Tania Velia, the "Yugoslavian bombshell," arrives for an exclusive engagement on Dope Island.

Can you name a movie that stars two different Olympic competitors?

I’ll wager that’s a big no, especially the movie I’m thinking of, which stars Herman Brix and Tania Velia.

I hear you, sounding very owl-like.

Who? Who?

olympics.com: After winning the 1928 Final Trials, 22-year-old Herman Brix from Tacoma, Wash., set a new Olympic shot put record on his first attempt at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. However, he could not match the new world record set by countryman John Kuck later in the competition.

Playboy, July 1959: Making a Splash: Fifteen swimmers comprised the Yugoslavian Olympic team competing in Austria in 1954. Fourteen returned to their Iron Curtain country. One, Tania Velia, selected as “Miss Yugoslavia,” displayed brains to match her blonde beauty by slipping away from the guards into the American zone at Salzburg, to escape forever from Yugoslavery. Tania cooperated swimmingly when we asked to take pictures. She was wearing her modest team sweatshirt and swimsuit. We explained that, for Playboy, we’d like something a bit more appealing, so she obligingly peeled off the shirt and suit and swam about in her birthday finery, and fine it was. “Something like this?” asked the Slavonic tonic. “Everything like that,” we said.

OK. A few more details about Herman and Tania.

Brix attended the University of Washington, majoring in economics, while also playing football. He played in the 1926 Rose Bowl. He was also a track and field star, leading him to a spot on team USA for shot put in the 1928 Olympics, where he earned a silver medal.

In 1929 Brix moved to Los Angeles and became an actor. In 1931 he was hired by MGM to star in an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, but Brix broke his shoulder while making a football film and the Tarzan filmmakers switched to another Olympian, swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.

But, apparently, Brix was meant to play Tarzan because when author Burroughs decided to finance a 12-part serial, Brix was chosen for the lead role. That led to numerous other roles in serials and B movies.
In 1939, feeling he had been typecast as Tarzan, Brix changed his name to the very milquetoasty Bruce Bennett and went on to be a very dependable character actor.

Look him up, and the reference you’ll see most often is his role as Joan Crawford’s first husband in Mildred Pierce. My most vivid memory of him is as the quiet “intruder” whose death at the hands of Mexican bandits brings a human focus to the gold-tainted starring trio in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

We’ll leave him there for a moment while we look at Tania Velia, the other Olympian featured in The Fiend of Dope Island.

The Yugoslavian Bombshell shaking her thing for patrons of Dope Island's tiki bar.

Born in 1935 to a Turkish father and an Italian mother, at age 14 Talia is a junior swimming champion, leading to her becoming a member of the Yugoslavian Olympic swimming team. While the team is competing in Austria in 1955, Tania and her mother seek asylum and eventually emigrate to the U.S. that same year.

Her escape from the Iron Curtain earns her plenty of press, including the July 1959 Playboy feature mentioned above.

And then there were the movies. In 1958 she was an unnamed “Venusian girl” in the Zza Zza Gabor vehicle Queen of Outer Space.

But it was the next year when she made a film with the former Herman Brix that I want to focus on.
Brix, as Bruce Bennett, stars in and contributed to the script for The Fiend of Dope Island. Tania Velia portrays exotic dancer Glory LaVerne. In the opening credits she is introduced as the “Yugoslavian Bombshell.”

Bruce Bennett (top), the titular fiend of the movie, and Robert Bray fight it out in the tiki bar.

Made in 1959 in Puerto Rico, The Fiend of Dope Island, originally known as Whiplash, was finally released in 1961, which is often mistakenly cited as its made date.

Well, I’ve seen many a weird movie, but there’s not many movies weirder than this one.

Bruce Bennett stars as the titular fiend, Charlie Davis, appearing unlike any character we have ever seen the normally staid actor. Here he’s a constantly cackling, maniacal, whip-snapping megalomaniac who rules the island with fear and his ever-ready whip. He’s the kingpin of the very small island where he runs a drug-smuggling operation.

What kind of drugs? Much of the action of this poverty row movie takes place in a dingy tiki bar. At one point the island’s drunken doctor motions to a guy passed out at a table in the bar, and tells Charlie it’s all his fault because of the stuff he peddles.

Well, I want to know, what is he peddling? With the guy nodding off at the table, it must be heroin, right?

A little later in the movie, after the introduction of the “Yugoslavian bombshell” into the mix on the island, she is given a tour by Charlie’s second in command, David (portrayed by Robert Bray, who would go on to star in several seasons of Lassie as Ranger Corey Stuart).

A crew is loading a boat for Charlie’s next drug run.

“You see those leaves over there?” David says to the Yugoslavian Bombshell.

“Yeah,” she says.

“They’re known as the assassin of youth,” David says. “Marijuana.”

Aha! The assassin of youth!

That, however, is the last reference to the drug running, or at least until David’s real reason for being on the island is revealed.

Bruce Bennett had a hand in writing the script. I wonder if he wrote this line for himself (he’s talking to the island’s drunken doctor): “Well get this through your rum-soaked skull you no good bladder mechanic…”

But it is a line uttered by the Yugoslavian Bombshell that resonated most with me, when she says about

Charlie, “If this guy’s human, nature made a terrible boo boo.”

A boo boo? OK.

They really do not make them like this any more.

Need to see it? Look for it on YouTube.