Twin Beauts

Bet this photo grabbed your attention! The babe is Irish McCalla, 5' 9 1/2" pin-up glamazon and future star of TV's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, seen here lounging in front of the slightly more statuesque but not nearly as sexy Merrick Butte in Monument Valley. This shot was probably snapped by prolific girlie magazine photographer David Sutton in September 1950 during the filming of River Goddesses, an indie travelogue that documented the adventures of five curvalicious pin-up models taking a sightseeing trip down the Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Footage from this obscure feature film hasn't been seen in decades, but based on the evidence of this picture, the goddesses also made a detour into bone dry Navajoland to pay a visit to John Ford's neighborhood in Arizona's Little Hollywood.

River Goddesses has one heck of an oddball pedigree. Its believed to have been produced by a Hollywood company called Capital Enterprises, which may or may not be the same outfit that later distributed Crusader Rabbit, the first made-for-TV cartoon series. It was directed by former German Communist Party member Carl Junghans, one of the leading documentary filmmakers of the Weimar period, who jumped sides in the '30s to work as a writer/director/editor for Nazi Germany's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. His documentary short Jugend der Welt (Youth of the World) received the Coppa dell’Istituto Nazionale Luce award at the 1936 Venice International Film Festival, the same year that the partly photographed-in-Sedona Nazi Western Der Kaiser von Kalifornien won the Mussolini Cup as best foreign film. After falling into disfavor with Hitler, Junghans hot-footed it to the United States, where he worked as a gardener and landscape photographer. In 1946, he made a comeback as a filmmaker to write, produce and direct a pair of short documentaries about Monument Valley: Memories of Monument Valley and Monuments of the Past, the latter movie narrated with typically stiff upper lip aplomb by British actor Herbert Marshall. Junghans (disparagingly monikered “the Colonel” by Goddesses’ crew) was reported to have been a somewhat less-than-charming Teutonic misogynist; forty-three years after working with him, McCalla recalled to author Richard E. Westwood that he "openly said women should be kept in concentration camps for breeding purposes only: that's all we were good for."

Four boats carrying the Goddesses gang shoved off from Hite, UT, at the northeast end of Lake Powell, and went ashore for numerous photo ops along the Colorado before landing at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., 7.5 miles southwest of the town of Page, Ariz., and the Glen Canyon Dam. Joining McCalla in the on-screen escapades were shipshape mates Becky Barnes, Lee Moi Chu, Irene Hettinga and Martha Moody; with the exception of Chu, who later did walk-ons in a pair of clinkers released by major studios (Universal-International's Forbidden and United Artists’ Dragon's Gold), the other models booked return passage into obscurity at the end of the nearly monthlong cruise.

The see-worthy sirens were chaperoned during the excursion by pioneering female river-running guide Georgie White Clark, who told Northern Arizona University researcher Karen Underhill in 1991 that the travelogue wasn't really about the scenery, but "was more to show the girls... they just showed the beauty of the girls more than anything. I mean, the thing was [they] really wanted to show more of that as they hiked around, which they did, up to Rainbow Bridge and all––[it was] more to show their beauty while they were doing it."

In her 1977 autobiography, Georgie Clark: Thirty Years of River Running, she recalled a Goddesses “action sequence” that featured Irish McCalla: “Next, they had Iris [sic] walk along the top of the cliff. Actually, it was just a little spot outside of camp. Next she fell and grabbed the top of the cliff. Next scene, the camera zoomed in to show her hanging hundreds of feet above the river. I almost died laughing over that one. They actually made that girl hang from the top of that little rock with her feet barely a foot above the ground. All she had to do was let go and drop easily to safety.” The march of time hadn’t dimmed Clark’s memory of Herr Junghans, either. “The first thing the director did after they unloaded [his boat], was to pop down in his chair on the beach and order martinis. I remember watching him drink that martini and thinking, ‘Boy, this is going to be some trip.’”

