Travels with Maggie, Tooley, Squiggy and Micky

I finally viewed the 1972 adaptation of the Graham Greene novel Travels with My Aunt, starring Maggie Smith, now known as the dowager duchess from Downton Abbey.

The story begins with a young paramour of the mysterious Aunt Augusta (Smith) hiding his pot stash in an urn of ashes following a cremation. A madcap voyage ensues, during which Augusta and her nephew, the staid bank manager Henry, encounter a young woman named Tooley on the Orient Express.

Tooley is played by Cindy Williams, the year before she appeared in American Graffiti. Tooley offers Henry some cigarettes that turn out to be pot, and the experience opens his mind and heart.

Williams is super in the role, from a time when, like in Graffiti, a new realism was seen in cinema. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies.

David Lander, who played Squiggy on "Laverne and Shirley," was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who said he and his partner Michael McKean (Lenny) created their characters for the show while high. Lander told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.

The sitcom lives: "Today Show" co-anchors Savannah Guthrie and Natalie Morales dressed as Laverne and Shirley on Halloween (way classier than "Good Morning America's" Lara Spencer as Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball).

Sixties TV icons The Monkees were also pot fans. A "Behind the Music" episode reveals that Peter Tork, considered the best musician in the band, was busted for $3 worth of hash he had on him when crossing the US/Mexican border and did three months in jail for the "crime" in 1972.  Meanwhile drummer Micky Dolenz was admittedly partying hearty, talking about being stoned and demonstrating what he meant by that (see left). 

Two Tokes for Sister Sara

I just viewed the 1970 film Two Mules for Sister Sara with Shirley MacLaine in the title role. I'm not the first who wonders if it was pot she was puffing in a scene where she steps away to have a smoke. After deeply inhaling, she gets a beatific look on her face and has another toke. She wears a wonderful smile when she walks back to co-star Clint Eastwood.

MacLaine admits to trying pot brownies provided by VIP Robert Mitchum (with whom she had an affair) in one of her books, where she also says she tried smoking pot in a London hotel room.

Two Mules was filmed in Mexico and written by director Budd Boetticher, who lived there. According to Wikipedia, Boetticher had planned on using Mitchum as the male star of the film, and the part of Sister Sara was originally offered to Tokin' Woman Elizabeth Taylor.

Directing the movie was Don Siegel, who directed the 1949 movie The Big Steal, the first film Mitchum made after his bust for marijuana. It was also filmed in Mexico, where co-star Jane Greer reported locals were always trying to foist joints on Mitchum.

The Two Mules film score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who's named as a pot smoker on the web, although I have not found confirmation. Since he's the brilliant composer of "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" as well as "The Mission" and other masterpieces, it would be nice to know!

In 1960, Boetticher departed from Westerns to make The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, a film loosely based on the lives of Jack Diamond and Arnold Rothstein, the US's first major drug dealer (who appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as well as Damon Runyan stories). Boetticher had a role in the 1988 Robert Towne movie Tequila Sunrise, starring Mel Gibson as a man who has a connection with a Mexican dealer (Raul Julia).

MacLaine played an Indian widow rescued from death on a funeral pyre by the heroes of the 1956 film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (pictured). In the book, the woman is stupefied to her sorry fate with fumee d'opium et de chanvre  (smoked opium and hemp). 

Shirley is now playing the American grandmother going toe-to-toe in Downton Abbey with matriarch Maggie Smith (who starred in Travels with My Aunt, based on Graham Greene's story about an eccentric woman with a marijuana connection).

Also recently seen: Bunny O'Hare (1971), starring Bette Davis as a widow who heads to Mexico on the back of a motorcycle driven by Ernest Borgnine as the two pose as hippies to pull off a string of bank robberies. Ernest puffs in the movie and Bette refuses when offered, but asks some intelligent questions about it. She gets the last word, and it's a doozy.