Category: Beauty

Debralee Scott and others in Dirty Harry (1971) – and more!

UncleScoopy

All comments by Adam, aka Whitecaps

Scoopy, I made, I thought anyway, decent 1080p caps from the 1971 movie ‘Dirty Harry.’

Here is the gallery.

The first, the woman in the window, is Lois Foraker, the second is uncredited, the third, my personal interest, is Debralee Scott, and the fourth at the strip club are two of Laurie Monk, Lolita Rios and/or Janet Wisely (according to IMDB, they aren’t credited in the film.)

Regarding the woman on the red bed:

That, of course, is not a naked standing baby boy, but is some kind of mechanical sculpture. I’m sure many people here have seen Dirty Harry, but there seemed to be some kind of parallelism going on as in the scene with the uncredited nude woman, there is also a painting of a completely nude woman. In the lower quality prints available in 1971, I’m not sure if the intended effect was to leave people thinking they were looking at kind of bizarre naked bodies.

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The game show vidcaptures are of Debralee Scott on the show Password Plus.

The video in somewhat higher quality can be found here:


So, this post is mostly in regards to the career of Debralee Scott, more or less. As an economics and history teacher, in this time I’ve been looking for parallels to the past, and I happened across a website that said the Norman Lear television show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was one of the most accurate representations of the changes and challenges the United States was going through in the 1970s. Debralee Scott co-starred in the show.

I’ve seen the first four episodes and it’s definitely unusual. The show was ostensibly a parody of 1950s American soap operas, so, even though it ran for only around 1 1/2 years, it aired five days a week, so there are more episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman than there are of M*A*S*H, which ran for over 10 seasons (and that’s not even including the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman spinoffs.)

The whole series is available on archive.org except for the pilot which is available on dailymotion.com. In the first four episodes there is one inflation joke: “indigestion is now a luxury.”

As I understand was planned, the show started off simple and got more complex with additional characters and interwoven plot lines. There is a lot of risque material including in the first episode a discussion between Mary Hartman’s husband and his friend on how many times they have sex with their wives (Mary Hartman’s husband it turns out is newly impotent.) In the 4th episode there is a discussion between Mary Hartman and her husband on masturbation (though the word isn’t used.)

There is also a lot of concern over Mary Hartman’s grandfather who has become a flasher (the show is set in the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio and he gets labeled ‘the Fernwood Flasher’) due to having fairly advanced dementia.

However, the dark sense of humor is established in the pilot episode which begins with sirens that turn out to be police and ambulance vehicles as their newest neighbors, two adults and three children, along with the neighbors’ eight chickens and two goats are all killed. Thinking it over Mary Hartman wonders “what kind of madman would kill eight chickens and two goats?”

The most interesting thing for me though, at least for these early shows, and what it seems many critics noted, was not the risque subject matter or the dark humor, but how naturalistic the show was. It had deadpan humor, but it struck me as more similar to modern British soap operas (like Coronation Street, not that I’ve seen much of it) than to anything likely from 1950s American soap operas in that there is a far amount of silence and a lot of banal conversation. People who liked the show say it’s the funniest television show that ever aired, most people who don’t like it simply complain that it was boring.

There is a sad irony in that, in addition to starting with murder there were a couple unusual deaths in the show while Debralee Scott died under somewhat unusual circumstances herself years later, though not unexplained (she slipped into a coma unexpectedly.) In the show, a couple characters, not in the original episodes, have comically morbid deaths. Martin Mull’s character, a violent abuser, dies after being shoved into a closet when he is impailed on a fake Christmas tree, while the high school football’s team coach dies drowning in a bowl of Mary Hartman’s chicken soup.

I’ve seen two more episodes since. New characters are starting to be introduced, and there is more on inflation. A new character, an activist friend of Mary Hartman is introduced. In this case, she is picketing for FATSO, the Fernwood Association To Stop Overpricing. “I know a lot of people are going to starve, but that’s what it’s going to take to make our point.”

Debralee Scott herself before going into the production side of Hollywood became essentially a professional celebrity contestant on game shows. She seemed to be both intelligent and fun loving. You can see in the Password Plus video that she was frustrated at not being able to answer the password at what those items had in common and equally frustrated that her non celebrity partner didn’t know the answer.

She was a regular on Match Game among others, but also appeared on Celebrity Family Feud as part of the cast of Angie.



She got to 200 points in Fast Money all on her own (giving four of the five #1 answers.) As Richard Dawson said, in the four years the show had aired to that point, she was just the fourth person to do so.