The idea for the cinematic nautical tour was apparently dreamed up by cameraman Sutton, who photographed the movie and at the same time snapped cheesecake stills of the frolicking short-shorts and bikini-clad bombshells to peddle to various “gags and gals” rags, like Brief, Peril, and Laff. The slightly classier Night and Day (modestly taglined "America's Picture Magazine of Entertainment") published shots from the trip for years; photos even showed up in the big circulation and appropriately named Look magazine, which ran a five page pictorial titled "Six Girls Against the Colorado" in its May 8, 1951 issue. Unfortunately, these titillating images are all that remain of River Goddesses. Every frame of it has vanished and there are no posters, newspaper ads or other types of publicity materials to be found anywhere. This lack of a paper trail could be telltale proof that the film never made it into theaters, although Georgie Clark claimed that she saw it once, so its a good bet that the movie was actually completed before it sank into oblivion.

Prior to making her invisible big screen debut in River Godeseses, Irish McCalla was one of the triumvirate of post-war American pinup superstars, along with sister va-va-voom icons Betty Brosmer and Bettie Page. Her filmography consists of just six post-Sheena features, mostly low-budget drive-in schlock like The Beat Generation, Hands of a Stranger, and She Demons, the cheesy 1958 grindhouse classic in which she portrayed a haughty society girl who washes up on an uncharted tropical island inhabited by a love-frenzied mad scientist, renegade Nazi storm troopers, sloppily made up zombie women and a bevy of over-rehearsed hoochie coochie dancers.

McCalla moved to Prescott, Ariz., in 1982 to devote her time to painting, her first love. She was the subject of numerous gallery exhibitions in Scottsdale, Ariz., and a longtime member of Women Artists of the American West; her paintings are even in the permanent collection of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. But it is her brief reign as pulp pinup queen that has made Irish McCalla immortal; the river goddess was named one of “The Top 100 Sex Stars of the Century” by Playboy magazine in January 1999.––Joe McNeill

German Spectacle

Since its publication last year, the chapter in my book Arizona’s Little Hollywood that’s raised the most eyebrows is the one that revealed that Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language Nazi Western, was shot on location in Sedona in September 1935. Readers find it incredible that such an off-the-wall film could have been shot in patriotic Red Rock Country; as pop culture pundit Fern Siegel commented in MediaPost, “Like Woody Allen, my Nazi radar is highly attuned, so Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a 1936 piece of anti-capitalist propaganda, was a surprise.”

I didn’t believe it either until I tracked down a German DVD copy and saw for myself. Sure enough, local landmarks Schnebly Hill, Oak Creek, Munds Mountain Trail, even the dirt trail that is today’s paved State Route 89A are all easily recognizable locations in the movie. There’s even a slow sweeping panorama of the entire area shot from high atop the Mogollon Rim that is probably the best photographic record we have of the Sedona landscape before development.

The question I'm most frequently asked is “How can I see this movie?” It’s not easy. Der Kaiser has never been released on home video in the United States, but pristinely restored DVD special editions (in German and without English subtitles) are available from Amazon.de in Germany, as well as through international dealers on eBay. Thankfully, because the intent of Der Kaiser was strictly to vilify capitalism and twist the story of Sutter’s Mill and America’s 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny into an analogy for Hitler’s plan for German expansion into foreign territories, there is no anti-Semetic or racist content in the film. But one word of warning before purchasing a DVD: Because the discs are produced in the European PAL video format, you’ll need a multi-region DVD player to watch it.––Joe McNeill

Trail to Lone Pine

Roy Rogers and Trigger greet Dale Evans, Beverly Lloyd and Peggy Stewart
in a scene from Utah (1945) shot in Lone Pine’s Alabama Hills.

