Butterfly (1982)

Writer-director Matt Cimber (the late Jayne Mansfield's husband) adapted his trashy film from James M. Cain's 1947 potboiler novel The Butterfly - a story of forbidden love, deceit, revenge, incest, and murder. The low-budget melodrama, made for $2 million, was financed by female star Pia Zadora's Israeli millionaire casino owner/husband Meshulam Riklis (who also bankrolled her appearance in her next film, The Lonely Lady (1983)). There was an amazing line-up of male stars in the sleazy film, including Stacy Keach, Ed McMahon, Stuart Whitman, James Franciscus and Orson Welles.

Butterfly was tauted with this tagline:

"From the author who gave you "The Postman Always Rings Twice"..."Double Indemnity"..."Mildred Pierce" ...Now, his most powerful and daring love story comes to the screen!"

One-time child actress Pia Zadora won two contradictory awards for this melodramatic drama:

• the Golden Globe award as "New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture" (defeating Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981)!)
• two Razzie awards (two of three wins from ten nominations) as "Worst Actress" and "Worst New Star" [Note: Zadora also won the next year's "Worst Actress" Razzie award for The Lonely Lady (1983).]

The film told about a "Lolita-esque" 17 year-old voluptuous, trampish, conniving sexpot named Kady (Pia Zadora in her first starring or lead film role). [Note: Zadora's motion picture debut was in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).]

In the opening scene - wearing a flimsy low-cut dress - Kady was hitchhiking in 1937 to Good Springs on the Arizona-Nevada border. The pouty, baby-faced female had seduced the truck driver (John Goff) into driving her to her destination, and then teased him (by hinting that she was promising him sex) before running off. She grabbed her belongings and ran up a hillside to the remote and isolated shack of desert hermit miner Jess Tyler (Stacy Keach), who was guarding and tending an abandoned Nevada silver mine ("keepin' it away from scavengers"). As she was sitting on his open front porch, Jess drove up.

Kady's Meeting Up with Jess Tyler (Stacy Keach)

When Jess asked: "Miss...somethin' you want?", she replied: "How can I tell 'til I know what ya got?" - and then added: "I'm lookin' for you." She stated that she already knew his name. She hinted that she was "just somebody you might like to know."

She followed him as he went to milk a cow, and drank the fresh creamy milk from a dipper, provocatively purring: "I like it warm with foam on it." He suspected that she was related to him - and was a "Morgan." He was referring to his alcoholic ex-wife Belle Morgan (Lois Nettleton) with whom he had allegedly fathered two long-lost daughters: the younger Kady and the older Janey (Anne Dane). With her hands on her hips, Kady stated her implied relationship to him:

You must have liked her more than once. You had two kids.

According to Jess, 10 years earlier when the mine closed, two-timing Belle had deserted him and taken the two girls with her, when she permanently ran off with her womanizing lover Moke Blue (James Franciscus), and raised the two girls in a boarding house for "lusty miners." There, she was forced to "grow up."

The barefooted waif Kady asked Jess about his lonely existence: "Don't it get lonely out here? Or is just milkin' that cow good enough for you?" He threatened her if she kept being provocative toward him: "You keep talkin' like that, somethin' just might happen to you." She snapped back: "Not unless I want it to." She then outright admitted:

I am a Morgan. I'm your daughter Kady.

Later that evening, she recounted how she had to forgo school when she became pregnant ("swelling"), and that she had delivered a child out of wedlock a month earlier (an infant son named Danny). She then decided to go looking for Jess - and boldly declared her intentions with him - as his daughter: "To keep you from being lonely. I come to stay with you." He refused to take her in, but then she tearfully told him as she hugged him: "I have nowhere to go." That evening, she enticingly undressed - silhouetted behind a sheet hung up as a room divider, as he restlessly tried to sleep on the couch, and he caught brief glimpses of her naked body.

The next morning before breakfast, he found her snooping around the entrance to the silver mine. He told her that there were only small chippings that remained - not enough for the silver mine owner Mr. Gillespie to keep a "full crew" working. She persistently asked: "Is there enough silver in there to make one, maybe two people rich?" He said there was, if it was accessible. She was hoping to become rich if she could entice or convince Jess to reopen the mine, locate chippings, and allow her to stay:

Kady: "You're the guardian, Jess. What's to stop us from gettin' it out?...Is all you want from life that miserable and a lonely closed-down mine to live with?...You got nothin' in this job and in this place. And havin' nothin' is bein' nothin'. Jess, I ain't got anythin' either. We could change that. If we had what's in there..."
Jess: "Is that all you came back for? Silver? You got more 'Morgan' in you than 'Tyler.'"

