Pulp International - Ernest+Borgnine

Jun 27 2024

Infancy, adulthood, and death in twenty-four years.

This issue of Man's Magazine hit newsstands this month in 1963 with Mel Crair cover art we suspect is cropped from a larger piece. In the past the magazine had featured paintings that occupied its entire front, but by this time it was experimenting with a tabloid look, giving more space to blocked text with sensational messaging, and reducing the dimensions of art acquired from Crair and others. More cover changes would come. From fully painted fronts, to the tabloid style you see here, it shifted to photo covers, which happened in 1969 and saw cheesecake and adventure imagery alternating, until the early ’70s when cheesecake took over and adventure was relegated entirely to the interior. Man's Magazine was by that point publishing nude and semi-nude women on all its covers. Other men's adventure magazines were doing the same.

This shift happened quickly, but had been in the wind for a long time. Private publications had crossed all red lines much earlier, though they hadn't been openly available. Producing and selling them was to risk prison. But it was understood that men wanted more eroticism, wanted it at high quality, and would buy it even if it wasn't behind the fig leaves of art and literature. However, art and literature were needed in above-ground publications because they helped avoid obscenity convictions. Otherwise, erotic content had no “redeeming qualities,” and legal troubles were guaranteed. Mainstream men's publications were largely articles, fiction, and cartoons for that reason—and to attract advertisers.

Man's Magazine had launched in 1952 and operated in reasonable health for at least fifteen years. But by the mid-1960s social repression and censorship were in retreat. Language was changing. Racier novels could be published without legal concerns, and more revealing cinematic content was possible. In the magazine realm, brands that foregrounded women's nudity more than previously were prospering. The erotic but coy Modern Man had launched in 1951. Playboy had arrived in 1954 and been willing to push the standards of what was possible. Penthouse arrived in the UK in 1965, in the U.S. in 1969, and began to show pubic hair. When Hustler arrived in 1974 the floodgates weren't just open, suddenly, but gaping.

Man's Magazine is a classic example of a publication that was swept away by all that change, but refused to go down without a fight. Its attempts to adapt failed and it folded in 1976. Interestingly, by the end, during the latter half of that year, it moved to personality covers. Cover stars included Richard M. Nixon, Muhammad Ali, and even Paul McCartney and Larry Csonka. We don't know what prompted that move—a final attempt to appear more highbrow, perhaps? We haven't bought any of those last gasp issues to seek clues, but nothing could help Man's Magazine retain market share in a landscape that featured publications with more nudity and gloss.

But it wasn't only explicitness and printing quality that pushed Man's Magazine and its ilk slowly off newsstands. With their tighter operating budgets when compared with Playboy and cohort, they generally had lower quality fiction, profiles, essays, and cartoons. By contrast Playboy would eventually interview some of the most important people in the world, and its fiction would feature the most acclaimed authors. Man's Magazine never had a prayer of keeping pace. But today's issue appeared before the decline. There's fiction from the well known Richard Deming, non-fiction by the respected Richard Hardwick, and many excellent illustrations. All of that and more are below.

Man's Magazine Modern Man Playboy Hustler Penthouse Ernest Borgnine Katy Jurado Richard Deming Richard Hardwick John Paul Scott John Oliver Killens Bob Powell Mel Crair magazine art literature

Vintage Pulp

Sep 12 2023

Think your boss is bad? Then you've never dealt with a mob boss.

Falling into the category of pleasant surprises, The Mob, for which you see an evocative promo poster above, stars Broderick Crawford as a cop sent to infiltrate an organized crime syndicate. You've seen the idea before. He works his way up the ladder and brings the bad guys down, but this iteration comes with brisk pacing, a set of unpredictable twists, and a supporting cast that includes Ernest Borgine, Richard Kiley, and Lynn Baggett. If you keep your eyes open you might even spot Charles Bronson.

Crawford had already won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for 1949's All the King's Men, so he unsurprisingly does a bang-up job in this film, instilling his deep cover cop with believable toughness and a gruff but relatable humanity. Crawford would later appear in such excellent films as Scandal Sheet, New York Confidential, Born Yesterday, and Human Desire, but The Mob may be his underrated classic.

