From the Vault: Joan Collins in Fatal Charm

This post was first published at my old blog. It’s been revised slightly and I’m re-presenting it here, just in time for Dame Joan Collins’s 92nd birthday tomorrow.

I’ve made it my mission to hunt down and watch all of Starfire Lounge VIP Joan Collins‘s pre-Dynasty cult films. From crime dramas to horror to erotic thrillers, she starred in some delightfully trashy flicks in the 1970s and early 1980s, and I’ve been doing my best to watch them all. So, consider Dame Joan—or, as I like to call her, Joan Fucking Collins—numero uno on the list of reasons why I recently streamed Poliziotto senza paura, a 1978 Italian flick set in Vienna and directed by Stelvio Massi. Various international titles include Magnum Cop, Fearless, Fearless Fuzz, and Fatal Charm, which is probably my favorite of the bunch. IMDb describes the plot like so: “An Italian private investigator tries to get to the bottom of a suspicious kidnapping case with the help of an exotic dancer.” I like to describe it as a combination police procedural/screwball comedy/erotic thriller. The dubbing into English is hilariously bad, leaving many characters sounding like stand up comics delivering punchlines to jokes they never told in the first place.

Maurizio Merli stars as Walter Spada, the Italian private dick trying to solve the case of a missing girl in Vienna, which quickly leads him down a rabbit hole of sex and intrigue. Merli was one of the most prominent actors of the Italo-crime subgenre, starring in close to a dozen of them. He’s outrageously good in Magnum Cop, playing a charming and wisecracking gumshoe who’s always on the prowl for some action—police action, sure, but mostly female action. Watching him flirt with a beautiful bartender and talk his way into drinking on the house is absurdly entertaining.

Über babe Joan doesn’t appear until the forty minute mark, but holy hell does she makes it well worth the wait. Playing exotic dancer Brigitte, she struts out on stage, puffs seductively on a cigarette, and launches into her act. After her striptease, she flirts, slinks, and screws her way through the rest of the film. Turns out she’s involved in the child prostitution case, helping lure young teen girls into a life of sexual squalor. Her complicity is never quite clear, however, thanks to the film’s convoluted nature.

Spada confronts Brigitte about it all, then instructs her to strip naked for…reasons? Reasons like this, maybe: she’s Joan Fucking Collins and her sex bomb status is what sells this movie. She happily obliges, smiling coyly as she undresses slowly for maximum effect—Brigitte is a professional, after all. It’s one of Joan’s hottest scenes in a career full of them. Soon, Spada is slowly sliding his gun down her naked body. Before Spada can slap on the cuffs—or slap on the cuffs and boff the always-game Brigitte into submission, as I suspect was his plan—a mystery gunman fires, killing Brigitte instantly. So long, Brigitte, we hardly knew ye. Turns out it was the old codger behind the kidnappings, who later blames it all on Brigitte and her explosive sexuality for corrupting his morals. I mean, the evidence against her is pretty damning:

I’d certainly commit a major crime for her!

The film’s Wikipedia entry offers the sort of passionate (if at times grammatically awkward) defense of Joan’s 1970s films that I could imagine myself writing:

Despite doing the occasional film in Italy and various made-for-TV movies, the exposure was enough to essentially relaunch Joan as a viable Star and lead to many other career opportunities. While some dismiss these movies as schlock, often Joan’s performance in them lifts the material from mundane to eminatley [sic] viewable, if only to see her age-defying Beauty. 

Fatal Charm is one such movie where the sum of its parts is exceeded by the end result. Not Academy award winning material but adequate to pass a Sunday afternoon enjoyably.

That’s the key: Joan’s 1970s work ultimately stands as a glorious testament to her otherworldly beauty, style, and glamour. Whenever she graces the screen in these films, be it Tales From the Crypt, I Don’t Want to Be Born, or The Stud, she instantly makes them required viewing. Fatal Charm is another classic Joan performance that delivers exactly what you expect out of her 1970s output: she’s deliciously haughty, slyly funny, stunningly gorgeous, and quite often in her skivvies. When she isn’t naked, of course.