My Fantasy Girlfriend - Dorothy Provine

Well, I wondered if in fact I should have said 'Lily Olay', the shameless floozie of a saloon singer that she plays in the clip from  The Great Race below.  I've always had a weakness for singers (and shameless floozies?), and I remember being quite smitten by her in this sequence when I first saw the film, aged about ten.  I think watching this again might be another of my nostalgic Christmas treats - although it's not a great film otherwise, and seriously overlong thanks to the superfluous Prisoner of Zenda pastiche at the end.  This, however, is one of the great saloon songs (and it is, of course, followed shortly afterwards by an epic saloon brawl [only currently available on YouTube in French! I've just added  the video of this – and a few more great screen punch-ups – over on The Barstool.]).  Oh yes, and Peter Falk is pretty funny as Max, the bungling sidekick to Jack Lemmon's villainous Professor Fate (clearly a model for the Dastardly and Muttley cartoons).... but I digress. Dorothy is not quite my 'type' really (blonde?!), rather too petite at 5'4" (although she got supersized in the now obscure '50s sci-fi comedy The 30ft Bride of Candy Rock), but she did have an irresistible cuteness... and a flair for comedy... and a great singing voice.  And although her film career didn't really take off, she did crop up in a number of minor classics from the '60s that I remember fondly from childhood viewings a decade or so later - Good Neighbor Sam, That Darn Cat!, and It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Back in those distant days, I also caught a one-off nostalgia re-run of an episode from the ABC television show that really made her name at the start of the '60s, The Roaring 20's (unnecessary apostrophe!).  In this she also played a chanteuse, the rather less alluringly named 'Pinky' Pinkham.  I think my favourite of her numbers from this is You Do Something To Me.  There is quite a bit more of her on YouTube (including this rather unsettling clip of her impersonating Al Jolson in blackface!); although, given that the show was set almost entirely within her nightclub, and she usually sang two or three complete songs in each episode, and it ran for two full seasons... well, there ought to be a lot more.  Perhaps more of her songs from this will have emerged if we return to that search in a year or two's time.  One of the more engaging oddities to be found at the moment is a guest appearance in a musical episode of Dr Kildare, where she duets with Richard Chamberlain on I Like New York In June. Enough of this noodling.  Here's that saloon song, He Shouldn't-a, Hadn't-a, Oughtn't-a Swang On Me - music by Henry Mancini, and fantastic lyrics by Johnny Mercer which fairly zing with slick rhymes (in many cases, double rhymes; I remember even as a kid being blown away by that Texas/solar plexus/reflexes triple-whammy!).  Enjoy.