Above, a cover of the always brilliant tabloid Midnight published today 1966.  See many more by clicking its keyword below.

Above are three dust jackets for the classics of macabre literature Frankenstein, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Dracula, by Shelley, Poe, and Stoker respectively. These books are photoplay editions, i.e. novelizations of silent film source material. The editions usually had a handful of production photos inside, as well as film production credits. Basically, these were seen as forms of advertisement for the movies, and back then it was the books people were interested in, not the dust jackets. As a result, the jackets were not well treated by owners, and often were thrown away. That may seem strange, looking at the art above, but it’s true. Picture an old movie. Any old movie. And now imagine a scene set in a study or den. See all those books on the walls? No dust jackets. Back then books were thought of as classiest and most impressive sans jackets. That’s why the items above are extraordinarily rare, and are each worth a fortune today. The first two were painted by Nathan Machtey, and the third is signed G.B., who is a painter unknown to us so far. But all three look rather the same, don't they, with a looming, monstrous shape menacing an insensate woman? They are pure brilliance. We’ve seen some of these at auction for $5,000, and we hear they can go for much more. Much, much more. Of course, the most expensive ones are first editions, with book and dust jacket paired and in good condition, but if the book and jacket are separated, the jackets still go for mucho dinero. We’ll keep an eye out for more Machtey work, and try to identify that second artist. We'll also look for more photoplay editions, and share whatever we uncover. 

This week’s image from the Goodtime Weekly Calendar of 1963 was made by Peter Gowland, whose name is probably familiar to all the photographers out there, but perhaps not to everyone else. Gowland, the son of actor Gibson Gowland and actress Sylvia Andrew, was not only one of the most famous glamour photographers of the 1950s and 1960s, but he also built highly precise cameras that are still sought after today. These cameras ranged from handheld to studio-sized, and he also built special underwater cameras, one of which we can assume he used in making the image above. Gowland’s work appeared in too many magazines to name, and he shot everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Muhammad Ali during a career that only ended with his death in 2010. There are several more Gowland images in the Goodtime Calendar—none of which have ever appeared online as far as we know—and they’ll be coming up in due time. Calendar text appears below.

May 12: Mother’s Day. Today a fella can tell his wife truthfully that he’s off to see his best girl.

May 13: “A lot of self-made men should deny it.”—Henry Morgan

Since we were just talking a couple of days ago about websites where it’s possible to download vintage magazines, we thought we’d shine the spotlight on two more. Vintage Girlie Mags and Dad’s Stash, which are basically alter egos of each other, both have full scans. The main difference is vintagegirliemags gives away the scans for free, while dads-stash charges a minimal amount for downloads. The May 1950 issue of Beauty Parade you see above is available at the latter site, though ours didn’t come from there. The cover art on this issue is by the great Peter Driben, and inside you get Yvonne de Carlo, Denise Darcel, Ann Sheridan, Lana Turner, and page after page of other beauties. Many scans below for your Friday enjoyment. 

Party Selvaggio, aka The Wild Party, is an interesting attempt to capture the decadence and glamour of 1920s Hollywood. The screenplay is based on a Joseph Moncure March poem, which in turn is loosely based on the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921. In brief, Arbuckle was accused of sodomizing an actress named Virginia Rappe with a bottle, an act which led to her death due to a ruptured bladder. No such thing happened, but sensational news reports portrayed Arbuckle as a fat lecher who routinely used his bulk to overpower helpless women. These fairy tales proliferated to the extent that morality groups—which were about as restrained and reasonable back then as they are now—were calling for Arbuckle to be put to death. He was acquitted at trial, but his reputation, career, and life were destroyed. In Party Selvagggio, the Arbuckle role is played by James Coco, who decides to throw a bash for major Hollywood players in hopes of revitalizing his ailing career. Unfortunately, the shindig goes horribly wrong. Coco earned some praise for his portrayal, but the star of the film is really Raquel Welch. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she’s the draw. The poster lists her second but places her image front and center, and she gets top billing in the official trailer. This was Welch stepping away from overtly sexual roles and being given a chance to act, which we mentioned was her driving ambition during the mid-point of her career. So how did she do? Well, despite the presence of legends-to-be Merchant-Ivory in the producer-director roles, this is a party you can miss. Welch gives her all in what is essentially a musical role, but the film never strikes the right chords. Don’t you just love this Italian poster, though? Party Selvaggio opened in Italy this month in 1973. 

