In the late-1950s and early '60s the Rat Pack, whose members included ringleader Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and others, were the epitome of hip. Famous for their free-form nightclub acts in Vegas, they took their unapologetic love of broads and booze, high-stakes gambling and about a million cartons of cigarettes to Hollywood, where in various combinations they appeared in more than a dozen films. A few of these early pictures, like the original Ocean's Eleven (1960), were agreeably slick, jazzy, outrageous and indulgent, but in short order only the indulgence seem to permeate these paper-thin movies. Later Rat Pack fare like 4 for Texas (1964) was pretty bad, and while on their own several of its members proved they were capable of good performances in great films (Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, Martin in Rio Bravo), by the mid-sixties the group seemed hopelessly out of synch with the rest of pop culture. Like Jerry Lewis's Muscular Dystrophy telethons, they became a tacky Vegas act stuck in time.

In Rat Pack cinema, Salt & Pepper (1968) and One More Time (1970) rank near or at the bottom of the barrel. Uninspired vehicles for Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford, these pictures are shameless mug-fests for Sammy, while Lawford mostly seems to be in a boozy haze. Neither film is without interest, but only the most tolerant and morbidly curious will want to sample them. MGM isn't helping matters, offering both films in decidedly inferior transfers that make them even less appealing than they need be.

The best thing about Salt & Pepper (not Salt and Pepper) is the title, and a police inspector's (Michael Bates, better served in A Clockwork Orange) initial confusion over their names: Davis is Charles Salt, Lawford is Christopher Pepper. After that it's all downhill as the breezy Soho nightclub owners are dragged into an international conspiracy to overthrow the British government. Eventually enlisted by MI-5's Colonel Balsom (Ernest Clark), Salt and Pepper track the revolutionaries to a land-locked nuclear submarine in a plot masterminded by Colonel Woodstock (John Le Mesurier) and others at the highest levels of government.

In One More Time, Christopher's snooty twin brother, Lord Sydney Pepper (also Lawford), is murdered. Chris assumes his brother's identity, keeping it a secret even from pal Charles, but they travel together anyway to his lordship's castle, where Christopher hopes to find his brother's killer. Interpol and smuggled diamonds work their way into the story.

Both movies are tired graftings of the old Hope-Crosby Road picture formula, the then current vogue for Bond spoofs (Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies were concurrently in production), and the usual Rat Packian hijinks. The biggest problem is their wildly inconsistent tone, which runs the gamut from cartoon-style slapstick and non sequiturs to Big Scenes of intended high drama. Davis and Lawford produced them, and Sammy outrageously indulges himself, even resorting to impersonations of Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in Salt & Pepper. Nothing is taken seriously, and subsequently there's little suspense or interest in the stories, which were tired and worn out to begin with. (The same problem plagued The Persuaders!, a very like-minded TV series that starred Roger Moore and Tony Curtis.)

The Hope-Crosby Road movies were similarly breezy, mocking, and self-referential, but they were better paced and not sloppy the way these are. Tashlin-esque sight gags work against Salt & Pepper's spy story with its grim murders and threat of nuclear annihilation, and vice versa. One early scene has the pair stumbling upon a fatally stabbed woman they mistake for a stoned call girl. As she lay dying, trying to speak, Salt slyly quips, "Do you think [someone] sent us a goodie?" Instead of funny the scene merely comes off as tasteless.

In One More Time, Davis's character discovers a secret passage behind a bookcase and follows it to a gothic laboratory where Dr. Frankenstein (an unbilled Peter Cushing) and Dracula (Christopher Lee, also unbilled) invite Sammy to join their "party." The scene has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else in the picture, and included solely because Davis was in real life a die-hard Hammer fan, and asked his heroes to make cameo appearances. Of course, that's rather like dropping Big Bird into the middle of The Seventh Seal, but hey Man, the kids'll dig it.

