Stace England and Screen Syndicate: Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House

[Steve M.]

Released in March 2022: Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House, a concept album from the downstate Illinois indie-rocker Stace England and his band Screen Syndicate that explores the career and death of 1970s exploitation-film icon Roberta Collins. This is a fascinating album, exploring the career of an actress who started out making movies about women in prison and ended with . . . making a movie about women in prison. Her only progress was going from playing an inmate to a prison guard.

Roberta Collins was talented enough to graduate to the A-list of movie stars and become another Michelle Pfeiffer or anther Susan Sarandon or even made rom-coms like Diane Keaton, but her big break never came. She died in obscurity in 2008. This album makes the case for Collins as an actress and as a woman.

Her most notable performance outside the sexploitation grind was as Jean Harlow in the pop musical movie Train Ride to Hollywood.

This album is available on YouTube Music:Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House

[Steve M.]

Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow in Train Ride to Hollywood and in an autographed picture

[Steve M.]

My review of Screen Syndicate's album:

Screen Syndicate - Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House (2022)

[Steve M.]

So why don't we go through the songs one by one?

"The Big Doll House," based on the movie of that title, opens the album. Like other women's exploitation movies, The Big Doll House was never going to win a Best Picture Oscar, but the focus of this song is on the impression the blonde actress makes in this movie - the blonde being Roberta Collins.

[Steve M.]

The Big Doll House was one of many B-grade, direct-to-drive-in movies produced by ROger Corman's New World Pictures studio . . . and one of several such movies to star our heroine, Roberta Collins. It also starred Pam Grier as a fellow prisoner. Both women would be a huge influence on director Quentin Tarantino.

The Internet Movie Database describes the plot as such:

Beautiful women prisoners are abused in a Philippine prison, until five of them plot an escape by taking the evil female warden hostage with the reluctant help of two male fruit vendors.

You can't make this stuff up, folks, though someone obviously did - someone who probably never had a girlfriend.

Roberta Collins had the most memorable line in this movie, but I can't repeat it here.

[Steve M.]

Roberta Collins's next movie was Women In Cages, which was essentially the same movie as The Big Doll House, except that this time, Pam Grier played a guard. The lyrics of this song essnetially say that women are always behind the eight ball, stuck in cages "with the man holding the key."

Quentin Tarantino described Collins’ final shot In Women In Cages as one of "devastating despair."

[Steve M.]

Unholy Rollers was a movie made at the height of the women's roller-derby craze of the early 1970s (it came out in 1972, to be exact), and the film is about women on the same team who can't stand each other. A vehicle for Claudia Jennings, it starred Roberta Collins in a supporting role.

"Unholy Rollers," the song, summarizes the movie and has a circular melody with a fast tempo meant to emulate the excitement of a roller-derby race, and it puts Jim Croce's song "Roller Derby Queen" to shame.

[Steve M.]

Roberta Collins appeared in two movies released in 1973 - The Roommates, which Screen Syndicate did not write a song about, and Wonder Women, considered by Stace England and his band to be a prototype for "Charlie's Angels" The plot involves an insurance investigator battling the nefarious Dr. Tsu, played by Nancy Kwan, and her sexy all-girl army.

And to think this came out the same year Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets.

Well, I can think of movies with stranger plots, some of which also featured Roberta Collins. In this film, she plays Laura, one of Dr. Tsu's warriors. Laura gets killed in the end - and, in fact, many characters Roberta Collins played would get killed off in these movies.

"Wonder Women," the song, is actually good fun.

[Steve M.]

No! Not another women-in-prison movie produced by Roger Corman!

The truth is, Roberta Collins starred in a lot of women-in-prison movies.

Caged Heat was written and directed by Jonathan Demme. Today, we remember him as the director who made The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married, as well as the Talking Heads rock documentary Stop Making Sense. But in 1974, Demme was a young, hungry filmmaker who needed to get some numbers on the scoreboard to get the ability to make A-list movies. Demme was the same age as Collins. Within a few years after making Caged Heat, he was working for the big studios, but for some unknown reason, he never thought to give Collins a role in any of his projects. Like, he couldn't share his good fortune with her?

"Caged Heat," the song, has a really cool heavy-metal buzz to it.

[Steve M.]

Three the Hard Way is a 1974 blaxploitation action film directed by Gordon Parks' namesake son and starring football legends Fred Williamson and Jim Brown and martial artist Jim Kelly. What does Roberta Collins have to do with this movie? She played a secretary to one of the main characters.

As you might guess, "Three the Hard Way," the Screen Syndicate song, is a funky hard-soul number.

And, as you already know, this wouldn't be only movie in which Collins would play a supporting role to black men in leading roles.

[Steve M.]

Matilda the Hun, the neo-Nazi road-rally racer in Death Race 2000, is probably one of Roberta Collins' best known roles. The movie, released in 1975, is about a dystopian future in the year 2000 in which race-car drivers race each other from New York City to Los Angeles and get points for how many people they fatally run over.

Ironically, Matilda the Hun is taken out herself by anti-race protesters who set up a fake detour and tunnel - straight out of Looney Tunes cartoons - to trick Matilda into driving over a cliff to her death.

