| Intl. Notebook | Jan 12 2021 |
Someone to watch over you.
Above, a Twentieth Century Fox promo item, a giant die-cut head of movie star Betty Grable made to promote her 1944 musical Pin Up Girl. That isn't the type of movie we usually talk about here, but for her we'll make an exception. This is the second time, actually, but we're into any kind of vintage memorabilia, especially something this rare and interesting. Plus Grable is kind of fun, as any viewing of her movies will show. This is a very large scan, as you can by our zoom of her eye. See another fun Grable image on the cover of Paris-Hollywood magazine here.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 11 2021 |
The score was never in question. I'm a 10, and you're a zero.
Above, a nice Robert Schultz cover for the 1962 titillation novel I Know the Score, written by the curiously named Ort Louis. Surely Ort is a pseudonym, one that sounds like the noise a hungry seal makes, however he's also credited with 1963's The Pleasure and the Pain, and wrote for crime magazines such as Manhunt. So maybe he's a real person. We'll keep an eye out for more info.
| Femmes Fatales | Jan 11 2021 |
The hat doesn't match the swimsuit, but it'll come in handy if she needs to be spotted by air rescue.
You saw a photo of Italian beauty Nuccia Cardinali not long ago, but when you make shots as nice as hers a return engagement is mandatory. The last one showed her lighting up the French Riviera as a blonde, while this brunette image shows her— Well, we have no idea where she is, and maybe she doesn't either. The shot was only published, as far as we know, as part of a series of cheesecake postcards in the mid-1960s. Cardinali thrived in unusual media. She began her career in photo novels, which were a mainly European phenomenon, and basically were comic books with posed photos instead of illustrations. She karate chopped and headlocked her way through sixty-nine of those, then graduated to singing and released several singles in 1968. She had already acted sporadically beginning in 1964, and had a steady run on the silver screen from 1971 to 1975, when she had eight credited roles, including in 1974's Lo strano ricatto di una ragazza perbene, aka Blackmail, and 1975's La tigre venuta dal fiume Kwai, aka Tiger from the River Kwai. We have a few other interesting photos of her, so maybe we'll get back to her in a bit.
ItalyLo strano ricatto di una ragazza perbeneBlackmailLa tigre venuta dal fiume KwaiTiger from the River KwaiNuccia CardinaliNuccia CardinaleKaren Carter
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 10 2021 |
Unseasonal heat returns to Japan.
Above, another Japanese poster for the Swedish film Sex-Cirkusse, released today in 1976, and known in English as The Hottest Show in Town. We chopped it in half below so you can see more detail. And speaking of detail, we talked about the, um... interesting content of the movie when we shared the other poster. Check here.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 9 2021 |
Lemmy put it to you as directly as possible.
Peter Cheyney debuted as a novelist in 1936 with the Lemmy Caution novel This Man Is Dangerous, and true to the title, his franchise character is one bad mutha-shut-your-mouth. We like the scene where he leg locks a guy around the neck, then proceeds to lecture him for two pages about how he's going to kill him and enjoy it, before actually breaking his neck. The crux of the story involves a plot to kidnap an heiress in London. Cheyney details Caution's wanderings around the dark recesses of the Brit underworld and slings the slang like few writers from the period. Much of it is amusing, though he never quite makes it to the level of “moo juice.”
But here's the thing about loads of slang in vintage literature—it can wear on you after a while. And when paired with a storyline that doesn't exactly sprint like Usain Bolt, it can really wear on you. You have to give Cheyney credit, though. He was unique. And successful. This Man Is Dangerous was adapted to the screen as the French film Cet homme est dangereux in 1956, and numerous other novels of his made it to the moviehouse as well. We weren't thrilled with this tale, but it's significant in the crime genre, and objectively we think many readers will love it. The Fontana edition you see above has amazing cover art by John Rose and was published in 1954.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 8 2021 |
The Devil went down to Southeast Asia looking for fortunes to steal.
1969's I, Lucifer is Peter O'Donnell's third Modesty Blaise novel, and it's a series we're going through mainly to highlight the great cover art by Robert McGinnis. He didn't illustrate all the books. In fact, this might be the last, which means we'll probably move on to other authors. But that won't be because the Blaise books aren't good. In fact, for the sexy spy genre they're top notch—exotically located, compellingly plotted, and peopled by wacky Bond-style supervillains. Case in point: the titular character in I, Lucifer is a man suffering from a psychotic delusion that he's Satan. The funny part is he isn't evil. The real evil guy is Seff, the opportunist who launches a global extortion scheme that hinges on faux-Lucifer's participation even though his delusion prevents him having a clue what he's really doing. Lucifer might be the only villain we've encountered in a novel who's a victim.
