| Vintage Pulp | Dec 27 2020 |
Esther Williams learns that privileged pretty boys can get very ugly.
The Unguarded Moment is one of those films that, although it's basically a lifetime old, is amazingly topical in 2020. The subtext of this mystery concerns whether a person is redeemable, whether they deserve forgiveness for their errors. When a high school football star stalks his beautiful thirty-five year old teacher, sends her provocative notes, breaks into her house, and even physically accosts her, the script positions him as someone who can be redeemed. He's just frustrated, confused, and acting out behavior taught to him by his terrible father. You know the sentiment by heart, because it still pervades today (though not for the non-white or non-privileged): “He has his whole life ahead of him and it's a shame to ruin it over one youthful mistake.”
Surprisingly, Esther Williams herself becomes this wayward soul's main advocate, despite the peril and fear she's endured. It's a noble turn for her character to take—and an unlikely one. Barring interruptions, Williams would have been raped. That's not our opinion. The script leaves no real doubt. The plot contrivance of giving this almost-rapist a break didn't sit well with us, but leaving that aside, it's interesting to watch Williams negotiate this role. It was a leap for the former Olympic swimmer and longtime musical star. The idea was to nix the singing and water ballet and get her into meatier roles, and sure enough, the only singing and dancing she does here is singing the praises of her attacker and dancing around her duty to assist the law.
The film wasn't well received by the public, though we aren't sure if the reticence had to do with performance, casting, subject matter, or something less tangible (a feeling of overall creepiness, perhaps). Even so, we think it's pretty well made, and Williams as an angel of mercy is worth watching, if only for the discussion her role might engender. Our girlfriends didn't like it at all. But for our part, we'll watch just about anything that has brand name stars in it, and Esther Williams, around this period, was about about big as they came. Watch and debate. After a special in premiere in Los Angeles, The Unguarded Moment began its nationwide run today in 1956.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 26 2020 |
One esoteric murder method begets another. Possibly.
Concepts for thrillers can be hard to come by, so sometimes authors borrow from one another. Not long ago we read John D. MacDonald's The Drowner and shared the cover from the Gold Medal edition. Here you see British author John Creasey's, aka Gordon Ashe's, Death from Below. If you quickly click this link you'll notice the two books have identical art, thematically—a woman being pulled down into the water by an unidentified killer.
We figured Creasy borrowed from MacDonald, but interestingly, both books were originally published in 1963. Assuming months were spent actually writing them, it seems as if both authors simply had the same idea (we don't know if there was an earlier thriller with the same concept, but we wouldn't be surprised). The main difference between the tales is that MacDonald's killer drowns one person, where Creasy's goes full serial and drowns dozens, including children. His story also takes place in France, rather than the U.S., and has a deep—if unlikely—political element.
We know this scenario didn't happen, but we like to imagine both MacDonald and Creasy/Ashe walking into bookstores on opposite sides of the Atlantic sometime soon after both paperback editions had been released, seeing each other's on a shelf, and being mightily perturbed. At that point we like to imagine Creasy, in time-honored British fashion, saying, “MacDonald! That cheeky bugger!” MacDonald on the other hand, being American, probably went, “Creasy! That sneaky motherfucker!” Advantage: yanks.
| Femmes Fatales | Dec 25 2020 |
What's more festive than a holiday candy cane?
Some people say Christmas. A few say X-mas. Many just say happy holidays. Whatever your preference, here's burlesque legend Lilly Christine—or if you prefer, Lilly X-ine—looking festive in a candy striped outfit. She's appeared on our website often, most notably in this series of photos from Carnival magazine we were the first to scan and upload. If you have the time and inclination, click her keywords below. And enjoy this day.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 24 2020 |
Hi, I'm lost and alone and if I disappeared off the face of the Earth nobody would question it or care.
Above, very nice Mitchell Hooks art for Gil Meynier's Stranger at the Door, originally 1948, with this Crest Books edition coming in 1955. We gave it a read and you should think of it as an early Psycho. The main character Joe runs a Tucson boarding house, and we learn via his vivid internal dialogues that he hates all people, particularly those who possess authority through education or social position. His disorder soon focuses on Dorry, an attractive new boarder who has no idea how disturbed Joe really is. He schemes, sneaks around, spies, and steals, and his first attempt at serious harm involves running someone over with his car. That person isn't the last. An unusual book for the time period, which we enjoyed because it's so different.
| Intl. Notebook | Dec 24 2020 |
What do you get the pulp fan who has everything?