The only flaw with this film, in our opinion, is a goofball denouement. We suppose, after ninety minutes of almost nonstop high tension, the filmmakers wanted audiences to leave smiling, and we're sure they did, because the scene, while dumb, is pretty funny. But in any case, we recommend giving The Mob a whirl. You'll enjoy it. It opened nationally in the U.S. in late September, but had its actual debut at special premiere today in Dayton, Ohio (why, we don't know) in 1951.

New Orleans Academy Award Golden Globe Award The Mob All the King's Men New York Confidential Scandal Sheet Human Desire Born Yesterday Broderick Crawford Betty Buehler Ernest Borgnine Lynn Baggett Charles Bronson poster art cinema movie review

Hollywoodland | The Naked City

Jan 20 2023

It was the Whisper heard from coast to coast.

Above is a cover of the tabloid Whisper from January 1965, with actress Carroll Baker, convicted murderer Winston Moseley, and New York judge J. Irwin Shapiro starring on the front. But before we get into the magazine, we want to share the good news that our longtime scanning problems are fixed. We didn't get a new scanner, though. We got a new computer—a Mac Studio with plenty under the hood. It's quicker than the old Mac, but it also changed the functionality of the scanning interface. The whole process runs differently, and is about three times faster now. So you'll be seeing more magazines in the future.

Turning back to Whisper, Winston Moseley—who editors call William for some reason—was America's villain of the moment for the murder of Catherine Genovese, who he stalked, stabbed with a hunting knife, then found again where she had taken refuge in a building, and finished her off. Additionally, Moseley was a necrophiliac. He raped his victims—of which there were three total—post-mortem. Of the trio of victims Genovese is the one that's remembered today because her murder sparked a national reckoning about the relationship between citizens and the police, as well as life in big cities, because the press reported that thirty-eight people had seen the crime happening but had done nothing.

As it turned out, that number was wildly inaccurate, but never let the truth get in the way of perfectly cooked, juicy tabloid outrage. A quote appeared in nearly every story about the murder: “I didn't want to get involved.” New York City—where the crime occurred—and other metropolitan centers were criticized as uncaring places. Author Harlan Ellison, who at that time was writing urban crime fiction, weighed in, saying, “not one of [the witnesses] made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police.” Peak outrage was achieved by New York State Supreme Court Justice J. Irwin Shapiro when he expressed a desire to execute Moseley himself. In the end, Moseley wasn't executed at all. He died in prison in 2016 at age eighty-one.

Elsewhere in Whisper, you'll notice that the magazine is—unsurprisingly, given the time period and nature of the publication—antagonistic toward gay men, as demonstrated by the panel with the blaring text: “Who's Queer Asked the Peer?” But what is a surprise is that later in the issue the editors run a detailed piece on transvestites and transsexuals, and the approach is very different than the contempt shown toward homosexuality. As we've pointed out many times before, mid-century tabloids had a deep interest in trans issues. The story is titled, “A Doctor Answers What Everyone Wants To Know About Sex Change Operations.” The tone is as follows:

The condition he referred to was the common plight of all male transsexuals. Physically he was a man, but emotionally and personality-wise he was a woman, a condition that made it difficult to find successful employment, and to live at all happily. Fortunately, in his case, he had a lawyer and a wise judge who were able to help him in his wish to go to Europe for a sex change operation so that his body could be brought into greater harmony with his mind, and enable him to work and live with a degree of happiness he had never known before.

That's respectful—if not even compassionate—for a 1965 publication considered lowbrow by sophisticated readers. Is it a paradox that the magazine could be so evil toward gay men, yet so civil toward transsexuals? We think so, and we'd love to know the thought process behind it. While we're puzzling that out, you may want to move on to Whisper's slate of celebrity news. Everyone from Romy Schneider to Ernest Borgnine get their due exposure. We've uploaded the magazine's “Behind the Whispers” feature, so you can get the dish on a few Hollywood stars. Please enjoy.

Vintage Pulp

Jun 26 2018

Get in his way and he'll roll right over you.