When Seff's murderous extortion hits too close to home for Modesty, she and sidekick Willie Garvin gear up and eventually end up in the Philippines, where they right some wrongs, explosively. As usual Modesty uses sex to get over on the bad guys, and it's a major part of what readers enjoyed about the series. At one point she ponders whether a colleague thinks she's promiscuous. Well, no, she isn't by 1969 standards. But the joy of literature is she can be unpromiscuous, yet we can be there in the room for every one of her widely spaced encounters. This book is particularly amusing along those lines, as it brings two of Modesty's lovers together to be uncomfortable and/or jealous as they're displaced by a third. But sleaze fans will need to look elsewhere. O'Donnell is subtle—if not poetic—with his sex scenes.
Though the sexual aspects of Modesty Blaise were a major attraction of the novels, we enjoy even more the tactical nature of O'Donnell's action, which is probably an influence from his military service in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Greece and other places. It's also probably why so much of the Blaise series is connected to that region. While the tales are always exotic, this entry is even wilder than usual. How wild? It involves precognition, trained dolphins, Moro mercenaries, and body implants that kill remotely, yet it all works. That's because as always, in the center of the chaos, you have Blaise and Garvin, perfect friends, platonic soulmates, and two armed and extremely deadly halves of a razor sharp fighting machine. Abandon all hope ye who cross them.
PhilippinesIranSyriaGreeceEgyptFawcett PublicationsCrest BooksPeter O'DonnellRobert McGinnisModesty Blaisecover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 7 2021 |
Pawn to king's palace—pawn takes queen.
They really don't make many like this anymore. We're talking about high budget adventures in an international setting, combined with romance and a few laughs. Hollywood used to specialize in international glamour, but nowadays in big budget movies Americans go abroad mainly to slaughter or be slaughtered. Gambit, which starred Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine, and opened nationwide in the U.S. today in 1966, falls into the same category as Charade, To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crown Affair, How To Steal a Million, Bedtime Story, and numerous other immensely pleasing cinematic excursions. Too bad those are far better films.
Michael Caine plays a con man who has found in Shirley MacLaine the physical double of the dead wife of Ahmad Shahbandar, the richest man in the world. Shahbandar's wife was in turn the virtual double of the ancient Burmese queen Li Szu. Shahbandar has an immensely valuable carved bust of this queen, which he bought for its resemblance to his wife. Caine hopes that once Shahbandar gets a look at MacLaine, he'll let his guard down and invite them into his inner circle, setting himself up for a theft of the bust. If this plot premise seems a bit cluttered to you, we thought the same.
But it doesn't matter because it's not really the main gimmick in the flick. That would be Caine's fantasy of his perfect crime, versus its reality. In his imagining, which makes up the first thirty minutes of the film, MacLaine goes through the motions of the heist like a mute automaton. Then the film restarts with the real MacLaine, and this one talks. Worse for Caine, she has questions, doubts, and, most upsetting of all, opinions. If half an hour of Caine imagining the perfect crime—especially when as a viewer you have no idea it's a fantasy—seems overly long, we thought the same. Again. But we mention it specifically to keep you from turning the film off, which is definitely a possibility for any MacLaine fans dismayed that she's trancewalking through her role. Stick with it and you'll get the same lively star from The Apartment, Irma la Douce, and other hits.
Obviously, we wouldn't have placed this movie in the same category as Charade et al unless there's romance, and MacLaine and Caine—whose names, by the way, sound like a country band or a Vegas magic duo—duly fall in love. But you won't buy it. The script says they fall in love, so okay, by the three-quarters mark they adore each other, but the love spark is never there. Luckily there's also a heist, some comedy, and all the other trimmings of the adventure/romance genre, so despite the film's shortcomings you may find it enjoyable. Then after you finish you can watch any of the movies we mentioned at top and note the difference when this formula is well executed.
Hi, I'm not Chinese but I get to pretend I am in this movie.
What a coincidence. I get to pretend I'm Arab.
Hi, guess what? I'm white too, but Sikh and you shall find!
And me? I basically get to play myself, because, well, I'm Michael frickin' Caine. Plus I can't do accents.
Regarding the above quips about ethnicity, they aren't completely out of the blue. We happen to be doing some work on a television series that's causing consternation online because of its casting of black and latino actors. See, there's a sizable contingent out there that wants an all-white cast in this thing, because the source material (written back when no white authors were putting characters of color in their lightweight adventure novels, because, why hurt your book sales?) is ostensibly all white.It's a headache, dealing with these folks. Most of the complainers talk about “their” territory being encroached upon, and say idiotic things like, “Why can't blacks and latinos write their own books?” They've invented a term—“blackwashing.” These intellectually deficient people forget—or never bothered to learn—that blacks and others were erased from, let's see, pretty much every Bible movie ever made (since none of the people in the Middle East of that era were white), and pretty much every western ever made (up to 25% of cowboys in the old west were black), and those films alone comprise many thousands of opportunities, both creatively and financially, wiped out by American segregation.
