Harlee McBride

[Joszka]

"Young Lady Chatterley" (Alan Roberts, 77), french lobby card.

[Findcandor]

.

Harlee as Young Lady Chatterley, from 1977.

I was working on a post for a sweet beaut who appeared on The Rockford Files, and then got distracted by another lovely from that show, which led to this post. It happened again when I encountered another pretty thing from the same program, and as with the earlier instance, I had no idea who Harlee McBride was.



I was surprised to see she had a VEF thread, and that was only because she had kindly offered the goods in two "Lady Chatterley" films (the only subject covered on this thread that began in 2007 by now-gone Member "Corbeau"; let's see if we may remedy that a bit, and expand on what Harlee was otherwise about). I just love it when an actress catches your eye, and it turns out there were times she had offered herself in the buff.



Let me get out of the way Harlee's appearance in the December 1978 Rockford Files episode entitled "Local Man Eaten by Newspaper," when the lady was thirty-years-old. She played an aspiring actress and trophy girlfriend of a mobster (performed by the handsome Gianni Russo, pictured above), and he can't get enough of her, showing the scene of her quick murder in a film, again and again to his boys.


When home viewing consisted of movie projectors and screens.

Harlee McBride got her start with two 1976 TV show episodes, and then hit the big time with a small part of an "Air France Stewardess" in the star-studded TV movie Raid on Entebbe (1976), with Charles Bronson as an Israeli commando and Yaphet Kotto as Uganda's Idi Amin Dada. She spilled her few words of dialogue with a heavy French accent.


Bad guys were led by Horst Buchholz, pictured; Martin Balsam again played a terrorized-by-Arabs passenger.

There really wasn't much else, just minor roles here and there (including her bit on Rockford), until she basically stopped (coinciding with her marriage) in 1985 (appearing only in minor fare afterwards, such as music videos, which I suspect she engaged in because she may have been friends with the producers), until she returned in a big way in the mid-to-late 1990s, playing a role with some substance in a respectable TV series.


From the trailer, it looked like Adam West
was going for a befuddled professor type.

It's a good thing (in the sense that she is now not just another obscure actress) that she accepted the title role in 1977's Young Lady Chatterley, and reprised the role in the 1985 sequel, Young Lady Chatterley II (with Sybil Danning and Adam West); she was an American who inherited the estate of the original Lady Chatterley (I haven't seen either film, but I am gathering the original "Lady" was an aunt in the first one, and a grandmother in the sequel).


I'd rather not see men in bedroom scenes, but when the man is Adam West, I don't mind.

Of course I had to do what I could to offer views from these films, since Harlee was kind enough to reveal her intimate parts, and that's the kind of thing we would all prefer to see. In addition, the images thus far that have been offered on the thread came across as generally lackluster (and also mixed with other actresses), so I was hoping to put up more definitive views of the woman we are celebrating.



I soon learned the reason why the prior views were mostly lacking had to do with the unavailability of quality prints. (Maybe if I spent more time, I could have found a good print... but this post was prepared in an off-the-cuff way.) For example, I downloaded the clip (still alive after over one decade; that was nifty) that sadly-"Blocked" Member "Chromax" offered in 2012's Post #5, but the VHS-quality was pitiful, and I had to limit these screen shots:



Then I ran into a trailer for the sequel that was put up on its IMDb page (still VHS, but a bit clearer), as well as a YouTube video review for the first, both offering better quality. Trouble was, the nudity was excised or downplayed in both, so what follows are views of "straight" Harlee, sans the saliva-making parts. First, views from the original:










I was impressed by how most everything I've read for both films (especially the 1977 original) gave high marks not only for the movies, but for the leading lady. For example, an IMDb reviewer monikered "Pbhowmick" wrote, "Her innocence in the beginning and then her transformation into the hot and over-sexed Lady looks so real." (Some pointed out that the prettiness of the actress, and the way in which she was not a raving beauty, worked with the believability factor.) In addition, Harlee knew how to act, not always the case with performers in softcore fare. Views from the 1985 sequel:




The was she peers with her eyes is irresistible.

One with the handle of "claudiopreis-99286" opined, "if the the 1950's gave us Rita Hayward then the 1970's gave us Harlee Mc Bride on this must see Erotica Classic for every Men 17 to 80." That was quite a compliment.




With the husband. If only she had married
Anthony Quinn; then she would have been
known as Harlee Quinn.

The man Harlee married in 1985 was famed actor-comic Richard Belzer, and she stayed with him for nearly forty years, until his death a few months ago. They did not have kids (Harlee had two from her first marriage). Obituaries for Belzer (as this one) claim the two met in 1981 and hit it off. Then there was this: "McBride had previously been featured in Playboy magazine in a sex-in-cinema feature in conjunction with Young Lady Chatterley," and that at the time, "McBride was acting in free theater and appearing in TV commercials for Ford."

So Harlee was in Playboy? These would have been in the form of publicity photos for the film and not a pictorial, but I'm disappointed these images have evidently not been put up here (since VEF is known for focusing on all the scraps from Playboy).

There was also this: "Once Harlee had a disruptive incident on an Air France flight from New York to Paris. The incident happened on October 12, 2014. She was handcuffed by a cabin crew for yelling and throwing away a tray, of food." How dare they showed former Air France stewardess Harlee such disrespect! I tell you, sometimes the French can have no honor. (The rest: "The pilot emergency landed the flight and she had to spend two nights in jail until her bail money was covered. Two years later, she was fined by a Gandeur Judge to pay 426,433 in restitution and $10,000.") ("426,433" in... Euros? Worth over half-a-million dollars in 2014, and then $10,000 on top..? That didn't make sense.)


From the 1998 HOMICIDE episode called "Mercy."

Belzer mostly retired in 2016, reportedly with health problems. (He was only four years older than his lovely wife.) The TV series that allowed for Harlee to resurface was Homicide: Life on the Street (where, I am guessing, she played a technician in forensics or something, judging by the "doctor" in front of her character's name) for nearly two dozen episodes between 1994-1999. This was Belzer's first big series, where he appeared from 1993-1999 (the ending year coinciding with the wife's departure; his presence almost certainly had something to do with Harlee's being cast), before he moved on with his same role of Det. Munch to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where he appeared for nearly twenty years.



These HOMICIDE views came from a poor online copy of the 1995 episode called "Heartbeat," where sparks appeared to fly between the characters played by the real-life husband and wife. The show also featured Yaphet Kotto (last photo) as a commander of the cop team, or Harlee's former ENTEBBE teammate.


I am grateful such a cutie-pie as Harlee made the nudity concession in 1977, and did not turn her nose up at doing so again eight years later. The lady is 74½ today, and I'm sure you'll join me in wishing her a long and happy life.











.