 She looks serene but she's about to erupt.  
These shots of Brazilian model and actress Florinda Bolkan, née Florinda Bulcão, were made in 1968 when she was appearing in her first film Candy. Bolkan would leverage that role into a movie career in Europe by headlining such films as Una lucertola con la pelle di donna, aka A Lizard in Woman's Skin, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, aka Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Non si sevizia un paperino, which we just talked about. For a time Bolkan was one of the hottest properties on the continent, and in Italy she was a virtual Vesuvius, with performances ranging from giallo to comedy garnering her acclaim that led to several international awards. All from humble beginnings on this beach. Read a bit more about her movie roles here and here.
 Turns out too big to fail was a strictly financial concept. 
You wouldn't think when you work for one of the industries most responsible for screwing up the planet you'd get much sympathy when you wind up dead, but Frances and Richard Lockridge's Payoff for the Banker was written in a previous era. This banker, George Merle, was loved by many and respected by all. Well, not all. At least one person hated him, and police think it's the woman in whose apartment his body was found. Enter husband and wife sleuths Pamela and Jerry North to solve the case. The fact that husband and wife sleuths were written by husband and wife authors interests us, as we have trouble collaborating on a trip to the store with the Pulp Intl. girlfriends, but that's why fiction is different from reality. The Lockridges were so good at working together they even made the Norths into franchise characters who appeared in twenty-six books. They also were portrayed on radio, stage, television, and cinema. We bet the Lockridges argued mostly about how to spend all their earnings. Originally published in 1946, this Pocket paperback edition appeared in 1948 fronted by Donald Beck art.
 In Hollywood a good name is half the battle. 
She had one of the most memorable monikers in Hollywood history. She appeared in more than sixty films, scores of television shows, and probably a couple of dozen television movies too, and all without very much in the way of serious studio push. She did have a contract with Columbia Pictures, but many of her appearances were uncredited. Nevertheless she worked steadily for forty years, which a lot of bigger stars can't say. She was born Jean Marie Donnell but she acted as Jeff Donnell—not a name you'd easily forget—and this photo shows her in 1942.
 U.S. magazine offers its vision of the world. 
Model and singer Corky Crowley stars on this September 1948 cover of See magazine, a publication that came out of New York City and fell squarely into the Life and Look category. We picked this up years ago in the U.S. and never got around to posting it because its large format and the resultant necessity to scan pages in halves and join them in Photoshop deterred us. But we finally had a few spare hours we opted not to spend on a local terrace sipping white wine, and today you have the result.
Inside this monster mag you get photo features, celebs, politics, travel and more. Probably the most interesting feature is the one detailing the transformation of a French typist into a high society dame. It was done as a promotional feature by the magazine Point de Vue and they called it “Cinderella for a Day.” For this installment they chose a woman named Juliet Latifa, who they coiffed, dressed, sent to the swankiest Parisian nightspots, hooked up with the celeb set, then sent packing at the end of the night just like in the fairy tale.
The final photo caption sums it up: “Her 24 hour dream ended, drab normalcy not unexpectedly overtakes Cinderella, but unforgettable memories will serve to bolster her occasionally slipping morale.” Wow—belittle much, See editors? In any case, the photos of Latifa's night out are nice. We wish we could scan all the shots in the magazine but there are more than a hundred and we just don't have that kind of stamina. We managed about twenty pages divided into thirty plus panels featuring Latifa, Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding, Ingrid Bergman dressed in armor for her role in Joan of Arc, and more.                                 
 What's mostly style and virtually no logic? A typical giallo. 
Giallo films occasionally take on taboo subject matter. In western cinema little is more taboo than child murder. Non si sevizia un paperino, aka Don't Torture a Duckling unabashedly uses this premise, as police in rural Italy try to solve the murder of a 12-year-old named Bruno. “The guy's obviously going to be a mental case,” one cop says. “The killer's a maniac,” says another. But cops are notoriously obtuse in these films. Was the killer really some nut job? Bruno was one of a trio of close friends who spent a lot of time together playing in the hills. When a second member of the group turns up dead it seems clear that the three boys saw something they shouldn't have and are now being targeted.
As usual in giallo there are extraneous moments littered throughout the plot. Why does creepy ass Florinda Bolkan play in the muck with three voodoo dolls that seem to represent the three boys? Why does a local farmer wander the woods during a late night thunderstorm chopping down foliage with a machete? Why does Barbara Bouchet lounge in her room nude under a sun lamp? Actually, we know the answer to that last question—the filmmakers had one of cinema's great beauties on their hands and weren't about to let the opportunity to show her pass. We couldn't let it pass either. See the promo images below.
Getting back to the positives, we enjoyed watching sex symbol Bolkan dirty herself up to play a mountain witch, loved Bouchet's assortment of ultra cool outfits and cars, and thought the filmmakers used the Basilicata countryside to good effect. But who did the killing? Was it Bolkan the witch? The big city drug addict? The handsome local priest? The mentally disabled man-boy? The priest's strange mother? Giallo mysteries are not usually written in such a way as to be solvable, so in truth it's hard to care. But even if Non si sevizia un paperino isn't an involving puzzle, it's great eye candy with a bizarrely graphic ending that must be seen to be believed. It premiered in Italy today in 1972.           