Then, Kady told Jess the identity of the father of her own illegitimate infant son - explaining even further why she felt entitled to a share of the now-abandoned Gillespie silver mine, in order to become rich:

• Wash Gillespie (Edward Albert), a spoiled rich kid, a "mama's boy," the son of the rich mine owner Mr. Gillespie

She described how Wash Gillespie had impregnated and then abandoned her when she started to show her pregnancy - because he refused to marry a poor 'Morgan": ("I'm not as good as a 'Gillespie'"). She felt deserving of repayment:

They owe me and my baby. If I can get silver, that's payment, and that's right and it's good. Jess, the first time I ever had a paper dollar bill in my hand, I was twelve years old. I let one of the boarders spend the night with me. Maybe that was bad, but the things I bought with that money was good, and I want more for me and for my baby. I want good things for us, and if that's bad, then I wanna be bad!

While attending a local church with a brimstone and fire preacher Rev. Rivers (Stuart Whitman), who spoke pointedly about "lust and fornication" while delivering a sermon about the Prodigal Son, Kady felt insulted by his insinuations about her need for cleansing of her sins, and she stormed out of the church. The preacher even warned Jess about temptations of the flesh: "You can only be a Daddy to her Jess, nothin' more." Shortly later, to keep Kady around, Jess agreed to search for silver chips in the mine ("You stay here. I'm gonna work the mine - for silver"). She had successfully manipulated him into her point of view.

The film's most notorious scene was a bathtub scene in which Jess helped bathe his alluring "daughter" in a metal tub, to relax after mining all day - and finding nothing. As she dipped herself naked into the tub, she told him: "Feels good. Is it gonna be like this every day? Hurtin' all over and not a thing to show for it? My shoulders feel like somebody’s been minin' them."

Kneeling behind her, he massaged her shoulders (Kady: "You got good hands") and then moved both of his hands around her back and squeezed and cupped both of her full breasts. But then he pulled back: "It ain't right," although she reassured him as a grown woman: "What's wrong? It feels good to me. Does it to you?...It's right if it's good." When he protested, "You're my daughter, Kady," she added: "I'm a woman, too. Sometimes, I need..." She held his arm under the water to touch her sexually between her legs, but he further resisted.

Kady's (Pia Zadora) Notorious Bath-Tub Scene With Jess Tyler (Stacey Keach)

[Note: Although the film continually hinted at an incestuous relationship between Jess and Kady, it turned out - in the complex family tree - that Jess wasn't actually her father after all.]

After finding silver chips in the mine worth $210 dollars, two problems arose:

• Ed Lamey (George 'Buck' Flower), a mine scavenger was later revealed to be the bearded, scruffy half-brother of Belle's womanizing lover Moke Blue; he overheard that the mine was producing results
• Jess's jealousy over Kady's hyper-sexualized body language and 'jailbait' flirtations with two local cowboys in the town's White Horse Cafe led to a fight and an appearance of Jess and Kady in court with lecherous Judge Rauch (Orson Welles), who called for her to approach the bench for close inspection

Upon returning home, Jess' older daughter Janey (Kady's older sister) appeared at Jess' desert shack with Kady's infant Danny. It was noticed that young Danny had a tell-tale hereditary butterfly-shaped birthmark near his bellybutton. Janey informed Kady that the baby's father Wash had decided to marry her (within a few days), and then he arrived the next morning in an expensive convertible. At first, Kady played hard-to-get: "I got one baby suckin’ on me, I don’t need another," but then after he proposed, she accepted. Wash planned on taking her away as his bride.

Soon after, at nighttime, scheming womanizer Moke Blue arrived with his silver-greedy brother Ed Lamey, and tuberculosis-ailing Belle (Jess' ex-wife) - hacking and out of breath, she was suffering from a serious terminal condition. Belle was always thought to be Kady's and Janey's mother. Moke suggested to Jess that with silver prices rising, the closed mine might now be profitable to the Gillespies. When Moke went inside to attend to the frail Belle, she attempted to stab him with a long hat pin, and while defending himself, he killed her.

Kady's Older Sister Janey (Anne Dane)	Kady with Infant Son Danny	Danny's Butterfly Birthmark on His Abdomen
Wash Gillespie (Edward Albert) - The Baby's Father?	Moke Blue (James Franciscus)	Belle Morgan (Lois Nettleton) - Jess' Ex-Wife and Kady's Mother

After Belle's funeral service and burial, Jess caught the despicable shirtless Moke stealing silver ore from the mine, his real goal for being there. He glimpsed the same butterfly mark near Moke's belly-button, and concluded that Moke had fathered Kady's son:

Moke: "Oh yeah! Yeah, that mark, huh. All the boys in the family got that marking."
Jess: "You pig, you laid up with my daughter."
Moke: "I laid up with --- ha, ha, ha -- (hysterical laughter) (Jess shot Moke in the stomach)... it's burnin'."
Jess: "You'll burn in hell, both of ya, for markin' up a poor little kid like that."

