{"id":3327,"date":"2014-02-02T18:24:18","date_gmt":"2014-02-02T18:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixtiescinema.com\/?p=3327"},"modified":"2014-02-02T18:24:18","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T18:24:18","slug":"all-about-eve-celeste-yarnall-remembers-her-jungle-goddess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/2014\/02\/02\/all-about-eve-celeste-yarnall-remembers-her-jungle-goddess\/","title":{"rendered":"All About “Eve”: Celeste Yarnall Remembers Her Jungle Goddess"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1967, former model and Miss Rheingold Celeste Yarnall risked her life savings to travel to the Cannes Film Festival in hopes of being \u201cdiscovered\u201d even though she was acting in television and films (The Nutty Professor<\/i>, Around the World Under the Sea<\/i>, among others) since 1963.\u00a0 Discouraged that her career hadn\u2019t taken off, she and her husband Sheldon Silverstein headed to that international city hoping Celeste would wow some producers. And wow them she did!\u00a0 Producer Harry Alan Towers, who was looking for a girl to play a female Tarzan in Eve<\/i>, spotted her strolling down the street. According to Yarnall, he yelled and pointed, \u2018Stop that girl!\u00a0 That\u2019s my Eve!\u2019 Yarnall made a breathtaking jungle goddess in Eve<\/i>, but the film wasn\u2019t a success though a cult favorite today.<\/p>\n

\"Eve<\/a>The jungle adventure Eve<\/i> <\/i>(1968) starring Celeste Yarnall was reminiscent of One Million Years B.C.<\/i> <\/i>with Raquel Welch and She<\/i> <\/i>with Ursula Andress. It was the story of an alluring half-savage jungle woman named Eve living in the wilds of Brazil where the natives worship her as a goddess. Trouble begins for Eve when she rescues a downed pilot (Robert Walker Jr.) who brings back news of this female Tarzan. A smalltime showman (Fred Clark) wants to capture her to put her on display while villainous Diego (Herbert Lom) wants her dead because he has been passing of his mistress (Rosenda Monteros) as the long-lost Eve, heir to her grandfather\u2019s (Christopher Lee) fortune. To make matters worse, the natives want to kill Eve for helping a white man and there is Incan treasure wanted by all. In the end the villains get their due and Eve is reunited with her grandfather on his deathbed. However, she rejects the noise and confusion of the civilized world only to return to the jungle, despite her love for the pilot who vows to find her. The ending left it open for an intended sequel, which was never made to the relief of Yarnall who called Eve<\/i> <\/i>\u201cone of the worst movies of all time.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Harry Alan Towers discovered Yarnall walking down the promenade in Cannes he offered her the lead in Eve<\/i> on the spot. \u201cI don\u2019t know why Towers thought I was right for this part,\u201d speculated Celeste. \u201cI was never a tomboy and hadn\u2019t climbed a tree in my life. I was more the sedate type. I even had to take some Judo classes to train for the role.\u201d\u00a0 When the start date of the film was postponed, Celeste returned to Los Angeles and was signed by Columbia to play one of the glamorous showgirls in Funny Girl<\/i> with Barbra Streisand. She had to back out because \u201cthe start date for Eve<\/i> was at the same time.\u201d Threatened by Towers with a lawsuit, Yarnall had no choice but to turn down the acclaimed musical.<\/p>\n

This was only the first of many problems Celeste encountered with her producer. \u201cIf you notice there is a whole section in the middle of Eve<\/i> that has to do with Rosenda Monteros pretending to be me,\u201d said Yarnall. \u201cI am missing from the film for a long stretch because Towers stopped paying me. My husband wouldn\u2019t let me show up on the set until I was paid. They re-wrote the whole middle of the script so that they could keep shooting. The movie\u2019s called Eve <\/b><\/i>and you\u2019re wondering, \u2018Where in God\u2019s earth is Eve?\u2019 My husband showed up at Towers\u2019 office with a water pistol pretending it was a gun and said, \u2018If you don\u2019t pay Celeste, she\u2019s not going to show up.\u2019 Towers was a notorious schemer. I ran into him years later and he was like a normal person, but back then he was absolutely wild! He had a little German girlfriend named Schnitzel and he worked in a small part for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite his shadiness, producer\/screenwriter Harry Alan Towers had a knack for getting high caliber actors to appear in his foreign productions. Here was no exception, as he assembled such stalwarts as Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and Fred Clark to support Celeste and her leading man Robert Walker, Jr. <\/b>\u201cHerbert <\/b>Lom was an amazing gentlemen\u2014just a very elegant, intelligent man,\u201d said Celeste fondly. \u201cChristopher Lee was totally bent out of shape that he was playing my grandfather because he felt he would have been a much better leading man for me than Robert Walker was! And he just hated being made up to look old.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for her leading man, per Celeste he was truly an actor of the Sixties. \u201cRobert was very far out.\u00a0 He was into psychedelia and meditation. I know for awhile that he and his family lived off of nature somewhere in the canyons of Malibu. They bathed in a creek!\u00a0 He is a very interesting man, but at that time he was too way out there for me. In retrospect, I liked him and I still like him.\u201d<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/youtu.be\/sLkJTYQ_BrA<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the film\u2019s pluses was that it was filmed on location in Spain and Brazil. However, shooting amongst the gorgeous scenery came with a price. \u201cI got very sick in Spain,\u201d recalled Celeste. \u201cThey put rancid oil all over their vegetables and I got food poisoning. Then I got injured while filming in Brazil.\u00a0 A stuntman had taught me some moves for my fight scene with Rosenda Monteros. It was carefully choreographed because we were high up on a bluff. Rosenda was supposed to put the sole of her right boot into my stomach and I would fall into the stuntman\u2019s arms. But she used her left foot and pushed me the wrong way and I almost went over the cliff. The stuntman did one of those flying leaps and caught the back of my head in the palm of his hand. We both fell into this bush\u2014I was all cut up\u2014but he saved me from a two hundred foot drop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"eve<\/a>Once the film was completed, Celeste saw a preview and was horrified. \u201cI was incensed because I think I\u2019m dubbed in this \u2014it doesn\u2019t sound like my voice,\u201d she exclaimed. \u201cI remember that they didn\u2019t want to fly me back to do the looping.\u201d Despite that fact, the actress agreed to help promote the movie in the U.S. \u201cI remember climbing up on a drive-in movie theater marquee and having my picture taken. I did a small tour promoting the film because I was voted one of the Most Promising New Stars of 1968 by the National Association of Theatre Owners [for this and her performance in Live a Little, Love a Little<\/i> opposite Elvis Presley].\u201d<\/p>\n

Any film that has Christopher Lee and the stunning Celeste Yarnall in a loin cloth is worth seeing and here you will not be disappointed. The story keeps your interest; the scenery is picturesque; and the actors, though not at their best, all play their roles competently.<\/p>\n

You can read more about Celeste Yarnall in my books Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema<\/i> and Film Fatales<\/i> (co-written with Louis Paul).<\/p>\n

\n

[amazon_enhanced asin=”0786408685″ \/][amazon_enhanced asin=”0786411945″ \/]<\/p>\n

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In 1967, former model and Miss Rheingold Celeste Yarnall risked her life savings to travel to the Cannes Film Festival in hopes of being \u201cdiscovered\u201d even though she was acting in television and films (The Nutty Professor, Around the World Under the Sea, among others) since 1963.\u00a0 Discouraged that her career hadn\u2019t taken off, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomlisanti.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}