Lone Pine is a dot on the California map, but it’s the town where manly movie legends, like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Errol Flynn, and Robert Downey Jr., made scenes during visits. Still, even with the cavalcade of stars spied hoofing Lone Pine’s Main Street over the past 90 years, it’s a good bet some people would never make the connection between glamorous Hollywood and the unpretentious hamlet located 177 miles north of Los Angeles (and 65 miles west of arid Death Valley National Park) at the foot of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. But it’s a completely different story for movie geeks – they get goose bumps at first glimpse of the town’s most distinctive landmarks: those surreal Daliesque boulder formations of the Alabama Hills just outside of town. Pilgrim, this is an iconic pop culture landscape, and not only for big men wearing big hats and riding even bigger horses; just about everyone who’s who in Tinseltown action movies has been captured on film in front of these rocks, from roly-poly silent movie comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to blockbuster comic book hero Iron Man. Not to take anything away from our own beloved Arizona’s Little Hollywood, but with a résumé of almost 400 feature film appearances (including two credits shared with Sedona, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien and Broken Arrow) plus dozens of TV episodes and commercials, Lone Pine is arguably the most popular outdoor location in the history of movies.

That’s a pretty good reason for the town to pat itself on the back, so for more than two decades residents have thrown an annual shindig to commemorate their ongoing cinematic history. And this year’s Lone Pine Film Festival, taking place Oct. 7-9, is shaping up to be a three-day cowboy movie bonanza.

Among the archival films scheduled to be shown are The Stolen Ranch (1926) and Blazing Days (1927), a pair of rarely seen silent Westerns made in Lone Pine by William Wyler, the Oscar-winning director of The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur. Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 classic Ride the High Country, with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, will also be screened, with several people involved in making the film slated to be present.

Jimmy Ellison and William Boyd in a scene from Hop-Along Cassidy (1935).

One of the themes of this year’s festival is a celebration of the 100th birthday of Lone Pine action figure Roy Rogers, and among the gifts to be unwrapped is a rare screening of Macintosh and T.J., the King of the Cowboys’ final film (made in 1975), with some of the cast members scheduled to appear at the party. As usual, there will also be hours of classic Westerns starring other B-movie big shots like Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry in picture shows that offer lavish views of Lone Pine, Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra. Best of all – and this is what sets apart the Lone Pine Film Festival from, say, the vastly overrated festivals at Sundance or Cannes – after watching the movies you can take guided tours of the locations you just saw on the big screen. How cool is that?

Festivalgoers won’t just spend the weekend losing their tans in a darkened screening room because there are plenty of other activities going on, like in-person celebrity panels, live Western street theater, musical shows, a rodeo, an arts-and-crafts fair and the Parade of Stars down the main drag. Action scenes won’t be confined to celluloid, either; look for live stunts in a show spotlighting the machismo talents of Diamond Farnsworth, stunt coordinator for TV’s NCIS, and Loren James, the veteran stuntman whose 300-plus film credits include McLintock!, Bullitt and Planet of the Apes. Other notable guests will include Republic Pictures’ leading ladies Peggy Stewart, Donna Martell and Marie Harmon, who’ll recall their days toiling in the Hollywood Thrill Factory. Wyatt McCrea (grandson of actor Joel McCrea), Peter Ford (son of actor Glenn Ford) and Cheryl Rogers-Barnett (daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) will reminisce about their illustrious family trees.

Screenings and events take place at various venues around town, including at the festival’s most important outgrowth, the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History. The 10,500-square-foot nonprofit archive displays Lone Pine movie artifacts, posters, props, costumes and other memorabilia. It also boasts a 85-seat theater that regularly screens hard-to-see films. Most vital, the museum is far more than a depository of black-and-white nostalgia. Since opening in 2006, it has compelled thousands of tourists year-round to visit isolated, dot-on-the-map Lone Pine, and that’s the best legacy movie history can bequeath a location town. Paying attention, Sedona?––Joe McNeill.

The 22nd Annual Lone Pine Film Festival takes place Oct. 7-9, 2011, in Lone Pine, Calif. For info and tickets call 760-876-4301 or visit www.lonepinefilmfestival.org. the Beverly and Jim Rogers Museum of Lone Pine Film History is located at 701 S. Main St. Call 760-876-9909 for information.

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘Arizona’s Little Hollywood’ Receives Nod

Here’s some news that put a hitch in our giddyap this spring: Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973 is a finalist in the Contemporary Nonfiction category for the Western Writers of America 2011 Spur Award. Sedona Monthly’s creative director Joe McNeill wrote the hardcover, 692-page book, which was published in 2010.