In anger for the unauthorized theft of silver - and for having fathered Danny with Kady, Jess lethally shot Moke in the stomach in the mine. As he died, Moke explained even more implications regarding the mark that only afflicted men, and admitted that Danny was his son (or grand-son) - as well as the fact that HE was Kady's birth-father:

Moke: "Only the men get it. If the baby's a girl, it skips, skips to the next boy. You see, the women are carriers. Danny ain't your grand-son, you sob-singin' bastard, he's mine...."
Jess (in shock): "Kady's not my daughter."
Moke: "Belle and me - we didn't know it through 17 years, not till Danny come along and we seen the marking."
Jess: "She's not my blood?"
Moke: "There ain't a drop of ignorant 'Tyler' blood in either Kady or Danny. Belle tried to kill me, 'cause she thought I come here to claim him. Hell, I don't care about them. I want the silver!"

[Note: The incest theme was again emphasized, although displaced.]

Jess dragged Moke - as he died - deeper into the silver mine tunnel and buried him in rubble. Then, Jess decided to tell Mr. Gillespie (Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show sidekick, who won the "Worst Supporting Actor" Razzie award) and his wife (June Lockhart), lodged in the town's Goldfield Hotel, about Danny's true heritage, and that Wash couldn't marry Kady. The wedding day between Wash and Kady came and passed due to the new revelations - although Kady thought she had been stood up. Kady now realized her true goal with Jess:

I don't want nothin' from the Gillespies but what I came here for in the first place - the silver.

Jess obliged her and excitedly promised to resume digging, as he touched her leg under the table and moved closer to her crotch - with sexual innuendoes about finding the treasure - both in the mine and between her legs: "I'll get it for ya, we'll find it, I promise, only we'll go, farther back." She hinted at the forbidden promise: "It's dangerous," but he assured her: "But it won't be. I can fix it. Come with me and I'll show ya. Now!" They immediately ran hand in hand to the entrance of the mine. The two made passionate and sweaty love (an alleged 'incestual coupling') while Kady still believed that Jess was her father, although he knew that she wasn't his "blood." Afterwards, they filled bags and bags of silver ore.

The scandalous sex incident in the mine between Jess and Kady was witnessed by the devious Ed Lamey and reported, and the Sheriff drove up to arrest both Jess and Kady for incest. [Note: There were no repercussions for Moke's murder, however.]

A trial was held for their indecent "crime against nature" - punishable by 10 years in prison, for Jess, and reform school for Kady. On the stand, Ed Lamey claimed he had seen them hugging and kissing, and Jess had touched Kady's back, butt, under her skirt and then her "tits too" - as a prelude to sexual intercourse. When Jess appeared to want to take the blame for victimizing Kady and forcing himself on her, she objected and pleaded with Judge Rauch - claiming that she had actually encouraged Jess to have sex with her:

It's not true. He never forced me to do anything...He didn't do anything to me that I didn't want to happen...He's the gentlest man I ever known. He ain't like any other men, grabbin', takin' what they want, takin' all. What we did was bound to happen from the first day we met, and when it did, it was good for both of us...He's a good man, best man I've ever known. He loves me...We wasn't like a father and daughter, not then...We didn't plan to have no baby. We were just a man and a woman. He wanted me. I wanted him. And we loved each other.

But it was to no avail until Jess objected vehemently: "Your honor, she ain't done nothin' wrong. Me neither. She's not my daughter." The court and Kady were both astonished by the revelation. Jess revealed Kady's true fathering by Moke Blue:

Moke Blue took up with my wife, Kady's mother...this was about a year before Kady was born...

When the Judge asked why Jess didn't simply tell her, Jess confessed his own true love for Kady before the court: "Because she never really had a father. Not for 10 years, and she needed that. And because I wanted to be everything I could to you, because I love you." Jess proved his assertions by showing off Danny's birthmark - and also having Ed Lamey (Moke's half-brother, with the same mother) show his related 'butterfly' birthmark. The Judge surmised again: "If Moke Blue is her father, why the hell didn't he tell her?" Ed responded simply: "The silver...Gillespie's silver. Moke was sure that after the weddin' when he come out and admitted that Kady was his daughter, that they come across the silver." The case was promptly dismissed and the two were freed.

Kady still decided to drive off with Wash (and Janey) in his luxurious convertible, even though she didn't really love him, as Jess suggested to her. Kady was setting herself up with Wash for a comfortable future: "But he can give Danny everything he needs or wants - and me, and make it right." She consoled forlorn-looking Jess on the steps outside the courtroom after he told her: "I don't want to lose you" - she kissed him:

Jess, you'll never lose me. You're my Daddy - and you'll always be my Daddy, always.