Except for scattered episodes of Gilligan's Island and Get Smart! director Richard Donner (later of Superman, Lethal Weapon fame) had little experience directing comedy, though he himself is a funny man. Mostly, Donner vainly tries to make Salt & Pepper as cinematic as possible, as if to distract from Michael Pertwee's dreary script.

One More Time is generally considered even worse than Salt & Pepper, probably for no other reason than it was directed by Jerry Lewis, his only feature in that capacity in which he did not star. (He's also quite clearly the voice of the bandleader in one scene.) In truth, his work is uninspired but perfectly competent. There's little Lewisian about the film, though Davis is given several pantomime bits clearly worked through by Lewis, and Davis's mannerisms are very much in his pal's style.

Lewis also does a better job showcasing Davis's singing in One More Time, and that film's three songs are superior, too, helping to give it a slight edge over its predecessor. Salt & Pepper, for its part, features a grating, over-emphatically "funny" score by John Dankworth, complete with Mickey Mousing xylophone and kettle drum. One More Time is also more character driven, focusing more on Salt and Pepper's friendship, with Salt sincerely mourning over what he thinks is his friend's murder, and focusing on his uneasy relationship with someone he thinks is his late friend's brother. When the diamond smuggling story takes center stage at the climax, it feels like an intrusion.

The look of both pictures is very mildly interesting as a time capsule of Swingin' London with, as the trailer describes it, the "turned-on clubs of Soho," and for the outrageously gaudy interior sets and fashions then thought to be hip. In Salt & Pepper especially, Sammy Davis, Jr. wears clothes resembling those worn by the aliens that used to visit Lost in Space every week (bright yellow turtlenecks, purple suede jackets, etc.). Both men never seem to be without a cigarette in one hand (even while handcuffed) and a drink in the other. (Lawford was only 44 when he made the first one but looks much older.) Davis and Lawford ogling topless blackjack dealers at their club plays especially silly today.

Both pictures benefit from good supporting casts. Besides Bates and Le Mesurier, Salt & Pepper features Graham Stark and Oliver MacGreevy (a kind of Cockney Tor Johnson, prolific in genre films of the period) and what sure looks like Carol Cleveland as the Salt & Pepper Club's receptionist. One More Time has even better support from a cast that includes Percy Herbert, Allan Cuthbertson, and John Wood, among others.

Video & Audio

In a word: disappointing. Perhaps wrongly assuming Salt & Pepper was a British film, MGM's transfer is 4:3 LBX matted at 1.66:1, the wrong aspect ratio. Shots are clearly framed for 1.85:1, and look just fine reconfigured for 16:9 sets with that option. One More Time is matted to 1.85:1, but neither film is 16:9 anamorphic, a pointless disservice to those with widescreen sets. Some reviews complain that the films look worn with poor color, but neither looks too far removed from the standards of the era, though both are a bit soft and slightly faded, and One More Time has serious negative damage (in the form of long black scratches) lasting about 30 seconds beginning at the 10:40 mark. Worse is the sound, which is thin during both films and downright muffled throughout much of One More Time. Both films were very poorly looped and mixed, but the transfers don't help matters. Salt & Pepper has an optional Spanish track and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish, while One More Time has only subtitles in those languages. Unlike MGM's Midnight Movie double-features, these are on separate, single-sided discs.

Extra Features

The only extras are trailers, also 4:3 matted, complete with text and narration. These are more amusing than the films themselves. One More Time's narrator: "Never before were they together again for the second time!"

Parting Thoughts

These Roads to Mediocrity were among the last wheezy gasps of Rat Pack moviedom. If you, like me, are sometimes fascinated by these train wreck-like movies, you might get some enjoyment out of them, but generally they're quite poor. It's amazing One More Time was ever made in the first place. Was Salt & Pepper really popular enough to warrant a sequel? In place of the usual "The End," Salt & Pepper concludes with a prophetic and, for most audiences, deliriously welcome title card announcing that "It's Over." Indeed.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.