She did, however, get to have fun as the villain in “Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold” (1975). Though she was part of a large ensemble in 1972 disaster-film classic “The Poseidon Adventure,” which also starred Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson, Stevens managed to make her mark in the film about an ocean liner that sinks.ĭespite the enormous success of “The Poseidon Adventure,” it ultimately did not boost Stevens’ feature-film career, and she was soon transitioning to B movies as well as to TV movies and guest appearances. Stella Stevens makes Hildy an altogether individual woman, perhaps the first Women’s Libber west of the Pecos.” “But she’s not just any hooker, mind you, or even the proverbial one with the heart of gold. In Sam Peckinpah’s 1970 Western “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” starring Jason Robards as the title character, Stevens put her own stamp on the material: “Cable pays no attention to his appearance until he meets the bountiful Hildy, the town prostitute,” Roger Ebert wrote. In “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows” (1968), a sequel to keen Rosalind Russell-as-nun comedy “The Trouble With Angels,” Stevens played a hip, streetwise nun who spars with Russell’s not-to-be-trifled-with character, the Mother Superior of a girls’ school. In “The Nutty Professor” (1963) or any other Jerry Lewis film, one might expect the female lead to blend into the background, but the New York Times praised her: “It’s about a shy gargoyle of a college chemist who brews a miracle mixture, becomes a bland Casanova (periodically) and finally reverts to his shy original self and a pert, smitten blonde student, neatly played by Stella Stevens.”Īssessing 1966’s “The Silencers,” the first of the Matt Helm spy spoofs, in a 2010 review, the Watching the Detectives website said: “The cast is also amusing to watch, with Dean Martin excelling in the part of the reluctant hero … and Stella Stevens as the clumsiest femme fatale to ever bumble her way across the screen.”

The Star and the Stellae by C.A. Nole