SOFTCORE COPPOLA..........BQ EXHUMES F.F.C.'S "THE BELLBOY AND THE PLAYGIRLS"

The Bellboy And The Playgirls (1962)   Having graduated from a radio-TV-Film university and known more than a few fledgling filmmakers, BQ well knows how brutally impossible it is to break into professional filmmaking........

               It takes powerful, hungry ambition, talent, grinding hard work.........and tough as this is to say.......mostly pure luck. Or luck you make yourself.........

                Francis Ford Coppola, like many of today's film giants, eventually jammed his foot in the door by way of Roger Corman's mentorship, as in  "Kid,  here's a couple of thousand and some raw film stock, go make me a movie in 10 days...."

                But even before that, young Coppola found a way, much to the disgust of his film school classmates, to achieve his first official writing and directing credit........

                And what a weird way to do it.

                 Armed with a bevy of Playboy Playmates and their accompanying bare boobs, Coppola fashioned enough footage to graft his own embarrassingly lame nudie comedy into an already abysmal German movie.

                  The German movie, in black-and-white, is a load of stillborn, English-dubbed gibberish about a virginal actress given droning, pageant-like displays of the history of sex, in order to loosen her up......(the only thing here that caught my eye - the naive cutie's played by a young Karin Dor, soon to become a Eurotrash Scream Queen and Bond vixen.....)

                   Edited into the German mess comes Coppola's own dismal farce, shot in washed out color and featuring a babbling, pathetic Jerry Lewis clone and the lingerie-clad Playmates, regularly parading their bare chests........

                      Watching this bizarre goulash unfold for over 90 dreary minutes, you have to wonder why they even bothered with the German movie at all........it's about as compelling and sexy as a Volkswagon owner's manual.......

                     Not that Coppola's breast festival is any better.........there's no hint of his yet-to-be-revealed style and talent here........his footage looks and sounds like it came from a horny 12 year old boy sneaking a peek at his dad's old Playboy issues........

                    But hey........he got his foot in the door. Mission accomplished.  And for that, and all his subsequent films, we should all be thankful.........

                   So don't bother with this unwatchable, Zero Star (0) abortion.........you'll see no trace of Coppola anywhere in it........strictly for film historians now........its original target audience, old men in raincoats stroking their erections to the sight of boobies, have long since passed away........