Erolie Pearl Gaddis Dern wrote as Joan Sherman, Joan Tucker, Pearl Gaddis, Peggy Dern, and for this 1951 romance Painted Lips decided to use her best known moniker—Peggy Gaddis. Gaddis was prolific, publishing dozens of romances and nurse novels between 1929 and 1966. This particular book follows the various dramas of a habitual homewrecker. We love the cover femme fatale, with her zebra skirt and wacky bodice. This would have been an absolutely insane outfit for 1951, so we wonder if the artist simply dreamed it up. We can’t answer that, though, because the art is uncredited. We think that was the modus operandi at Venus Books, because we’ve seen quite a few of their releases—including a couple with covers obviously by this same talented painter—with no attribution. Shame. But we’ll try to dig up more info on a possible artist anyway. There’s always someone out there who knows. 

This evocative poster is for the 1975 thriller Perversione, which was originally made in Spain as La encadenada, and for its U.S. release was retitled Diary of a Murderess, or Diary of an Erotic Murderess. Spoiler alert: there’s a murderess in this film. Marisa Mell is nurse to a rich widower’s mentally disturbed son, but she turns out to be a grifter intent on liberating some of the family knick-knacks. She's especially covetous of an antique chalice that resides in a safe. At some point, she finds a diary left behind by the widower’s dead wife, and in its pages the departed plots the murder of her husband, writing her plan in helpful step-by-step detail. Mell decides follow the diary’s instructions, all the better to get hold of that chalice.

But nothing is as it seems here. The chalice is actually the Holy Grail, Mell has actually failed to ditch her terrible husband, and a few other surprises pop up to keep viewers guessing. Director Manuel Mur Oti has crafted an atmospheric piece here, but we recommend it for giallo fans only, because it’s a bit slow off the starting line. Also, we suggest watching the original version, because we’ve heard that the American cut is several minutes short on nudity. It may not matter though, because the movie may be impossible to find. We located our copy online, but the links have since died. Not that we’re recommending any illegal downloading. Us? Never. Perversione premiered in Italy today in 1975. Below, just because we can, we’ve posted an image of Mell at her lovely best, and you can see another one of great interest here. 

There came a moment around 1970 in the U.S. when movie producers realized that African-Americans liked cinema too, and tailoring content to serve their tastes might prove profitable. But they did it on the cheap, with heavy-handed writers, inexperienced directors, and untested actors. The genre known as blaxploitation was the result. While the films were putatively black, the money behind them was almost always white, or at least establishment. Well, the same thing happened around the same time with at least one tabloid. Above is a May 1969 cover for It’s Happening.

So, what do you get here? The cover says it’s “the news others dare not print,” but basically, it’s the same as tabs like National Informer and Midnight, only with that added black/white spice on every page. But this is not ebony and ivory together forever in perfect harmony like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney once sang. Who’d buy such a newspaper? No, Americans prefer to lay down their hard earned coin for fear, strife, anger, rape and pillage. The stories, in classic ’70s tabloid fashion, are basically flights of editorial fancy matched to whatever handout photos happened to be languishing in the file cabinet. Thus we learn about a white mom seducing black boys, a black beauty’s boobs that put a potential white rapist in a trance, and so forth. We’d don’t think it’s black published. Why? Well, for one thing, the noun usage is suspect, as in the back page story headlined: Sports Scene Now Belongs to the Blacks. If you were black, would you refer to yourself as “the blacks”?

We managed to score a few of these, and there’s no publication information in any of the issues, in fact no masthead at all—which we think lends credence to our suspicion that it was put together by a bunch of snickering yuppies in some garage in suburbia—but we’ll see if we can ferret out the paper’s provenance. Whoever put it out, we’re certain they saw it as satire, and imagined it would, in a decade or two, be remembered as a humorous artifact of a forgotten, racially divided age. Hah hah. Joke’s on them. Here we are, nearly half a century later, and it’s pretty clear that we humans are not intelligent to the extent that we can conquer the hatreds that divide us. Isn't that just hilarious? Er, maybe not. You can see another It's Happening here, and we have more coming soon.

The National Police Gazette reveals on this cover from today in 1960 that Hollywood said no to Brigitte Bardot. The accompanying story quotes an unnamed independent producer, who says that the problem is that Bardot's deficient acting skills limited her to sex kitten roles, but American censorship meant Hollywood couldn't make those kinds of movies. He adds that, at $150,000 salary per project, Bardot is too expensive for Hollywood. A second “well-informed source” tells Gazette that studios are afraid of Bardot’s unbridled sexuality, claiming that her image is “so sexually devastating, that [Hollywood] quivers in fear before the slight, curvaceous French girl with the moist, pouted lips.” So, basically two of three reasons Police Gazette gives for Bardot not featuring in Hollywood films have to do with the influence of legions of American prudes. So maybe it wasn’t really a case of Hollywood saying no to Bardot as much as it was saying yes to sexual repressives. Bardot, it should be noted, simply continued on as the biggest star in the world. Elsewhere in this issue you get the plot-of-the-month attributed to Fidel Castro, tales of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Jack Paar’s fears, and a nice portrait of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Scans of all that below, and more Gazette coming soon.