7 - Exploiting her nascent has-been status in Berserk! (1967)

Summary

Diana Dors joined the ranks of the ‘has-beens’ in the 1960s, notably when cast in a supporting role in Joan Crawford's British thriller Berserk! (O’Connelly 1967). Working with one of Hollywood's great comeback queens, she discovered how post-peak stardom imposed a challenging set of demands upon actresses but also gave them some unique opportunities within the margins of mainstream cinema. American producer Herman Cohen and British producer-turned-director Jim O’Connelly allowed Dors to retain her sex symbol image in Berserk!. Yet there’s more than a hint of mockery about the way she's presented here as a rumour-mongering magician's assistant who refuses to shut her big mouth even at the bitter end.

Dors was at the lowest point of her career when she made this film in 1966. Just ten years after the peak of her stardom and a year after leaving Los Angeles to take her chances as an ageing sex symbol in Britain, the thirty-five-year-old was reduced to singing, joking and telling stories against herself in working men's clubs in some of the roughest parts of England. Here, she was confronted by ‘audiences of men heckling me over pints of beer’, as she later recalled in Dors by Diana (1981: 248). She also described in her autobiography how financial necessity had forced her to prostitute her talent by ‘peddling a screen name that had once been big; enduring shouts of “Get ‘em off “ or “Show us your tits”’ (249). Once envied by women and adored by men around the world, Dors was now little more than a target for misogynistic verbal abuse, for which she was mostly paid cash-in-hand.

Dors risked further humiliation when signing on to do Cohen’s Berserk! even though the producer had a good track record of creating lucrative movies on a shoestring, including I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Fowler Jr 1957) and A Study in Terror (Hill 1965). The fact that Cohen had hired some talented actors to support Joan Crawford and secured a distribution deal with Columbia Pictures suggested that this exploitation thriller might become a hit and, as such, help Dors regain her footing in the film industry. Sadly, although the film's publicity claimed that Berserk! would challenge an audience's ability to withstand a series of horrifying events, it was neither truly terrifying nor terrifically trashy, making it a fairly disappointing experience for most devotees of cult cinema.