John Derek is an actor best remembered today for the beautiful women he married — Bo Derek, Ursula Andress and Linda Evans. But in 1951 he made a film that, as advertised here in this Spanish advertising flier that I picked up in a Barcelona flea market, capitalized on his beauty. The flier trades in a whiff of homoerotic scandal with the slogan His Body For Sale plastered across his rather buff pecs.
The movie itself, known in the US as Saturday's Hero, was about a high school athlete of no great scholarly ability, who gets a scholarship at the behest of an older man who gambles on the team. Today one could have a film with the "His Body For Sale" slogan about the baseball gay porn scandal of Kazuhito Tadano. But this 1951 film is just as up to date — only the subject of how money has corrupted both the game and education in college athletics. And this old movie shows it's nothing new. For those of you who think you have never seen a John Derek film, if you've seen Heston's Moses, then you've seen Derek's Joshua in The Ten Commandments. As for his acting ability, well, he got regular work, but Humphrey Bogart is reputed to have said to him "You look great kid, but looks are not enough." Nevertheless, posters and slogans like this always bring in audiences.
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