| Vintage Pulp | Apr 16 2024 |
No appeal, no parole, no mercy, no hope.
Today we continue our journey through ’70s exploitation cinema with Jackson County Jail, churned out of the grindhouse factory known as New World Pictures. Plotwise, Yvette Mimieux plays a Los Angeles advertising exec who leaves her cheating husband and finds herself at loose ends, but manages to score a job from a friend in New York City. She decides to get there by driving cross country, but passes through fictional Jackson County, located somewhere in or around Texas (a geographical fact we learn from a news broadcast that provides a Dallas Cowboys update). She's railroaded into jail and raped by the cop working the graveyard shift. Afterward, Mimieux manages to brain him with a stool and escapes with the help of hardened criminal Tommy Lee Jones, who early in his acting career (and with that monobrow of his) was already capable of making lines like this sing: “There's nothing wrong with being a crook. Everybody's crooked. I never met a straight person in my whole life. Whole goddamn country is a rip-off. And everybody in it.”
Jackson County Jail is sometimes labeled a women-in-prison flick, but it's a bit different for a generally low rent sub-genre because Mimieux was an established star, thirty-four years old with more than twenty movies behind her. The credibility she lends the film changes little about its basic purpose—titillation mixed with violence and an indictment of hick culture. Simultaneously, though, the filmmakers definitely don't go to the extremes of other women-in-prison dramas, in which we've seen women hung up by their hair. There are some viewers, we suspect, who wouldn't consider this movie a women-in-prison flick at all. We're fine leaving it out of the conversation too. The jailbound portion lasts barely twenty minutes of what is perhaps more of an outlaw movie, complete with Jones letting fly with this response to being told the police will kill him: “That don't matter. I was born dead.” Whether women-in-prison, outlaw, or counterculture, that's a damned good line. And Jackson County Jail is a pretty good movie. It premiered today in 1976
TexasNew World PicturesJackson County JailYvette MimieuxTommy Lee JonesCliff EmmichHoward HessemanRoger CormanGene Cormanwomen in prisonposter artcinemamovie review
| Femmes Fatales | May 27 2023 |
Ask not for whom the Bell is mistaken.
If you do an image search on the above photo, every website in which it exists (that would include Getty Images, Yahoo, CNN, et al) says it's Paula Kelly, shot during the making of the 1972 blaxploitation movie Trouble Man. There's just one problem—she isn't Paula Kelly. She's actually—and obviously, we think—Jean Bell, who appeared in such movies as TNT Jackson and Policewomen. Bell and Paula Kelly don't look alike, but just the same they're the victims of an IRE™ (internet replication error) that probably will never be corrected. We're not perfect here, but we also don't have a research department like CNN and Getty Images. Because of the misidentification we don't have a copyright on this shot, but it's probably from around 1974.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 10 2023 |
Isn't it interesting how we all get better looking with every round?
This uncredited cover for Jackson Harmon's Night Spot, 1966, for Midwood Books, is another example that fits our cocktail tease collection. As there are hundreds of such covers out there, expect the set to keep growing indefinitely. Or at least until we run out of dumb quips.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 14 2022 |
I've been working on some fresh runway poses. I call this one: sociopathicool.
Above: a cover for Australian author Neville Jackson's, aka Gerald Glaskin's 1965 novel No End to the Way. What you see here is a 1967 edition from the British publisher Corgi. This is a significant book, one of the first novels with gay themes to be widely available in Australia. It wasn't legal to mail into the country, so Corgi, the legend goes, flew it in aboard chartered planes to skirt the law.
Plotwise what you get here is a drama about Ray and Cor, two men who meet in a bar and form a relationship that becomes committed, and seems aimed toward permanence—which is exactly when their most serious challenge arises in the form of a bitter ex-lover. This ex is determined to ruin what Ray and Cor have built, up to and including slander, career damage, and more.
We were quite interested in the cover art because Corgi was a mainstream publisher, and with this bright yellow effort they gave this controversial book the full court press. The push, the art, and the quality of the story worked—it was reprinted at least twice, and in fact was Jackson's/Glaskin's best selling book. He was an eclectic and fairly prolific writer, so maybe we'll run across him again later. There's a good bio here. Now we're going to work on that pose.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 6 2021 |
How do you show your man you love him? Show your love to other men.
Here's another amazing and framable movie poster, this time for Le trottoir, which was originally made in England as The Flesh Is Weak. The art is by René Brantonne, who typically illustrated book covers, such as here and here. This is stylish work, very different from what we've seen him do before. It's cartoonish, but captures the mood of the film, an urban drama starring John Derek. Yes, that John Derek, the one who— Or has he been forgotten already? We'll reacquaint you. Derek was an actor, photographer, screenwriter, and director, but he's best known as a sort of Svengali who directed his fourth wife Bo Derek in several erotic films in which male actors got to squeeze and lick her soft parts. In 1984's Bolero he shot Bo in three love scenes, one of which made viewers wonder if there was more than acting involved. That's unlikely, but even so, actual penetration was about the only thing missing, which makes John Derek a different kind of husband indeed.
