Something’s afoot — and abreast — in room 229 of the Happy Holiday Hotel, and a cowardly bellboy wants to see for his peeping-Tom self in The Bellboy and the Playgirls. The nudie-cutie film would have no shelf life, if not for being directed in part by Francis Ford Coppola, in one of two such pics the eventual Oscar hat-tricker helmed early in his career.
Also from 1962, Tonight for Sure was the other. Both starred Don Kenney in his only acting credits, here playing the titular bellboy — and, by today’s standards, also an incel, since he admits not knowing how to act around the girls for whom he madly lusts. He’s taking a correspondence course titled How to Be a Hotel Detective and Be Liked by Women, which we know because he flat-out tells the audience; one could say he breaks the fourth wall, but it looks like the production couldn’t afford more than two. His dual studies come in handy when he grows suspicious and aroused over 229’s group of beautiful ladies, whom he wrongly assumes are prostitutes and/or porn stars, because that’s comedy. Right?
Either scantily clad or nude, the women are led by the bountiful June Wilkinson (Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie), who — surprise of all surprises, given her Playboy popularity at the time — is the only one not to appear naked. The bellboy dons a number of disguises, drag included, in order to penetrate the room so he can take the ladies’ measurements and see them in the altogether, resulting in burlesque-ready exchanges like this:
“Get out of here!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re standing on my foot!”
All of the scenes with Wilkinson’s crew appear in eye-popping color, with the final 10 minutes (with perhaps cinema’s only cold-cream fight) in eye-popping-er 3-D. Most of the rest of the film actually comes from another: 1958’s Sin Began with Eve, a German black-and-white snore about a stage director (Willy Fritsch, Adventure in Rio) schooling his über-prudish actress (You Only Live Twice Bond girl Karin Dor) on the history of sex, with fanciful flashbacks to the likes of ancient Greece and gay Paree, all rendered on cardboard sets. In a poor attempt to tie this repurposed footage to his own, Coppola shot monochrome transitions of the bellboy as a side-gig stagehand.
Surprisingly progressive in some ways and astoundingly conservative in others, The Bellboy and the Playgirls is consistently terrible, and yet less embarrassing than Coppola’s Jack. —Rod Lott