The story is a loosely connected series of adventures dealing with young Pauline, a girl raised in the Baskerville Orphanage, befriended by George Stedman (Pat Boone). When they are young adults, he leaves Baskerville 'to make his fortune,' promising to return and wed Pauline when the time is right. But before George can fulfill his promise, the orphanage is shut down and teen Pauline is sent to teach in Africa (?). She becomes a tutor for sex-crazed 12-year-old Prince Benji who wants to start his own harem with her [e.g., his voice is dubbed to sound like Rocket J. Squirrel from Rocky, Bullwinkle & Friends].

She eventually avoids his seduction. However Pauline is then sold to the "white pygmy chief of the Congo" (Billy Barty). She gets rescued by safari hunter Willy Sten-Martin [played by Terry-Thomas] but then slips through his fingers. Meanwhile, George Stedman - now the richest man in the world - is also attempting to find his Pauline. The audience is taken on an array of endless adventures as everybody crisscrosses the globe, gets lost and then gets found, but they are also cryogenically frozen, brainwashed, climb over the Berlin wall, become cosmonauts... and, oh, yeah, Pauline then meets a "far-out" Italian filmmaker Frederico Frandisi and becomes the star of his newest film. Besides all that (and even more), Pauline and George run into a wild gorilla ...twice.

This was Pat Boone's final theatrical film, followed by the religious 'mean streets' actioner The Cross and the Switchblade in 1970. Incidentally, Mungo Jerry also appears as Pat Boone's traveling butler. He may be remembered as the singer behind the '70s hit In the Summertime.

The tagline for this movie was: "That 'Rebellion Girl' is dodgin' unbelievable perils in The Perils of Pauline!" While difficult to imagine today, here's a perky blonde girl who became known exclusively for a string of television car commercials. She was 'the Rebellion Girl' based on a limited series of Dodge TV ads. ("The Dodge Rebellion wants you!"). That was her claim to fame. No lasting guarantee of continued popularity as she would certainly be replaced unceremoniously when the new Dodge girl arrived with the 1968 car models. It was - indeed - a very tiny window for building a star.

But everything about 1967 seemed to embrace an 'instant' quirkiness that refused to fail. First, there was the Beatles and then [blink] the Monkees. 'The Adventures of Batman' suddenly hit the top of the ratings [blink] new episodes would start airing twice a week. Everybody was talking about James Bond [blink] enter The Man From Uncle and then [blink] Get Smart. Universal Pictures had a huge hit with Julie Andrew's roaring-20's musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. The studio wanted to do an immediate sequel as a TV series. They tapped Joshua Shelley (the successful director of the Get Smart series) to make it happen quickly, providing him with all the Millie props and sets.

The director knew he didn't have time nor experience to create a TV musical comedy on such short notice. He requited Pat Boone to play lead with the virtually unknown Dodge girl and began making a TV series, set in the Roaring '20s but ultimately based on an old movie serial Perils of Pauline. But the executives at Universal were becoming impatient and wanted to premiere the TV show while Pamela Austin was still center-stage in the heavy run of Dodge commercials. In a peculiar move, Universal decided to abandon the TV route; rather, splice everything together and release PERILS to the motion picture theaters, resulting in a wildly cockeyed, illogical [yet decidedly psychotronic] experience for the big screen.

An American film in English language; fullscreen, (104 minutes) in DVD encoded for
ALL REGION NTSC, playable on any American DVD machine;
Extras include radio promotion plus Pamela Austin's collection of Dodge TV commercials

   

Violence/Sexual Situations
for Mature Audiences