Photograph: Werner Schmidt

Thursday, February 11, 2010

A Rowing Film with Welch? Ehh.. Well...

We all, now and then, stumble over things that we did not know existed. In my search on Corbisimages, I found under ‘movie stars rowing’ a peculiar photograph from a film I have never heard of, The Magic Christian, from 1969. The photograph shows Ringo Starr and Raquel Welch, and a lot of topless ‘slave’ girls rowing a galley – which is not the photograph posted above; not that I am a prudie, but you never know whom you might offend by posting nude girls…

So, Ringo Starr is in a lead role, as is Peter Sellers. Raquel Welch is Priestess of the Whip, and …. No, I do not think that I will even try to tell you what this weird film is about. Instead, go to Wikipedia.org by clicking here to get a summary of the film. But why on earth am I posting this on my rowing history blog? Is it because I found some naked girls rowing? No, it is not, nor is it because John Cleese, Roman Polanski and Christopher Lee are in the film, too.

Instead, it is because there are a couple of scenes from the Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge. In the Oxford crew you will find Graham Chapman (from Monty Python) and Richard Attenborough as the Oxford coach. A real ‘Boat Race character’ in this film is John Snagge, who is playing a TV commentator. Snagge was a BBC commentator at the Boat Race between 1931 and 1980.

Click here to watch a trailer for the film.

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