We were poking around online and came across these two nude figurines by the French artist Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan. He's well known today as an advertising illustrator, paperback and magazine illustrator, and pin-up artist. He also modeled a hedonistic lifestyle, a sort of mini-Hefner existence (example here, and below)—which like Hugh Hefner's may have been partially staged for publicity purposes. But what is less known about Aslan, outside France, anyway, is his sculpture. However he was a heavy hitter in this area too, and had been since before he became famous as a pin-up artist. Way back in 1952, when he was only twenty-two, he won a prize for his sculpture. Later he sculpted a famous bronze bust of Brigitte Bardot as Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, and he also sculpted a funerary statue for famed actress Dalida's tomb, as well as a bronze bust of her that was erected on the Place Dalida in 1997. So these figurines come as no surprise to us. We'd let these live on our desks, keeping our stray papers under control, but the prices are too rich for our blood. On the other hand, since it's Christmas, maybe we can receive them as gifts. Hmm... Okay, gotta run. We're going to talk to our girlfriends about these.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 23 2020 |
You two stop fighting. I don't love either of you. I only sleep with you for the body heat.
We have another issue of Adam magazine today, the sixty-sixth example of this Aussie treasure we've uploaded to our website, with a cover illustrating Ken Welsh's tale, “A Friend in Greed.” Welsh has done well in the past, but not this time. In the story, a couple of thieves who are sent by a mastermind to perform risky robberies, only to receive a minimal slice of the take as payment, decide to cheat their boss, but immediately turn on each other. This happens thanks to the liberally shared sexual favors of a femme fatale, as seen in the cover art. In the story she didn't wear a tiger-striped minidress, but we appreciate the artistic license. Unfortunately, “A Friend in Greed” is short on tension and scant on effort, hardly worth the illustration. We can't believe this is the same Welsh who wrote the excellent “Dirge for Darling.”
The highlight of the issue turned out to be Jules Archer's, “The Wildest Gun in the West.” It's supposed to be a factual story, and tells how two cowboys with a grudge to settle worked together to dig a grave seven feet deep, four feet wide, and eight feet long, then dropped into the hole to have a close-quarters knife fight to the death. The idea was that neither would have to bother burying the other after the fight. Just push some dirt in and leave. Easier said than done, since both are wounded before the matter is settled, but indeed one cowboy is left behind while the other rides back to town, pretty much naked because he had to use his clothes as bandages. Did it really happen? Well the word “fact” is used loosely in these men's adventure magazines, but we guess anything is possible when it comes to the old west. Thirty-plus scans below.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 22 2020 |
Gentlemen prefer blondes. So do elderly billionaires, used car salesmen, and pornographers, but let's leave all that aside for now.
We said we'd get back to Anita Loos and here we are. We said that eleven years ago, but what can you do? Above you see a French edition of her classic comedy Les hommes préfèrent les blondes, better known as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with Marilyn Monroe—who starred in the movie version—front and center on the cover. We read the book a while back—its full title is actually Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady—but haven't talked about it, so we'll just tell you that it's simply ingenious, taking the form of the diary of a somewhat vacuous and entitled socialite flapper named Lorelei, who is to gentlemen what sugar is to flies. Lorelei is a material girl obsessed with wealth and status, who expects adoration and basically plies most of these guys for gifts. But of course she does choose someone in the end.
The novel is built from short stories Loos wrote for Harper's Bazaar in the early 1920s. It was originally published in book form in 1925, with this edition coming in 1959, a few years after film version's French run. Loos' masterpiece wasn't loved by critics, but it was a runaway success anyway and ended up being printed in thirteen languages. Little known factoid—unlike the film version, which takes place on a cruise ship, a chunk of the novel occurs aboard the Orient Express, with Lorelei displaying herself to the crème of European gentlemen from Paris to Budapest. She even meets Sigmund “Froid.” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes obviously isn't pulp style at all, but Monroe had a pulp-worthy life, so that's connection enough for us. If you want a mental break from gunplay and mayhem, this is a good option.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 21 2020 |
This one has both her arms—and they're .38 calibre.
The versatile Mitchell Hooks is back, working in what we like to think of as his realistic mode on this cover for Ben Benson's The Venus Death. We wrote a little piece on Hooks and his various styles of painting. You can see that at this link. This novel is a solid thriller about the sparks that fly when a young state trooper named Ralph Lindsey crosses paths with an even younger femme fatale named Manette Venus. Yes, that's a ridiculous name, like something a stripper made up. So maybe it's no surprise that within the narrative it turns out to be a pseudonym. But Manette Venus isn't a stripper. She's just a woman with a secret—and some unsavory acquaintances.
