By Tom Lisanti
I admit it. I am a Troy Donahue fan.
There I said it. Not surprising since I love and have been writing about
Sixties starlets for over ten years. If there ever was a male version of a
starlet, it was Troy. I purchased the DVD box set Warner Bros. Romance Classics
Collection featuring four of his early Sixties movies and recently viewed My Blood Runs Cold (1964) from Warner
Bros Archive as a DVD-on-Demand. The pairing of Troy Donahue as a loon and Joey
Heatherton as the blonde he desires in this suspense film didn’t burn up the
silver screens across the country and left most critics cold, but the coupling
of America’s favorite bland blonde boy with the Ann-Margret wannabe made for
bad cinema you just got to love.
By 1964 Troy Donahue had reached super
stardom and was one of the most popular young actors at the time, but he was
extremely unhappy with the roles being offered him. He could be lackluster at
times and was by no means a great actor, but with his looks Troy didn’t have to
be, as his boy-next-door charisma made teenage girls (and some men) swoon. His
film career began in 1957 with small roles in a number of films including Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Summer Love (19580, Live Fast, Die Young (1958), and Monster on the Campus (1958) before he was cast opposite Sandra Dee
as tortured naïve young lovers in A
Summer Place (1959) for Warner Bros. The film, beautifully filmed off the
coast of Carmel, California doubling for Maine and featuring a lush score by
Max Steiner, was a huge hit especially with the teenage set. The studio wisely
then signed Donahue (who shared the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer –
Male for his performance) to a contract. He then co-starred on the lightweight
TV detective series Surfside 6
(1960-62) in between essaying the romantic leading man in a series of glossy
romances (most directed by Delmer Daves) opposite some of the prettiest
starlets of the day.
In Parrish (1961) he is a tobacco farmer and was described as being “more than a boy. He was not yet a man—dangerously in-between…and between three girls!†They were Connie Stevens as an easy farm gal, Diane McBain as a bitchy gold digger, and Sharon Hugueny as a sweet rich girl. In Susan Slade (1961) he is a struggling writer in love with Connie Stevens who harbors a dreadful secret (her little brother is actually her illegitimate son!) and doesn’t think she deserves happiness. Donahue won the Photoplay Gold Medal Award for Most Popular Male Actor of 1961 and continued his streak of glossy romantic dramas with the lush travelogue Rome Adventure (1962) as a grad student who falls for librarian Suzanne Pleshette (whom he was married to for a short time) though he is involved with worldly older woman Angie Dickinson. He played yet another college student in Palm Springs Weekend (1963) who on Spring Break has a fling with local gal Stefanie Powers. Then there was a change of pace role as a cavalry officer in the Raoul Walsh directed westernA Distant Trumpet (1964), but to keep his teenage girls fans happy he is torn between widow Suzanne Pleshette and snooty Easterner Diane McBain.