The Best Thing about A Name for Evil, a recently released film starring Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar, is its scenery—breath-taking mountain country and amply exposed anatomies. The screenplay is so convoluted that it's unlikely to advance the careers of either Culp or Miss Eggar, who plays his screen wife, but it has already done something for a movie newcomer, co-star Sheila Sullivan: She's since become Mrs. Culp. In the film, Miss Sullivan plays Luanna, a rural nymphet who meets architect John Blake (Culp) at a village square dance cum orgy—which may or may not have been a dream. For reasons not made entirely clear, Blake doesn't score with his wife in the sack; the screen synopsis implies he's impotent, while the movie itself hints that the problem is his ball-breaking spouse. Black and a Luanna, however, make it famously, both in a woodsy dell and underwater at the foot of a cascade—amazingly, without benefit of snorkels. Miss Sullivan's performance, her first in a movie, is considerably more prepossessing than her showbiz debut some years ago—as an usherette at Carnegie Hall. Later, however, she landed some plum Broadway roles—in Golden Boy and Play It Again, Sam, among others—before heading for Hollywood. Her second film, already out, is Hickey and Boggs, with Culp and his old I Spy sidekick, Bill Cosby; that, at least, had a better plot. This one is a ghost story about a man who, to quote the production notes, "flees the commercial coral reef by taking his wife to settle in an isolated, broken-down Southern mansion left to him by a great-great-grandfather." For his Southern mansion of the 1800s, producer Reed Sherman picked what looks like an abandoned Pacific Northwest tourist lodge, circa 1915, in the mountains of British Columbia. It was built before World War One as an escape sanctuary for Kaiser Wilhelm, who never got to use it. It's supposed to be haunted not by the Kaiser but by Blake's ancestor, whose evil presence induces Blake to kill his wife. Or does he? Frankly, we're not sure. But, like we said, you'll enjoy the scenery.
