No, Wes! His first name is not "Steve".
Reps, I'm sure that there must be a website naming all the obscure movies that had well known bodybuilders in them, but in order to save some time and do as little searching as possible, I'll name a few off the top of my head with the help of IMDB.
Not too many fans know that Steve Reeve's appeared in his first Hollywood production - Jail Bait.
Here's some info on that obscure flick ..... JAIL BAIT is a grimy drama about criminals sleazing around a crummy little town, by the acknowledged king of bad cinema, Ed Wood. In what was conceived as his homage to the TV series DRAGNET and the film noir of the 1930s and 1940s, Wood developed this vehicle for stars Steve Reeves and Delores Fuller, his wife. The story is about a young criminal who kills a cop and has plastic surgery to alter his face. The film's title, however, is misleading; the only mention of "jail bait" in the film is made in reference to a gun!
Steve played the part of a "side-kick" detective in that one. See poster below. It's still available on DVD but it's one of the worst movies of all time.
Athena (MGM 1954) is only available on tape, but Steve was in top shape for that movie - even more-so than any of his Herc pics.
Another obscure but enjoyable movie is "L'il Abner" with Peter Palmer playing the part of Abner and Leslie Parrish as Daisy Mae.
That movie also included a number of bodybuilders (only three got credit on IMDB), the most famous of whom include:
Gordon Mitchell - Gordon Mitchell was one of those perfectly developed bodybuilders who jumped on the Steve Reeves bandwagon and hightailed it to Italy to seek movie stardom as a Herculean strongman. Born in Denver, Colorado, but raised in Inglewood, California, Mitchell served in WWII and at one point became a prisoner of war. After the war he went to college and became a high school teacher, albeit an imposing one, what with his incredible physique. He eventually became part of the "Muscle Beach" crowd and flexed his way into the entertainment field as part of Mae West's musclebound revues, where he toured everywhere from Las Vegas to the Latin Quarter with other "abs"normal actor wannabes such as Mickey Hargitay, Brad Harris and Reg Lewis. Mitchell took a fancy to show biz and appeared as posing beefcake in such films as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Li'l Abner (1959), which, of course, did little to advance his acting career. In 1961, after Reeves' Fatiche di Ercole, Le (1958) (US title: "Hercules") proved a phenomenal hit and revived the "muscleman" genre, the non-Italian-speaking Mitchell headed off to Europe and began appearing in the same type of badly dubbed sandal-and-spear epics. Adept at displaying both heroics and villainy, he developed his own core of fans, but when the fad wore off around 1965, Mitchell--unlike many of his colleagues in that field who just dropped out of sight--stayed on and appeared in over 100 more films, many of them in the "spaghetti western" genre, staying true to the country that made him a star. He passed away in 2003.
Brad Harris - Born in St. Anthony, a small town in eastern Idaho, Bradford Harris attended UCLA in the early 1950s where he played fullback on the football team while studying economics. His studies may have been intended as the groundwork for a career in his family's banking interests but Harris instead drifted into the fringes of Los Angeles' movie business where he began to do stunt work. In the late 1950s he traveled to Europe as the stunt co-ordinator for a German-Italian co-production. Soon he found himself working as a second-unit director and that led to a starring role in 1960's "Goliath Against the Giants." Harris's good looks and muscular build kept him in demand during the era of "sword and sandal" movies and when this fad began to fade, he moved into "spaghetti westerns" and various kinds of action movies with an emphasis on spy thrillers. In 1967, he married actress Olinka Berova.
The most obscure bodybuilding flick of all time has got to be "Beauty and the Beach". It played as a second feature to Elvis' "Kissin Cousins" back in 1964 in Hollywood. More info on that one to follow if there is any interest. It was a fairly good flick about a young girl arriving in Hollywood to become a star and meeting and hooking up with a bodybuilder.
I knew Dave while he was making "Don't Make Waves". He did a good job in that movie. I forget the actual story he told me but that house that slid down the hillside actually slid down that hillside either before the making of that film or shortly thereafter. Reg Lewis and Chet Yorton were also in that one. I believe that Dave met Sharon Tate during the filming of that production and I do know that he was devastated upon her death.
Here's that poster I promised