His partnership with Bo in using her body to make money is even more interesting considering the subject matter of The Flesh Is Weak. He plays London agent who meets naive Milly Vitale and convinces her to attempt resolving his debt problems by selling her womanly favors. Of course, he has no debt problems, and he's no agent—he's a pimp, and chose Vitale to convert to prostitution. She ends up tricked into selling herself because she's in love, and though for some readers that surely seems impossible to comprehend, we read Iceberg Slim's autobiographical Pimp some years back and he confirmed from a firsthand perspective that love was what he often used as a lever. It's hard to imagine but true. And its pretty sad, even in the sanitized version presented in The Flesh Is Weak. Is it worth watching? There's no need to clear your schedule, but overall it's pretty good. There's no known French release date, but it had its world premiere in London today in 1957.
FranceBritainLondon. Le trottoirThe Flesh Is WeakJohn DerekMilly VitaleFreda JacksonShirley Anne FieldRené BrantonneIceberg Slimposter artcinemaprostitutionmovie review
| Musiquarium | Jul 13 2021 |
I'm supposed to be working plainclothed but what's a queen to do?
The blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones premiered today in 1973, so we thought it was an appropriate moment to post this sleeve for the soundtrack, a pretty good record, like blaxploitation soundtracks tended to be. It's a re-issue, which is why it looks so pristine. The artists include Joe Simon & The Mainstreeters on the title tune, plus contributions from Millie Jackson, Carl Brandt, and J.J. Johnson. But our interest in this is the image of star Tamara Dobson, who plays the titular badass government agent cum fashion plate. We cropped and de-texted the cover and the result is the poster-like image you see below. Fun movie too.
| Hollywoodland | Jul 9 2020 |
You never forget the first time.
We recently saw the latest reboot of the classic blaxploitation film Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson, Jesse Usher, et al, and while the parties involved in that effort have their unique charms, this photo pretty much covers what made Richard Roundtree the best. He was, and remains, a bad mother— Shut your mouth! He was born today in 1942, and this photo dates from 1971.
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 4 2019 |
“This place is amazing. Nice bay windows, original wood floors—” Booooo.... get ooout! “Too bad we can't stay.”
French illustrator Roger Soubie has a long and impressive résumé. He painted more than 2,000 posters during a career spanning four decades, and produced iconic promos such as those for Lolita and The Unholy Wife. The above effort is for The Haunting, called in France La Maison du diable. Based on Shirley Jackson's classic novel The Haunting of Hill House, it's about an anthropologist who rents a creepy old mansion in order to determine whether it's haunted. Of course it is—and it proceeds to seriously flip out the anthropologist and the witnesses he's brought along to verify his findings.
Jackson wrote her chiller in 1959, and it's considered by many to be the greatest haunted house tale of all time. Director Robert Wise uses zooms and odd angles to jar the audience but follows the novel's plot closely, which was a good decision. Today his movie is likewise considered to be one of the finest in the horror genre. Horror has really improved with time, but The Haunting holds up nicely. If you haven't seen it, know going in it's fueled by atmosphere rather than events, but we think it's worth a gander. After its 1963 Stateside premiere it opened in France today in 1964.
FranceLa Maison du diableThe HauntingJulie HarrisClaire BloomRichard JohnsonRobert WiseRoger SoubieShirley Jacksonposter artcinemahorrormovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 2 2018 |
Then when he tripled my rent so he could evict me and give my place to some Silicon Valley tech jerkwad I just snapped.
Yet another subset of pulp novels was the true crime book, and this effort called San Francisco Murders was edited by Joseph Henry Jackson, written by Allan R. Bosworth, Hildegarde Teilhet, and others, and details ten San Fran murders that took place over the course of a century. Among the killers: Jerome von Braun Selz, aka The Laughing Killer, Theodore Durrant, aka The Demon of the Belfry, and Cordelia Botkin, who had no nickname but probably should have, considering she killed rather exotically with arsenic laced chocolates. She was trying to do in her ex-lover's wife and ended up poisoning not only her target, but a hungry bystander as well. We're thinking the Accidental Chocolatier, or maybe the Bitter Chocolate Killer. Right? Yeah? San Francisco Murders was originally copyright 1947, and this Bantam paperback edition came in 1948 with cover art by Bob Doares.
Bantam BooksJoseph Henry JacksonAllan R. BosworthHildegarde TeilhetJerome von Braun SelzTheodore Durrantcover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 22 2017 |
I felt so lonely and unappreciated I was going to jump. But then people started screaming, “Take it off! Take it off!”
It's been a while, so here's a cover from sleaze icon Darrel Millsap for Hoke Jackson's 1968 Candid Reader sleaze novel Along the Ledge to Lust. Jackson also wrote The Lecherous Age, Swappers in Heat, and Marriage for Four. He was not a person, though, but rather a pseudonym inhabited by various writers, so we don't know who really authored this, and we have a funny feeling they prefer it that way. More from Millsap here and here.
