She did a gazillion movies but she is probably best know in the United States for her roles in A SHOT IN THE DARK, THE PRIZE and THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. If you are a horror movie fan you also may have seen her in such cult classics like BARON BLOOD, LISA AND THE DEVIL and HOUSE OF EXORCISM.
Elke was one of the big sexsymbols in the seventies and even appeared in PLAYBOY. I mostly remember her from ( of course ) A SHOT IN THE DARK and DEADLIER THAN THE MALE ( 1966 ), one of today's forgotten cult classics where she played the ultimate bad girl.
An excerpt from Flick you ! :
Back in the 1960’s when the world went positively apeshit over the exploits of cool superspy James Bond, filmmakers all over the globe flew into action and released a slew of imitators in hope of cashing in on the secret agent zeitgeist. There were seemingly hundreds of Bond imitators unleashed upon an innocent moviegoing public and the majority of them sucked out loud, being cloyingly and unfunnily campy at best or downright boring at their worst — the Derek Flint movies, OUR MAN FLINT (1966) and IN LIKE FLINT (1967) being among the best of the lot — so finding a gem amongst that misbegotten subgenre, the so-called “spy spoofs,” is a rare occurrence. DEADLIER THAN THE MALE isn’t just a rare gem, it’s a downright treasure of the genre and it came from out of nowhere to make my list of all-time favorite espionage thrillers.
Unlike most of the legion of Bond clones, this one delivers in spades, even when the actual series began to suffer under its perceived need to outdo itself, becoming an excessive self-parody by virtue of sacrificing the plot in favor of spectacle and gadgets while the scripts became more ludicrously fantastic and convoluted. I’d even go so far as to say that DEADLIER THAN THE MALE is actually a hell of a lot better than the two Connery Bond films that came out right before and after its release, namely THUNDERBALL (1965), a slow-moving bloatfest worth seeing mostly for a great villain, and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967), the first of the insanely over-the-top Bonds that blends spaceships, assault helicopter fights, offensively stereotypical western male fantasies about Japanese women, and — I shit you not — ninjas to form what amounts to a listless travelogue with would-be clever dialogue.
In every way, DEADLIER THAN THE MALE is the Bond film that should have been a part of the series rather than those two lackluster entries, both of which used to hold a fond place in my younger Bond fan's heart, but now stand revealed in my eyes as nothing more than examples of a franchise operating on autopilot and following the theory of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Why sit through either those for the umpteenth time when you can add this overlooked classic to your Netflix queue? TRUST YER BUNCHE and give this a look at once!
In the movie Elke plays a cold blooded killer and even has a bikini scene something that was obligatory in the movies of that time. Yes, as hard as it is to believe movies were much raunchier at that time.
The third movie with her that I vividly remember is the movie UNTER GEIERN ( AMONG VULTURES ) one of the many german movies based on the books of KARL MAY. Karl May is one of Germany's best selling authors whose books take place in the American Old West, the Orient and the Middle East and althoug he never went farther than Buffalo his descriptions of foreign countries are unbelievably accurate.
UNTER GEIERN was one of the western movies involving WINNETOU and besides Pierce Brice as Winnetou it starred Steward Granger as Old Surehand instead of Winnetou's usual sidekick Lex Barker who played Old Shatterhand. It also had two other famous actors : Goetz George ( most famous for the Schimanski crime series ) and Elke Sommer.
She mostly wore a very plain outfit which was basically a shirt and a long skirt but she also was in underwear in many scenes. And there was one scene in which she has to distract the bad guys and showed a lot of cleavage. The reason why this scene was burned in my mind was that Elke was still a young and growing lady in that movie and her breasts were as big as her head. Trust me, I've measured it out. Now that was something you didn't see everyday.
Biography :
Elke Sommer ( born 5 November 1940 in Berlin ), born Elke Schletz, is a German-born actress, entertainer, and artist. Considering her family origins, she could still claim to be a baroness, but she never choose to present herself so.
After the war, the family was evacuated to Erlangen, a small university town in the south of Germany, where, despite their lack of money, she attended the prestigious Gymnasium (high school) in Erlangen. Nowadays Erlangen is mostly known for hosting the INTERNATIONAL COMIC SALON ERLANGEN, the biggest german comic convention that is held every two years. However her father's death when she was 14 precluded further formal education, and she moved to England to be an au pair, to perfect her English and earn a living.
She was spotted by film director Vittorio De Sica whilst on holiday in Italy, and started appearing in films there in the late 1950s. She quickly became a noted sex symbol and moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s. She also became one of the most popular pin-up girls of the time, and posed for several pictorials in Playboy Magazine (September 1964, December 1967).
She became one of the top movie actresses of the 1960s and made 99 movie and television appearances between 1959 and 2005, including A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, The Art of Love (1965) with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke, The Oscar (1966) with Stephen Boyd, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) with Bob Hope, the Bulldog Drummond extravaganza Deadlier Than the Male (1966), and The Wrecking Crew (1969) with Dean Martin; Sommer was the leading lady in each of these films.
In 1964 she won the Golden Globe Awards as Most Promising Newcomer Actress for The Prize, a film she co-starred with Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson.
In 1972, she starred in two Italian horror movies directed by Mario Bava, which have both become cult clasics...."BARON BLOOD" and "LISA AND THE DEVIL".
The latter fim was never theatrically distributed in its original form; it was later re-edited (with 1975 footage inserted) to make a very different movie called "HOUSE OF EXORCISM" (an "Exorcist" rip-off). Elke went back to Italy to star in the additional scenes that were inserted into the movie by its producer, against the wishes of the director. This is probably her most shocking film, featuring a demonically-possessed Elke swearing obscenities at her exorcist, spitting out pea soup and actually vomiting live frogs and insects from her mouth!
In 1975, Peter Rogers cast her in Carry On Behind as the Russian Professor Vrooshka. She became the Carry On's highest paid performer, at £30,000 (a honour shared with Phil Silvers for Follow That Camel).
Sommer also performed successfully as a singer, making several albums. She also was on the MUPPET SHOW a few times.
Since the 1990s, she has concentrated more on painting than on acting. As an actress, she worked in half a dozen countries learning the languages (she speaks seven different languages) and storing up images which she would later express on canvas. Her artwork shows a strong influence from Marc Chagall. Sommer had a long-running feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor that culminated in a libel suit.
She now lives in Los Angeles, California.
The resources I used for this post :
Deadlier than the male review at Flick you !.
Elke Sommer at Vintage Culture.
Elke Sommer at Cult Sirens.
Elke Sommer at wikipedia
Elke Sommer at imdb
Sorry, no download links today becuse I'm downloading the LEGION OF SUPERHEROES episodes for a future post on my other blog.
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