Happy 50th Anniversary to
Herbie J Pilato
When it comes to vintage comedy-variety shows headlined by pop-music stars, before Tony Orlando and Dawn, Donny and Marie and the Captain and Tennille, there was Sonny and Cher.
Breezy, brazen and groundbreaking,
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour started it all.
Premiering August 1, 1971, as a six-week summer replacement series on CBS, it starred the married musical duo who rose to fame in the late 60s on the popularity of such hit songs as I Got You Babe and The Beat Goes On.
Cher (née Cherilyn Sarkisian) was sylphlike and sardonic; Sonny (Salvatore Bono) was short and silly. She cracked wise; he was the butt of her jokes. She could belt out a tune; he had difficulty carrying one. But it didn t matter. When they got together, it was television magic.
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The opening scenes of The Real McCoy took me back to Topkapi and Grand Slam and The Hot Rock and all those other heist movies where a bank vault was subjected to high-tech manipulatins by athletic supercrooks. Unfortunately, those same scenes apparently took the film s authors back to the very same sources, since The Real McCoy recycles the same devices, not quite as well as the originals.
The film stars Kim Basinger in the title role, as a bank robber so clever and famous she s known, yes, as The Real McCoy. But as we meet her she s just leaving prison after six years; she was double-crossed, it appears, by an old partner named Schmidt (Terence Stamp), who was responsible for her being trapped inside a bank.