Pin-up of the Day: Ann-Margret
Another woman who has achieved legendary feats of drawn-out movie eroticism…
I’m not sure what my teenage self thought of the following, other than “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “I wonder what the discussions with the director were like?” Said director being Ken Russell, I’m sure they were ebullient and highly persuasive.
From THE SWINGER. Which I haven’t seen.
The particular kink illustrated here, if we consider it as a kink, is known in the UK as “sploshing”, as far as I’ve been able to discover. And it turns out Ann-Margret had past form in this activity:
shadowplay 
October 14, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Here’s a more decorous (and un-bean-covered) A-M with the only man
TRULY worthy of her ineffable fabulousness (and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you whp THAT is) under the direction of George Sidney
October 14, 2008 at 10:52 pm
That Miss Olsson, ahh, the subject of my last real youtube stalk, and the woman who weaned me off facebook. You’ve probably come across this staticky old footage of her and Tina already, but if not, here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTw9eZHWHc
Was it A-M that Tina ran to when she finally ran from Ike? Regardless, no number of men gathered in one place can ever have possessed the collective balls of these two ladies here.
October 14, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Viva las Vegas is a film predicated on sheer sexual chemistry, and the tension between Presley and A-M is such that I kind of believe they WEREN’T an item, but were seriously thinking about it. Many many hot scenes in that film.
Odd that the UK was offering A Hard Day’s Night at the same time… both are great, of course, and it’s nice that we don’t have to choose one over the other.
October 14, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Oh Wow! I was looking fo a clip of A-M in Lookin’ to Get Out, a late, obscure, very good Hal Ashby starring her and Jon Voight. And look who made her motion picture debut in it!
October 15, 2008 at 4:30 pm
OK, now I feel old!
Talking about sploshing, I’ve not worked up the courage to watch it yet but guess that Sweet Movie would probably appeal to the same demographic!
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=390
October 15, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Sweet Movie is EXTREME! In EVERY WAY.
Thanks for the clip of Lookin’ to Get Out, which I’m longing to see! And that “siren” line must be improvised by Voight! Delightful.
October 16, 2008 at 1:14 pm
I like the fact that at the end of your entry we’re told that it’s filed under FILM with the tag “sploshing”, sort of legitimizes the pastime. Having seen Tommy in the theatre when it was first released, this is the one segment from the film that I did recollect. And which is why I haven’t seen it since, the mess she’s wallowing in is a bit too fecal-looking for me, or maybe diarrhetic. Ann seems to revel in her sploshery.
October 31, 2008 at 1:38 am
I love the Tommy scene and The Swinger paint one is just behind that for me. I love the look on her face as she gets all messy in the Tommy scene. I would love to hear the sounds she must have been making.
October 31, 2008 at 9:56 am
Possibly just swearing at Ken Russell?
May 25, 2009 at 5:43 am
She loved doing this scene and Ken loved filming her do it from what I hear.
May 25, 2009 at 8:16 am
Well I’m sure Ken did. And I guess it would be a good laugh. Messy stuff only becomes really uncomfortable if it goes on for days (Brain Dead) or if the stuff starts to harden under the lights (Intergalactic Kitchen, a TV show I did with a poor little girl smeared in goop in a freezing shed in Maryhill).
Do you know the great Mr. R?
May 30, 2009 at 4:54 am
I don’t know Ken but I talked to people that worked with him. That scene took 3 days to shoot. Can you tell me more about the titles you mention above?
May 30, 2009 at 10:40 am
Which ones? Brain Dead is a Peter Jackson splatter movie, made before he got respectable with Lord of the Rings. The cast were covered with fake gore for weeks on end. Intergalactic Kitchen was a kids’ TV show I worked on where we had an episode in which an alien thingy attached itself to a character and slimed her. Not much fun to shoot, as it turned out! The kid could either stand there and freeze in the draughty studio or stand by a heater, in which case the slime would harden and pull at her skin. It was an ordeal!
June 3, 2009 at 6:53 pm
doesn’t sound like fun at all. It always seems like these messy scenes are associated with slapstick and fun. It’s easy to forget that they can be quite unpleasant for all involved.
June 3, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Yeah. Kids’ TV in the UK has a long history of sliminess, but I don’t know if anybody had attempted to do it in a drama, so the problem of long-term sliming had not been addressed!
June 5, 2009 at 5:58 pm
In the Tommy scene Ann Margret did that for three days straight. They would clean her up the she would go back to the set and get blasted again with all that. She must have been spent after all that.
June 5, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Cleaning the set must have been serious work too!
June 8, 2009 at 5:15 am
They had to clean it and start over again for each take.
December 4, 2010 at 4:29 am
From what I remember of Peter Guralnick’s amazing two-volume Elvis bio, the King and A-M did have a thing. I can’t remember if it was consummated, but according to Guralnick it was so obvious that they were a fit that it actually freaked out Colonel Tom, who did everything he could to keep them from seeing each other or working together again, worried–reasonably–that Ann-Margret’s independence and sheer power would rub off on Elvis and jeopardize the Colonel’s controlling position. He worried in similar fashion about songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, with whom Elvis had a wonderful, intuitive connection; he pushed them–and their top-shelf songs–away.
December 4, 2010 at 1:08 pm
…and thus was Elvis prevented from being too interesting in the latter years of his career. Fascinatingly horrible manipulation.
August 15, 2012 at 8:35 pm
Re the screengrab from Carnal Knowledge at the top of the post: This shot is held for quite a while, and during a screening at Montclair State College circa 1976, the projectionist adjusted the framing about 45 seconds in, to see if there might be another inch or two of pulchritude at the bottom of the image. There was not, but the applause went on for nearly a minute anyway.
August 15, 2012 at 9:14 pm
And we sometimes wonder if the man in the booth is paying attention!
December 11, 2012 at 12:51 am
I have very vivid memories of seeing this in the cinema as a kid. I remember NOTHING about the rest of Tommy at all but this scene…. wow!
December 11, 2012 at 1:03 am
The screen’s sploshiest siren.