Since 1953, the Spur Awards have been given annually for distinguished writing about the American West (www.westernwriters.org). The awards are among the oldest and most prestigious in American literature; past winners include Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove, Michael Blake for Dances With Wolves and Tony Hillerman for Skinwalkers. This is the first time a film history book has been nominated.

“To have my name mentioned along with such illustrious company is one of the greatest compliments I could ever receive,” says Joe. “But this is really Sedona’s honor. The town made the history – I was just the messenger who delivered the news.”

Arizona’s Little Hollywood includes numerous revelations about moviemaking in northern Arizona. The book tells the story behind Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, a German-language anti-American Nazi propaganda Western filmed in Sedona in 1935, as well as the true history of filmmaking in Monument Valley including the most detailed account ever published of John Ford’s Stagecoach.––Erika Ayn Finch. Originally published in the June 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly

True West

The reclamation of Sedona’s film history continues! The June issue of True West magazine features excerpts from the Der Kaiser von Kalifornien chapter of Joe McNeill’s book, Arizona’s Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s Forgotten Film History 1923-1973. True West has been in publication since 1953. When Executive Editor Bob Boze Bell received a copy of Arizona’s Little Hollywood, he was immediately intrigued. (Bob also hosts a segment, True West Moments, on the Encore Westerns channel.)



“The Stranger” (Bernhard Minetti) appears to Johann Augustus Suter (Luis Trenker) on the steps of the US capitol with a vision of America’s future industrial might in the 1936 Nazi Western Der Kaiser von Kalifornien.

“I have lived in Arizona for 55 years and studied our unique history for at least 30 of those years, and I thought I knew a thing or two about the history of movies filmed in Arizona, but Joe McNeill’s new book knocked me right on my butt,” says Bob. “I had no idea how much of our film history has been mangled and flat-out forgotten (and, I'll bet you will agree). This is really a treasure chest of invaluable information for anyone who cares about a critical period in Arizona's long film history.”

For more information, visit www.truewestmagazine.com.––Erika Ayn Finch

Nice Shootin’, Siegfried!

I’m not surprised that the chapter in Arizona’s Little Hollywood raising most eyebrows is the one on Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, the obscure 1936 Nazi propaganda Western filmed in Arizona and California. Let’s face it, the idea of a rootin’ tootin’ goosesteppin’ buckaroo is foreign to most Americans. But the Nazi Western didn’t just materialize out of nowhere, it evolved from a legion of cowboy entertainment that began filtering into German culture during the nineteenth century. Luis Trenker’s screenplay for Der Kaiser (which he also starred in) was influenced by the writing of Karl May, whose adventures of the fictional Mescalero Apache chief Winnetou and his Teutonic companion Old Shatterhand in the Wild West remain the German-speaking world’s biggest-selling series of novels. The swastika, then known as a Native American symbol for good luck, was often incorporated into the illustrations of the Winnetou books; some historians suspect this is where young Adolf Hitler, a May fanatic, first encountered it. None of May’s Western tales reached the screen until 1962, when the West Germany/Yugoslavia co-production Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake), a loose adaption of his 1890 novel was a smash hit, blitzkrieging continental box offices and sending the Eurowestern movie craze down a trail that would wind directly to The Man With No Name.

May never set booted foot in the American West and neither did Erich Rudolf Otto Rosenthal, a wildly popular German stage performer who adapted the handle “Billy Jenkins” and was billed as Der Koenig der Cowboys (The King of the Cowboys) while Roy Rogers was still in fringed diapers. Jenkins was the Teutonic equivalent of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, the sharp-shooting front man of a traveling Wild West show that toured Germany and other European countries for more than two decades before the Nazis seized power. Even though he was half-Jewish, Jenkins became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933 and at the same time changed his surname from Rosenthal to Fischer, his Gentile mother’s maiden name. Granted Aryan identity papers and official sanction by the Nazis, he remained active as a cowboy showman well past the start of World War II.

