THE FEMALE ANIMAL didn’t whelp much of a box office litter in 1958—Cogerson lists it coming in 109th for the year, tagging $2,000,000—and today is mentioned, if at all, only as being the top-half of a double-bill dump from Universal. The other picture, which the studio was throwing away, was Touch Of Evil, the Orson Welles noir excursion now regarded as a classic. This silly tease of a melodrama is amusing in its own right and worth a look thanks to its quartet of careers on the skids stars on the wane.

Saved from an on-set accident by a quick-thinking extra, movie star ‘Vanessa Windsor’ (Hedy Lamarr) ‘rewards’ the hunkish hero (George Nader as ‘Chris Farley’—yes, we know) by letting him care-take her beach pad, with seduction ‘on the house’. Chris then helps another hot number out of a jam, only to find that teenage vixen ‘Penny’ (Jane Powell) is Vanessa’s hellion daughter. Seduction #2 happens, because Chris is (a) an amazing sap, and (b) a guy. Meanwhile Vanessa’s ‘friend’ and sister actress ‘Lily Frayne’ (Jan Sterling), fond of collecting younger boy toys, gets cruelly catty. This menage-a-stew may not end well.

Fortunately, it only takes 84 minutes to boil down, and the pulp material gets a fair share of chuckles. The ironically cast stars valiantly do what they can and Russell Metty’s camerawork makes the trash take on a tawdry gleam. Functional director Harry Keller doesn’t bring much to the party, a tinsel tease tour dashed off by Robert Hill, who also sired Confessions Of An Opium Eater and Sex Kittens Go To College. Ya get what ya pay for.

“Miss Windsor, maybe I shouldn’t say this; but, well, I’ve always felt that you were a much better actress than the roles they gave you.”

All four leads were either calling it quits or downshifting to other venues. Lamarr self-reflected playing a faded screen queen, an ignoble fall from being history’s 2nd most-famous ‘Delilah’ (#3 would be the silenced siren in the Tom Jones song): this was her last film, calling it quits at 43. There was only a 14-year dif between Hedy and ‘daughter’ Powell, who left features for stage and TV; at 29, she doesn’t convince as a teenager, but in a decided departure from her sweet musical-comedy persona she turns on the heat, skimpily attired and promising promiscuity. Sterling, 37, did a few more appearances in features, seguing into small-screen work. Her cougar ‘Lily’ gets one of the better exchanges with her man-of-the-whim ‘Pepe’—LILY: “I don’t know why you’re objecting to that slave bracelet. I buy one for all my friends. I used to wear two or three of them myself around my ankle in the old days. Everybody wears them.”   PEPE: “Mon cher, please, I’m bored hearing about The Stone Age.”   LILY: “That’s where these rocks came from, lover, and don’t forget it.”

Blank slate Nader, who is 4th billed despite having the largest part, gets the pregnant line “I think it’s time I did something about my life”; at 36 his thud-spangled career was headed down-slope. One of the weaker of the mold-a-star-out-of-clay types that speckled the 50s (Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner, et.al), he’s not bad here, a feat considering his Chris is such a clod. That George’s private life picks went counter to sheet-wrestling with a tigress like Hedy Lamarr just adds another head-shake and grin to the ‘adult experience’ that is The Female Animal.

The rest of the team is fleshed out by dependable 2nd-string supporting players: Jerry Paris (in unctuous mode), Mabel Albertson, James Gleason (wry bartender), Gregg Palmer (as ‘Piggy’), Casey Adams/Max Showalter and Ann Doran (she logged as many film & TV credits as everyone else in the cast combined). Hans J. Salter bathes it all in a sappy music score.

* Powell ala Lamarr: “Well, Hedy didn’t like me too much because she had to play my mother and she didn’t like having to play a mother. She was such a beautiful woman, but she was so wrapped up in her beauty and that was it.”

Hedy (“That’s Hedley!”) speaks—“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”   “The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually agent, actor, director, producer, leading man. And you are a star if you sleep with them in that order. Crude but true.”