There's always a Price for bad behavior.
These two wonderful posters were made for the melodrama Shock, which starred Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Anabel Shaw, and Frank Latimore, and premiered today in 1946. With promo art like this we couldn't resist the film. While staying in a San Francisco hotel Shaw looks out her window and sees a man and woman arguing in a nearby room. The man strikes the woman over the head with a heavy silver candlestick, and seeing this causes Shaw to fall into a catatonic state—a state of shock. A doctor is sought and luckily there's one in the hotel—the same man who a bit earlier crowned his wife. The doctor figures out pretty quickly that his murder made Shaw go into shock, so he commits her to a sanitarium under his care. Diabolical.
Vincent Price plays the doctor and the role is perfect for him. He's a master of the sinister, and here he's positively terrifying. He decides that he needs to keep Shaw from talking, and, helped by his mistress Lynn Bari, who's a nurse in the sanitarium, he uses psychotherapy to try and wipe out Shaw's memory. That doesn't work, so he reverses course and tries to drive her insane. Later he reverses course again and decides to kill her via insulin shock. All this non-Hippocratic behavior from Price generated angry reactions from physician and psychiatrist groups around the U.S., but that's just hilarious—physicians have always been integral to atrocities, from the Tuskegee experiments to the Gitmo torture programs.
If the movie has any issue, it's that Shaw's frailty and hysteria feel anachronistic. The script sets up her mental condition by having her pre-shocked—she was told her soldier husband had been killed in the war, so she was already in a fragile state. Even so, we aren't sure many World War II-era women would have become catatonic after seeing someone hit over the head. We said “hit over the head” as opposed to murdered because Shaw had no reason to assume she'd seen a murder, rather than a severe beatdown. But okay, murder they wrote, so we'll accept the filmmakers' premise that candlestick + head = automatic death, and that Bari is in no mental condition to see such a thing. In which case we have to pronounce Shock an adequate little drama, worth it anyway for the oily Price, but decent in general. You ever realize you're so untrustworthy you shouldn't even trust yourself? I do. It's weird.
The deeper you go the tighter it gets.
We've all seen movies about the long con, the elaborate, drawn-out, multi-participant scam. The Crooked Web, aka The Big Shock, starring Frank Lovejoy, Richard Denning, and Mari Blanchard, is an early example of the sub-genre. The plan is for a group of crooks to sell a cache of gold one of them found in Germany during World War II, but the con takes an unexpected twist early, and we learn that the trap being set is deeper than it first seemed. We can't share more details, but we can tell you the film strives greatly to rise above its b-movie constraints with plenty of exterior shooting and a script with international scope. The plot even takes the principals to post-war Germany—which looks a lot like Southern California even with matte work designed to put the foreign illusion across. But you have to forgive budget woes. The flaw that's difficult to overlook is the unbelievable carelessness of the central scam artists, who are posing as brother and sister, but are really lovers and can't keep their hands off each other even when their mark is just around the corner. They're almost busted while in the clinch multiple times, which is a laughable lack of restraint when there's so much at stake. But the shortest route to dramatic tension is to make characters behave like morons. We've talked about it before. It's lazy screenwriting, but that's okay—The Crooked Web is still a fun movie. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1955
Knight shoots pawn—check and mate.
Patricia Knight made only five motion pictures, but one of them was 1949's Shockproof, which falls into the category of under appreciated film noir. She plays an ex-convict who moves in with her parole officer. Yeah—bad idea, but no need to say more because we already talked about the film in detail. Check here. Knight married her Shockproof co-star Cornel Wilde and, except for a few more roles, that was pretty much the end of her career. But her contribution to film noir is remembered as one of the better ones. This is a promo photo from the movie, 1949.
She’s a classic work of art, and the sculpture isn’t bad either.
American actress Christa Lang is known for her many collaborations with director and husband Samuel Fuller, including The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor, Underworld U.S.A., and his underrated racial drama White Dog. She also appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? and has already wrapped The Queen of Hollywood Blvd., to be released later this year. The above shot, showing her in front of a backdrop depicting Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s famous sculpture "La danse," which is located on the façade of the Opera Garnier in Paris, appeared in the Spanish magazine Triunfo in 1965
No thanks. I'm good right here. Besides, I forgot my swimsuit. Above, a nice shot of French actress Muriel Montosse, aka Vicky Adams. If her name sounds familiar it may be because we recently talked about her 1977 movie aka Der Ruf der blonden Göttin, aka Call of the Blonde Goddess, aka Pornoshock. This rather awesome shot is from the French magazine Pulsions.
The only real shock is how bad the movie is.
1977’s Porno Shock was originally released in West Germany as Der Ruf der blonden Göttin, but was also known as Porno gola profonda, The Call of the Blonde Goddess, and Voodoo Passion. Indeed, there’s voodoo involved, as the film was shot in Haiti, and every film shot there involves voodoo. The movie was directed by Jesús Franco under his Manfred Gregor pseudonym, and starred Vicky Adams, better known as Nanda Van Bergen or sometimes Muriel Montosse. Supporting her were Ada Tauler, aka Annie Sand, Karine Gambier, Siegrid Sellier, Jack Taylor, and others. Basically, a woman arrives in Haiti to visit her husband who works there, uncovers what seems to be an incestuous relationship between hubby and his sister, has some detailed erotic nightmares, and begins to believe she’s fallen under the influence of a voodoo curse. Probably the only thing you’ll fall under the influence of in this mostly atrocious softcore production is the dancing of Vicky Adams, who as a white voodoo priestess spends long stretches of screen time gyrating naked in the woods. Even the fact that she has to share these scenes with sundry male dancers and their stubby penises doesn't detract from her extreme, er, watchability. You can see for yourself right here at about minute 24:00, minute 38:00, and minute 103:00. Not that we kept track.
But lest we forget, Pulp Intl. is mainly dedicated to art, and the only reason we’re talking about Porno Shock is because the two English language posters above—and obviously the Italian one at right—were painted by Mafé, an Italian master illustrator who five years after we first learned about him remains a total mystery. We have no full name on him, no biography, nothing. But what we do have is more of his work, and you can see that here, here, and here. We also have more of his posters in our hard drive and we’ll get those up in a bit. Meanwhile, help us out Italian friends—who is this guy?
San Fran film fest once again celebrates the best and brightest of mid-century crime cinema. Today, once again, the U.S.’s premier film noir festival begins in San Francisco. Well, we aren’t impartial—we used to live in Berkeley, just across the Bay, and San Fran was our nocturnal playground—but we think the Noir City Film Festival is the best, that its locale the Castro Theatre is awesome, and that San Francisco, with its iconic hills, clanking cable cars, and rogue fogs, is the also the best possible host city. This year the art produced for the festival in its thirteenth year references worn pulp paperbacks, which we can appreciate, and we also love the festival line-up.
The extravaganza opens with Woman on the Run, a film we discussed recently. Apparently the last known print burned in a fire, and this year’s showing represents the culmination of years of restoration work. Since the film was in the public domain, we imagine some secondary sources existed and needed to be tracked down and cobbled together. Other classics to be screened include Clash By Night, The Thin Man, Shockproof, Cry Terror!, and twenty others. Hopefully a few of our Bay Area friends will attend the festival and report back. And to Pulp Intl. readers in that part of the world, this is your official reminder—any chance to see film noir on a big screen is an opportunity not to be wasted.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—First Prints Are Left at Grauman's
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established. 1945—Hitler Marries Braun
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia's Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden. 1967—Ali Is Stripped of His Title
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon. 1947—Heyerdahl Embarks on Kon-Tiki
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing. 1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
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