Like the Amerikaner Buffalo Bill, Jenkins was the hero of dozens of popular German-language pulp novels, often partnered in his fictional adventures with a Native American sidekick named Hunting Wolf. Despite decades of popularity, Jenkins never appeared in a feature film, although there were a number of Western movies made in Germany dating back to the silent era. As late as in the closing days of the Weimar Republic, a little more than two months before Hitler became Reich Chancellor, Der Goldene Gletscher (The Golden Glacier, 1932), a talkie Western drama about political corruption set during California’s Great Gold Rush of 1849, was playing in German cinemas.



America played the propaganda game, too. In 1944 Monogram Pictures released Enemy of Women, ostensibly a peek into the malevolent love life of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Independently produced by Minneapolis-based theater operator W. R. Frank, The New York Times' reviewer called the film “a miserable consequence.”

Der Kaiser may have been the only Nazi Western to shoot scenes on location in the United States, but there were a trio of others produced during the Third Reich: Wasser für Canitoga (Water for Canitoga), the comedic Sergeant Berry (both starring German matinee idol Hans Albers and directed by Herbert Selpin, who it is believed was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942 for openly criticizing the German navy during production of the anti-British melodrama Titanic), and another genre parody, Gold in New Frisco, directed by Paul Verhoeven, an actor who played a supporting role in Der Kaiser; all three films were corralled into theaters in 1939. Both Berry and New Frisco were released with English-language titles, perhaps in an attempt to make German audiences think they were Hollywood product, and not surprisingly, three of the four Nazi Westerns fixate on the lure of gold and the lethal greed of American free enterprise.

Wasser für Canitoga’s plot revolves around the shopworn cowboy movie cliché of capitalist schweinhund sabotaging the water supply of a gold mining town, but the film also has a musical production number that foreshadows the glitzy rawhide extravaganzas Roy Rogers would churn out at Republic Pictures during the 1940s (although the slight bawdiness of “Good bye Jonny, Good bye Lilly,” the tune warbled by Hans Albers, would have brought a blush to the cheeks of “Queen of the West” Dale Evans). The idea of fascist cowpokes crooning a cabaret ditty in a Wild West saloon (which even has a revolving disco-style mirror ball hanging from the ceiling over the dance floor) may seem weirdly off kilter to Americans who grew up visiting Miss Kitty’s Long Branch saloon on TV, but “Good bye Jonny” enjoyed musical life far beyond Canitoga and went on to become a pop standard on the Fatherland’s Hit Parade. After the fall of the Third Reich, “Jonny’s” political loyalty stampeded stage left when its tune was appropriated as the basis of “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Risen from Ruins”), the national anthem of Communist East Germany from 1949 until Deutschland’s reunification in 1990. The anthem’s music is officially credited to left-leaning composer Hanns Eisler, who fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1933 to avoid persecution for his political views; by the late 1940’s the composer was accused of being “the Karl Marx of music” by finger pointers on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and he voluntarily returned to East Germany. But in 1950, West German tunesmith Peter “King of the Evergreens” Kreuder had a showdown with Eisler in the International Court of Justice, charging that the opening measures of “Ruinen” was plagiarized from “Good bye, Jonny,” which he had co-written eleven years earlier with lyricist Hans Fritz Beckmann.

The Western movie continued to be used as a propaganda tool in Germany well past the end of open warfare. In 1966, East Germany’s state run Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft studio (popularly known as DEFA) kicked off a series of ideological “bratwurst” Westerns that featured Native Americans as the good guys and whites as the villains, a concept that allowed for transparent propagandizing of Yankee “imperialism.” The first of these Indianerfilms, Die Söhne der großen Bärin (The Sons of Great Bear), was adapted from a novel written by East German communist author and historian Liselotte Welskopf Henrich. Directed by Czech Josef Mach, with up-and-coming Serbian actor Gojko Mitić starring as Sioux warrior Tokei-Ihto, these Marxist cowboy and Indian yarns added a Cold War spin to the “Plight of the Red Man.”–– Joe McNeill