The movie Truck Turner was originally written to star Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Ernest Borgnine, but none of them were available. American International Pictures exec Larry Gordon reportedly said, “Well, we can't get any of them so now it's a black picture.” Marvin, Mitchum, and Borgnine were lucky they dodged this Truck. Isaac Hayes was signed up and he plays an L.A. bounty hunter who chases down a pimp named Gator only to end up pitted against a powerful madame named Dorinda. The movie is poorly put together, which you wouldn't guess from looking at its scores on sites like IMDB, where raters give it a 7.0. But we suspect those ratings derive from copious action and an amusingly bad script, particularly co-star Nichelle Nichols' tour de force segment in which, as Dorinda, she parades her whores before a group of pimps and describes their assets in a colorful monologue that's possibly the funniest moment from any blaxploitation movie. Here it is:

“Gentlemen, this is my family. These all prime cut bitches. $238,000 worth of dynamite. It's Fort Knox in panties. Candy did seventeen thousand last year. Velvet, Miss Sophisticate, did twenty. Used to be a Paris model. Jess and Annette each did twenty-two five. Show 'em your wares, bitch. [bitch licks lips, strikes a pose] See what you can get if you're good? That's Turnpike. She did twenty-six five. She's called Turnpike ’cause you gotta pay to get on and pay to get off. China, come here, baby. China did twenty-nine. Sweet piece a Oriental meat. Mmm, mmm, mmm. This is Frenchy. Gator used to call her Boeing 747. Show 'em why, bitch. [bitch shimmies] She did twenty-seven five. And that's sweet Annette. Show 'em that smile, you sweet thing. She did thirty thou last year. And where's my baby? That's Taffy. This bitch grossed thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars working part time. Shit, her clients think she's too good to fuck. They call her Colonel Sanders because she's [bitch licks fingers] finger lickin' good.”

So that's pretty funny, in a horrible, un-2018 kind of way. The outtakes must have been uproarious. Nichols knocks this bit out of the park like a hanging curveball because she can act (in fact, watching how she makes those words sparkle is a clinic on the wide gap between screenwriting and an actor's interpretation). Yaphet Kotto as the pimp Harvard Blue makes his role work because he can act too. But nobody else can. Luckily, as action eventually overtakes dialogue matters improve considerably, with the last third of the movie developing enough momentum to sustain viewer interest. There's one other asset too—Hayes' groovy soundtrack. But you don't have to watch the movie to enjoy that, or Nichols' monologue, which you can watch at this YouTube link while it lasts. It starts about forty seconds in. Otherwise, we recommend giving Truck Turner a pass unless your sense of humor is—like ours—inclusive of semi-inept Hollywood obscurities. If that's the case, roll on. Truck Turner premiered in the U.S. in 1974.

Los Angeles American International Pictures Truck Turner Isaac Hayes Nichelle Nichols Yaphet Kotto Larry Gordon Lee Marvin Robert Mitchum Ernest Borgnine poster art cinema blaxploitation movie review

Hollywoodland

May 15 2016

From Here to Oscar night.

American actor Burt Lancaster posed for the promo photo you see above when he was filming the World War II drama From Here to Eternity in the Hawaiian Islands in 1953. The movie, based on James Jones' novel, was one of the highest grossing productions of the 1950s, and film noir vet Lancaster in the lead as Sergeant Warden was a prime reason why. The movie also starred Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, and Ernest Borgnine, making for a supremely talented cast. In the end From Here to Eternity scored thirteen Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture.

Hawaii World War II Academy Award From Here to Eternity Burt Lancaster Montgomery Clift Deborah Kerr Frank Sinatra Ernest Borgnine cinema

Vintage Pulp

Dec 18 2010

Another loner is tormented until he kills. Do bullies never learn?

We found this Japanese promo art for the original version of Willard. In the film, a young man trains a pack of rats to do his bidding, which is all fun and games at first. But complications arise when Socrates, who is basically the Frank Sinatra of this pack, is killed, leaving Ben, the impulsive Dean Martin rat, to take over. Eventually Willard sends the pack to dispose of his tormentor, played by Ernest Borgnine, and let’s just say they turn him into a tartare that makes those cooking rats from Ratatouille look like real culinary hacks. But Ben is a mercurial rodent, and when he subsequently feels rejected by Willard, well, we think you gnaw what happens next. Willard and his rat pack swarmed Tokyo for the first time today in 1971.

Japan Tokyo Willard Ratatouille Ernest Borgnine poster art cinema movie review