You know what they say about men with big hats. In this production still from 1946's The Big Sleep featuring a bizarrely large hat in the foreground, Martha Vickers falls into Humphrey Bogart's arms. Bogart, under normal circumstances, would have been smart to likewise fall for Miss Vickers, but his other choice in the movie was Lauren Bacall. Which means it was she who got hat, head, and all the rest.
Trust me, I can do this for a long, long time.
Lauren Bacall gives the camera the look she made famous, and which gave male filmgoers palpitations. Ironically, the look came about because in her first film To Have and Have Not she was so nervous her head was shaking, so she kept her chin down to suppress the tremors, which required her to look from under her eyelids. Or so the story goes. This particular photo was made for her thriller Confidential Agent, and it dates from 1945.
Italian master’s genius spanned decades. Back in August we showed you a poster from Luigi Martinati, who worked from 1923 to 1967, and said we'd get back to him. Below, seven more great promotional pieces with his distinctive signature on each.
To Have and Have Not On the Waterfront Phantom of the Rue Morgue Humoresque Flamingo Road The Wrong Man
If only their taste in mates matched their taste in music.
The Noir City Film Festival continues its challenging 2016 slate when it screens another pair of classics tonight—Love Me or Leave Me and Young Man with a Horn. Both are musical dramas, and though neither is a noir, both take viewers to dark places. In the 1920s period piece Love Me or Leave Me velvety-voiced Doris Day stars as a struggling chanteuse given a break by gangster James Cagney. He quickly becomes her manager and uses force to launch a national career, blind to the fact that she has real talent and can succeed with no strongarm man to back her. But Cagney doesn't see her talent—show business is gangsterism for him, and bullying is how he operates. When he finally bullies his way into marriage with Day his constant rage transforms her into an indifferent and isolated woman. This is one of those movies that will, especially in a full house in San Francisco, trigger groans of distaste as Cagney ticks all the worst boxes of reprehensible human beings—treating women like meat, slapping them around, trying to obtain sex by force, dispensing emotional abuse, and using violence as a tool in every situation, against both women and men. But the audience may be just as hard on Day by the final reel forpossessing a level of forgiveness that is alien to people circa 2016. Love Me or Leave Me is an excellent movie—cringe inducing in parts, but deeply involving, and perhaps destined to be the most discussed film of the festival. Day stars in Young Man with a Horn as well, singing again, this time with Kirk Douglas, who plays a gifted child musician who grows up to be an ace trumpet player thanks to the tutelage of an elder jazzman. Unfortunately he has a congenital inability to conform, particularly when it means playing dance band music over improvisational jazz. The arrival of a femme fatale—in the person of the awesome Lauren Bacall—brings a whole new set of troubles. The gender roles are reversed from Love Me or Leave Me, but the films each explore how a bad relationship saps the joy from the soul of an artist, and Day is winningly sweet in both. Perhaps by now you’ve noticed the theme that has emerged with this year’s Noir City offerings—they are all about artists or their artistic output. In Rear Window and The Public Eye it’s photographers, in The Two Mrs. Carrolls it’s a painter, In a Lonely Place and The Bitter Stems deal with a screenwriter and journalist, Deception and Humroresque look at classical musicians, and The Dark Corner and Crack Up deal with art ascommerce and contraband respectively. The theme is nice, but once again two films will be screening tonight that present yet another challenge to noir purists attending this year’s fest. Both films are great, but we’ll be surprised if organizers stray this far from the form next year.
October 1st marks the second rare lunar event this week. Two years ago we shared a very rare Japanese promo poster from the 1976 Italian romance Laure, also known as Forever Emmanuelle. The calendar image above from the Japanese cinema and celebrity magazine Roadshow doesn’t directly promote Laure, but it comes from the same photo session, and like the earlier image features French actress Annie Belle doing her imitation of Monday’s supermoon. Both are amazing events, but this one, happily, features fewer craters.
It’s always best to let sleeping corpses lie. It’s a Dino de Laurentiis production, so you know it’s going to be bad. Filmed in black and white, Cadavere per signora, aka Corpse for a Lady deals with a wealthy woman, played by the transcendent Sylva Koscina, who is blackmailed and calls her three childhood friends for help. The four of them arrange a deal with the blackmailer, but he ends up dead and they’re stuck with the body. Hilarity ensues as they try to get rid of it. Not recommendable, but we love the poster. Cadavere per signora premiered in Italy today in 1964.
And that one's for saying 50 Shades of Grey sucked ass! We like to make fun of the movie Perversion, aka Nathalie: Escape from Hell, but one thing that can’t be denied is that it has interesting art. This Italian locandina style poster doesn’t quite stand up to the nightstick-licking promo we showed you last year, but it’s weirdly funny in its own way, with Patrizia Gori on the receiving end of some corporal punishment from oversexed dominatrix Jacqueline Laurent. Both posters are by unknown artists, but as always we’ll keep digging—someone out there was probably credited at some point, and if they were, they have no more chance of escaping than poor Nathalie. And on the subject of digging, we’ve located some good promos of Patrizia Gori and we’ll share one a bit later. Later has arrived: the photos below show Gori in all her loveliness from the year 1979.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1962—Marilyn Monroe Sings to John F. Kennedy
A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's breathy rendition of "Happy Birthday," which does more to fuel speculation that the two were sexually involved than any actual evidence. 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.
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