 You're amazing. This whole reputation you have for evil is totally undeserved. Wait, what are you doing? Hey, I can't bre— *glug* 
Another cheapie cover from Greenleaf Classics, Lust Demon by Don Elliott, with a tableau featuring a nipple-less devil woman and her unsuspecting companion. This isn't just any sleaze—it's sleaze by Robert Silverberg hiding behind the Elliott pseudonym. We've read of few of his smut efforts now, and he's better than the average literary perv. That doesn't sound like a compliment, but it really is. 1966 on this with art by uncredited.
 Somebody tried to put a glass slipper on my foot but I told him I'm strictly a Gucci girl. 
Above is a nice George Gross cover for John D. MacDonald's 1953 novel A Bullet for Cinderella. We acquired this book mainly because of the art, but also to see if the weird generalizations about various types of people we complained about in MacDonald's Travis McGee novels was the character or the author. Turns out it was the author. But he keeps it in a lower gear than in his McGee novels, which helps. In the story a Korean War prison camp survivor heads to a dead buddy's home town to try to locate $60,000 in stolen money. On his deathbed in the prison camp the friend had confessed to hiding the money, but in his delirium did not say exactly where. He asked that the money be returned to its rightful owner but the hero of the story plans to keep it. To his dismay another death camp survivor who somehow learned the same information is already in the town, also trying to locate the cash. You get a battle of wills, a moral struggle over whether to keep the money if found, and a love interest who was once the dead man's girl. You could find a better book to read, but you could also find a lot worse.
 Under the circumstances he has no choice but to drink. 
 In the photo at top, sometime during the summer of 1964, a woman at a stunt show in Atlantic City jumps with a horse sporting an LBJ political banner into a tank of water. The leap took place at Steel Pier, and the height, though not discernible in either shot, was about sixty feet. The horse diving attraction at Steel Pier thrilled and appalled onlookers from 1928 into the 1970s. Some accounts claim the specially trained horses learned to enjoy diving so much they often took off before a rider could get mounted. While we don't doubt some horses took off unmounted, the assumption they did it because they loved flying through empty space to an aquatic impact is a bit of a leap, so to speak. One thing's certain, though. The LBJ horse definitely wasn't happy that day—he was a Goldwater supporter.
 Wu Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with! 
The Hong Kong actioner Shao Lin da peng da shi, aka Return to the 36th Chamber, is part of a trilogy of films that inspired the legendary U.S rappers Wu Tang Clan, and as such is as famous for its musical influence as its place in cinematic history. Wu Tang must be the only hip hop group—probably the only music group of any genre—whose entire schtick revolves around Hong Kong chopsocky. But forget the music. We're about cinema today, though to reiterate—Wu Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with!
In Return to the 36th Chamber a group of fabric workers scam their evil bosses into backtracking on a pay cut by having a Shaolin monk with invincible kung fu take up their cause. Problem is the monk is just a regular Joe named Chao Jen-Cheh and he knows no martial arts. When the ruse is exposed, Chao is humiliated and roughed up. But at that point he goes to the shaolin temple where he learns real kung fu. Well, sort of. He learns how to build bamboo scaffolding, but in true zen form he realizes the skills are transferrable. He returns to the place of his humiliation armed with his bamboo-fu, and this time he aims to make the bad guys pay.
Basically, the movie follows the predictable Hong Kong martial arts formula of early defeat of the good guy, followed by rigorous training with a tough-but-inscrutable master, capped by redemptive kicking of evil guy asses. But even with its standard plot—not to mention bad make-up, silly wigs, rough prosthetics, and cookie cutter plot—the movie is still fun. The fight scenes are of course amazing and the comedic elements are lowbrow but effective. Too bad guys like Chao Jen-Cheh don't exist in real life. There are a lot of workers that could use an ass kicker like him these days. Shao Lin da peng da shi premiered in Hong Kong today in 1980.      
 We're both starving, and frankly, the way he's behaved he's given us absolutely no reason not to eat him. 
During the mid-century period, high quality cover art was seen as the key to paperback sales, thus many types of books received makeovers. Aussie novelist Ronald McKie's The Survivors is an example. You'd assume it was fiction but it's actually the true story of the Battle of Sunda Strait, which occurred in Indonesia between the islands of Java and Sumatra during World War II and pitted two Aussie cruisers against a major Japanese naval force. During a battle in which the outgunned Aussie ships fared better than could have been reasonably expected, both were sunk. In the aftermath a group of stranded men battled innumerable hazards in an attempt to survive. The book sprang from the handwritten account of an Aussie sailor who spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. He was a friend of McKie's, and when the author read the dairy pages he immediately decided to write a full accounting of the battle. As far as we know nobody ate anyone, but raft rides get pretty rough. The Survivors came out in hardback in 1953, with this Popular Library paperback appearing in 1954.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family. 1918—U.S. Congress Passes the Sedition Act
In the U.S., Congress passes a set of amendments to the Espionage Act called the Sedition Act, which makes "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces, as well as language that causes foreigners to view the American government or its institutions with contempt, an imprisonable offense. The Act specifically applies only during times of war, but later is pushed by politicians as a possible peacetime law, specifically to prevent political uprisings in African-American communities. But the Act is never extended and is repealed entirely in 1920.
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