Femmes Fatales | Apr 25 2024 |
![ACCUMULATING POINTS](/images/headline/7453.png)
This Paramount promo image shows Carole Lombard and was made for her 1933 horror drama Supernatural, which was part of a small set of vintage movies concerned with spiritualists and the supposed netherworld. Movies we've discussed that feature (always fake) séances or seers include Bunco Squad, The Amazing Mr. X, Nightmare Alley, and Ministry of Fear. In a career spanning more than seventy films, Supernatural was Lombard's only fright flick. Its rarity requires that we give it a watch, which we'll do pretty soon.
Intl. Notebook | Apr 17 2023 |
![GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS](/images/headline/7003.png)
Hollywoodland | Mar 13 2015 |
![FACES IN THE MIRROR](/images/headline/2829.png)
This issue of the American film magazine Movie Mirror was published today in 1935 with Grace Moore on the cover, who was promoting her role in the film Love Me Forever, and later died in a plane crash with Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden. You may also notice the unusual sight of editor Ruth Waterbury giving herself standalone credit at upper left. We’ve never seen that before. Waterbury isn’t well remembered today, but she was a player in her time, one of America’s famous journalistic figures, and a staple in tabloids and gossip columns.
Movie Mirror billed itself as “Filmland’s most beautiful magazine,” and indeed its painted covers by the likes of John Ralston Clarke were among the most striking to be found on newsstands. In the late 1930s the magazine began moving away from painted covers to photo-illustrated fronts designed to evoke the same mood. In 1941 it merged with Photoplay and ceased to exist as a distinct publication. Below you see nine more covers, all from the 1930s, with Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Snow White, and others.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 30 2013 |
![IN THE CLICK OF TIME](/images/headline/2027.png)
Below are scans from a March 1939 issue of Click, a humor and photo monthly published out of Philadelphia. Information is scarce on this one, but it appears to have been published approximately between 1938 and 1944. We got the images off the website Darwination, at which there hasn’t been much activity of late. Hopefully they’ll get going again over there sometime soon. In the meantime enjoy the scans.
Intl. Notebook | Jan 11 2013 |
![VISIONARY ART](/images/headline/1931.png)
We were researching our recent post on fascist-era femme fatale Isa Miranda when we stumbled across fourteen sets of eyes from some of the most famous starlets of the 1930s. They were on a Brazilian fashion blog called Cajon DeSastre, now defunct, and we gather they came from a book—Fashion at the Time of Fascism—which we’d love to read if we could find a copy. Anyway, just a little eye candy for Friday.
Femmes Fatales | Nov 30 2012 |
![BLACK VELVET BLONDE](/images/headline/1896.png)
American actress Carole Lombard, née Alice Jane Peters, was known for her screwball comedies, which is why we love her going against type in this smoldering white on black image. Lombard is one of many Hollywood actresses whose time was cut tragically short. She was killed in January 1942 at age thirty-three when a plane in which she was a passenger crashed into Double Up Peak on Potosi Mountain outside Las Vegas.