ONE FOR OUR BABY

Frank Sinatra’s latest bimbo is kidnapped.

When gorgeous Lilah DeHart, prettier than Ava Gardner and better in bed, misses a screen test arranged for her by Frank Sinatra, her boyfriend of four weeks, Old Blue Eyes smokes up a storm, belts back a few and asks Joe Buonomo, a pilot and private eye who’s saved his skin more than once, to find out what happened to her. Joe, known to Sinatra’s mobster connections as Joe Bones, feels sucker punched when Lilah turns out to be his ex-fiancee, Helen. Now he’s just as desperate as Sinatra to find her. His resolve pits him against the Ching Hwas, who may be responsible for the murder of Helen’s pal Betty. While trying to avoid the lethal Asians, Joe runs up against Carmine the Rat and his sidekick, who send a message to Sinatra that to get Helen and the film back, he must pay $100,000. What film? The one with Helen and another babe frolicking naked with a gent or two. Tracking the blue movie takes Joe from Sinatra’s plush compound in Palm Springs to Vegas to Ensenada, where he and Helen briefly connect before she’s whisked away by more gun-toting thugs to a porn kingpin’s well-protected lair across the border. The feds swoop in. The Chinese reappear. Mobsters get blown to smithereens. Not even Joe’s piloting skills can keep him from crashing a plane into a mountain. Still, he rouses himself, tries once more to rescue Helen, manages to lose the ransom money and Helen, and gets a glimpse of another blue movie starring presidential candidate Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, which started the whole brouhaha off in the first place.

Heat up the popcorn. This retro debut thriller has all the makings of a Bruce Willis movie: sex, violence, flashy scenery, cardboard characters. What’s not to like?