A look around Pulp Intl. will reveal white actors made-up yellow to play Asians and Pacific Islanders, brown to play Native Americans, Indians, Mexicans, Arabs, and so forth. We've written about maybe two dozen such films, but there were literally thousands. Hell, even stage minstrels came about partly because audiences wanted to see comedic black performances but were for the most part not about to watch actual black men do it. So we thought Gambit would be a good moment to point out yet again the century-long erasure of actors of color from lucrative opportunities in cinema, both in front of and behind cameras, and to note that diversity in media is (inadequate) redress of a hundred years of racist exclusion.
Every time someone sees the cast in this tv show we're working on and complains about white culture being encroached upon, if you were to check their music collection you'd probably find such thefts as white guys rapping, white guys playing the blues, white guys playing jazz, and white guys playing rock and roll, from Elvis on down the line. When you include clothing, style, dance, language, and more, pretty much everything people of color have invented in America has been co-opted by white culture and magically transformed into money, while simultaneously all the literature people of color supposedly don't produce was summarily ignored by Hollywood.
Despite all we've written about this today, we're basically pretty dispassionate on the subject. White casts reflected an understanding among filmmakers of the shortest path to making money. Sure, there has long been a tiny percentage of cinema about race that had performers of color, but basically, movies were filled with whites (even if they had to wear shoe polish to play characters of color) because audiences were understood to be white. So why alienate your audience? But the diverse peoples that have always existed in America are today both more numerous and more economically significant—and the younger folks who actually fuel movie industry profits are particularly diverse. Therefore yesteryear's logic still applies for studios: Why alienate your audience?
Hollywood diversity is about making money, just as yesteryear's segregation was. We don't mind that people hate diverse casts. They're racists—duh. No further explanation needed. But what irks us is racists who pretend to be oppressed, conveniently ignoring generations of exclusion perpetrated either directly by them, or on their behalf. Nobody in their family tree was ever denied economic opportunity by nationwide industries because of skin color. People in Hollywood are in essence saying today, "Hmm.. you know, maybe it would be nice for our industry to stop screwing over people of color and actually give them some opportunities here. That's fair, right?" We think it's sad that so many people either don't get that, or pretend not to, but whatever, there's our explanation for why we joked about it above. Because behind every quip there's a story, if not an unsolicited rant.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 5 2021 |
He may be gone but his good works live on.
Above, five more paperback covers painted by Jean Salvetti—aka Salva—who we've featured several times before. French paperback illustrators, except for Aslan, Michel Gourdon, and a few others, tended toward more freeform styles, but their command of color was excellent and we've always liked their approach. Click Salvetti's keywords below to see more.
FranceÉditions le TrotteurYves RollatRoddy GerfeeldJack NortonRudy BombergJack AuburtinJean SalvettiSalvacover artcover collectionliterature
| Femmes Fatales | Jan 4 2021 |
Bardot joins the Pulp Intl. gymnastics team.
You may remember we've been keeping our eyes open for shots like this one. Here you see Brigitte Bardot hanging from a pair of rings in Louveciennes, a northern suburb of Paris, in 1952. We have eight more examples of vintage actresses getting bendy with their bodies. If we'd suspected we'd eventually find so many we'd have made them a group post. But as it is, you have to visit them individually: Danielle Darrieux, Ellen Drew, Constance Dowling, Sophie Hardy, Joey Heatherton, Gitte Haenning, Margaret Lee, Rosemary LaPlanche, Joan Leslie, Vera Zorina, and Betty Compson. We will surely find more down the line.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 4 2021 |
I heard you the first time. I'm just choosing to ignore you.
We've been told that this low rent cover for Justin Kent's 1955 fetish cheapie Touch Me Not! is by sleaze art master Eric Stanton. If so, it's a mere sketch compared to his normal style, but we'll accept that it's him. Last time we checked, Touch Me Not! was selling for $155, which is outrageous for something that looks like it was stapled at a Kinko's. But in this case at least, the buyer would get something historically significant. This book was central to an obscenity case brought in 1959 by the state of New York against Times Square bookstore owner Edward Mishkin that after seven years went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966. Mishkin lost the case, and Touch Me Not!, which had been confiscated with numerous other books, remained under wraps for fifty years. You can see plenty more Eric Stanton art by clicking his keywords below.
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