Death Race 2000 features David Carradine and a couple of future stars - Fred Grandy as Matilda's navigator, who would go on to play Burl "Gopher" Smith" on "The Love Boat" and then represent his hometown in Iowa in the U.S. House of Representatives, and, as a rival racer, Sylvester Stallone - a year before his breakthrough with Rocky.

Stardom may have come to Grandy and Stallone, but Collins remained mired in the el cheapo movie business. What would get her noticed by casting directors working for top Hollywood studios? Perhaps a supporting role in a musical, as a real-life movie actress from the early period of talking pictures? A musical starring an R&B band doing all the singing? With covers of early pop and rock and roll classics, maybe?

As for the song "Death Race" from Stace England and his crew, it's a wistful, synth-driven song that expresses wonder if Matilda will return one day . . ..

[Steve M.]

Sadly, Train Ride to Hollywood was not among the movies starring or co-starring Roberta Collins that Stace England and Screen Syndicate produced a song around for Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House. England reportedly tried to write such a song but had to abandon the idea. But then, the movie was chock full of Bloodstone songs and covers, so it was a fool's errand for England anyway.

However, I pause here to acknowledge once again Collins as Jean Harlow in Bloodstone's 1975 movie. Because she didn't just imitate Harlow in this movie - she became Harlow. Her combined screen time amounted to only a little more than two minutes, but she came across in this movie as someone you could watch for two hours - and not in an exploitation movie, as most of her exploitation flicks were just a little over an hour long anyway.

And playing Harlow is not an easy task; you could have asked Carol Lynley or Carroll Baker, both of whom played the 1930s Hollywood legend in two flop biopics, about that. Collins could have played her in a Harlow biopic with no trouble at all. It's too bad that not enough people saw Train Ride to Hollywood - or that no casting director from a big studio saw it either.

Below is a video collecting all of Collins' moments from Bloodstone's movie.

[Steve M.]

Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow in Train Ride to Hollywood was about as close to mainstream cinematic success as Collins ever got. Had it been given a greater theatrical release, the movie made have turned Collins from a B-movie actress in material belying her talent to an A-lister on par with Susan Sarandon or Diane Keaton. But distribution disputes doomed this movie to only token theatrical release in a couple of cities, not only damaging Collins' chance for a career breakthrough but also having a detrimental effect on Bloodstone. The movie wasn't as good as it could have been, but the soundtrack got excellent reviews- alas, because the movie sank, the Train Ride to Hollywood soundtrack album didn't make either the pop or R&B album charts.

The movie was eventually aired on HBO in the spring of 1977.

Train Ride to Hollywood has great musical performances from Bloodstone and some cleverly humorous scenes. It also has mild expletives, a murder subplot, and a marijuana-smoking scene. Yet it got a G rating - the only such movie in Roberta Collins' career.

Below is a promotional picture of Roberta Collins as Harlow for the movie.

[Steve M.]

And so, Roberta Collins went from playing Harlow to playing a harlot.

She appeared in Eaten Alive, created by the same folks who brought you The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as a prostitute who gets . . . well, read the title. The Internet Movie Database describes the plot (if it can be called that) as thus: "A psychotic redneck, who owns a dilapidated hotel in rural East Texas, kills various people who upset him or his business, and he feeds their bodies to a large crocodile that he keeps as a pet in the swamp beside his hotel."

Oy vey.

The film also starred Mel Ferrer and a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund.

Unappetizing stuff, to be sure, but Stace England and Screen Syndicate turned the title into an earnest song that defends Collins as an actress. The lyrics express hope that some casting director would recognize her talent and realize that she's not just "another blonde playing dumb" - and needs a first-class movie with a "killer plot" to prove herself in.

[Steve M.]

Blockbuster popcorn movies notwithstanding, 1984 was a tough year for Hollywood. It was a year of disappointing movies and outright flops for Paul Newman, Dudley Moore, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, and Robert De Niro. But in November 1984, Roberta Collins did something that likely doomed her career for good.

She turned forty.

Collins always knew that she wouldn't be young forever, which is why she concentrated on honing her acting skills in the hope of being on par with actresses like Meryl Streep, but realizing that ambition depended on a breakthrough into the Hollywood mainstream, and by the time she became a quadragenarian, that hadn't happened. Instead of co-starring with Robert De Niro or playing the title role of the movie adaptation of John LeCarre's The Little Drummer Girl (which starred . . . Diane Keaton??) - which would have been perfect for her bad-ass reputation from her years as drive-in diva - Collins appeared in Hardbodies, a sleazy sex comedy in 1984. Sexy? Well, Collins sure was that. Comedic? Yes, when she got the chance to play it funny, like in Train Ride To Hollywood or even in Death Race 2000, like when she said to a rival auto racer, "Whoever called your car the Bull was only half-right!" But sleazy? No. Roberta Collins was a lot of things, but she was never, ever sleazy.

Oh, yeah, Hardbodies yielded a sequel in 1986, and Collins was in that too. Both movies are considered among the worst movies ever.

Stace England and Screen Syndicate's Roberta album starts out as a brash, rocking disc, but by the time it reaches "Hardbodies I & II" - the ninth song - the music is slower, less brash, and more mournful. "Hardbodies I & II" reflects a career in decline.