Benson can write. He's not a master, but he also doesn't litter the narrative with grammatical clunkers or overcooked stylistic flourishes. In workmanlike fashion and in somewhat procedural detail, he tells the story of Ralph the trooper digging to the bottom of a baffling mystery involving a bizarre shooting, two guns, and the sometimes tricky place where presumption and proof clash. He learns at the end that sometimes people can be one thing, then seem to be the opposite, then turn out to be what you thought they were in the first place. That's vague, we know, but we liked the book, so you get no concrete hints. This edition came in 1954 from Bantam.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 20 2020 |
Which is louder—his shotgun or his wardrobe?
Above you see two posters for the blaxploitation flick Hit Man, which premiered in the U.S. today in 1972 and stars NFL player-turned-actor Bernie Casey as a man from Oakland who blows into L.A. to investigate his brother's murder. His brother ran a used car lot, but had gotten on the bad side of some local criminals. How he did that, who these bad people are, and what they're up to are the questions at the crux of the narrative, and when Casey finally learns the truth he's horrified and infuriated in equal measure, which turns him into a leisure-suited revenant with murder in his eyes and a gun in his hands.
What is neither horrifying nor infuriating is that Pam Grier is in this, which makes it a must watch in our book, and she holds nothing back, sporting a quantum leap forward in afro science, and proving once again that she was a fearless performer. Nevertheless, she and Casey can't make Hit Man good despite their best efforts. But on the other hand, it isn't awful either, and in the middle isn't a bad place to be in b-cinema, considering how deeply terrible the films can get.
Hit Man has a couple of miscellaneous notes of interest. A bit of filming takes place at Watts Towers, Simon Rodia's italo folk art monument that was designated a historic site in 1990. We've seen the place in person and we loved it because its mosaics reminded us of the type you see on modernist architecture in Barcelona. The production photo of Grier in a long black dress, below, was shot at the site. It's one of the most famous images of her, and one of the most badass too.
Hit Man also makes use of a location called Africa America, an open air animal preserve of the type made famous by Tiger King. We can't find any trace online that it ever existed, so there's no way to know for sure whether it was a real zoo, an MGM set, or something in between, such as a private ranch dressed up for filming. But it plays an important role in the plot, as do its hungry lions. If they'd eaten a few of the worst script pages, and a couple of bad supporting actors, and maybe Casey's purple leisure suit, Hit Man might be better than just okay. But lions are finicky like all cats, and most amateur film critics.
Los AngelesWattsMetro-Goldwyn-MayerNFLHit ManBernie CaseyPam GrierLisa MooreMarilyn JoiRoger E. MosleySimon RodiaJohn Solieposter artcinemablaxploitationmovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 19 2020 |
Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto give their all and then some in hard luck crime thriller.
Across 110th Street premiered today in 1972, which makes it one of the early arrivals in the blaxploitation wave that was sweeping American b-cinema. With its ample budget and its well established headliner in Anthony Quinn, you could make the case that it isn't fully part of the genre, but we think it fits, even if it's atypical. Outlier or not, you'll see several faces in this that would soon become well known in blaxploitation, and you'll also see Burt Young, later of Rocky and Chinatown.
Plotwise, the movie centers on odd couple cops—old school racist Quinn and college educated reformist Yaphet Kotto—thrown together à la In the Heat of the Night to solve an NYC murder/robbery. As familiar as this oil vs. water dynamic may be, the movie still comes together in exciting fashion thanks to the way it tracks the robbers' storylines. They're a trio of amateurs who ripped off the Mafia for $300,000 and now are being hunted by both crooks and cops. Quinn and Kotto must find these thieves before the Mafia turns Harlem into a war zone.
When the film was released it was criticized for its violence and bitter racial subtext, but upsetting the herd is one of the things it tries to achieve. And while it may not appeal to people's better angels, it's quite interesting, with the grit of Wally Ferris's otherwise radically altered source novel left intact, and the central metaphor embodied in the title—that of which lines will be crossed and what the consequences will be—deftly observed. Across 110th Street is rough stuff, but well worth a watch.
New York CityHarlemAcross 110th StreetAnthony QuinnYaphet KottoAnthony FranciosaAntonio FargasPaul BenjaminRichard WardWally FerrisBurt Youngposter artcinemablaxploitationmovie review
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