Sharon Tate's Last Film

      I get a pang of heartbreak whenever I see Sharon Tate in anything.  She worked in TV, had a recurring role on The Beverly Hillbillies as one of Mr. Drysdale's secretaries, but that was before her film career took off, a period of four years when she was in six films, two bit parts in the early 1960s adding to just eight total.  

     If you type in "Sharon Tate" in Amazon Prime, around seventy titles appear, including the film (listed on Amazon as 12 + 1) reviewed here, but, depressingly, dozens of titles reflect the actions of an evil dead creep named Charles Manson, who sent his minions to slaughter Tate and her friends in Benedict Canyon on August 9, 1969.

     The Amazon search would seem to indicate that Sharon Tate is more famous for being a murder victim than she is for being an actress.  For her sake, I want that to be a different reality.

     Her last movie, an Italian comedy called Una su 13 (One In 13), is light-hearted and antic, dealing with an unlucky money-strapped barber (Vittorio Gassman) who inherits his English aunt's estate.  Traveling to England from New York, he finds her house derelict, with some moldy paintings and thirteen Hepplewhite chairs in need of refurbishing in order to be worth anything.  He sells them to an antiques dealer across the street for a hundred pounds.  The dealer fixes them up, his assistant Pat (Sharon Tate) sells them to another dealer in London.

     Mario the barber then finds a note left for him by his aunt, revealing that she'd put something worth a hundred thousand pounds in one of the chair seats.  Thus begins a kind of Blake Edwards movie, a frantic chase through London, Paris, and Italy, as Mario, joined by Pat, search for the chairs.  The London dealer has broken up the lot of thirteen, selling four to a rich industrialist in Italy (played by the film director and sometime actor Vittorio De Sica), two to a London stage actor (played by the film director and sometime actor Orson Welles), two to an African embassy in Paris, one to a brothel also in Paris, and, honestly, I don't remember where the other four end up.

     All thirteen chairs get gutted by film's end, springs shooting upwards every time with a comic sound effect.  Slapstick pervades the film.  Mario is relentlessly clumsy.  Other characters stumble, get knocked out.  A chair fight scene between Mario and one of the other characters in the know about the treasure inside one of the thirteen is quite funny, especially when Mario's chair rams into a tree hard enough to stick there for a moment before falling to the ground.

     Welles, funny in his on stage performance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, hams like I've never seen him ham.  Vittorio Gassman maintains the intense energy level necessary to embark on such a quest, which involves destroying others' property and getting into trouble every time he does it, except for when he rips up the prostitute's chair, having paid her generously to do so.  Played by gorgeous French actress Mylène Demongeot, Judy the prostitute figures Mario has an aggressive sexual thing for chairs.

     Pat goes intimately from Mario, to Stanley the London dealer, to the wealthy Carlo (De Sica).  In the end, Mario and Pat don't end up with the treasure (an old jeweled necklace worn by some long past aristocrat) inside the thirteenth chair.  That final seat ends up, accidentally, with a group of nuns on a charity collection drive.  Mario, broke, returns to New York on board a ship, having secured passage by getting a job cutting passengers' hair.  Pat, meanwhile, waves goodbye to him from the dock while her rich boyfriend, Carlo, waits for her by his big silver luxury car.  

     In cinematic terms, this is the last we'll ever see of Sharon Tate.

Vic Neptune