| Vintage Pulp | Aug 26 2023 |
By whatever means necessary.
Above is a Belgian poster for the 1953 film noir Wicked Woman, originally made in the U.S. starring Richard Egan and, in one of her classic femme fatale roles, Beverly Michaels. Generally, because of the predominant languages used in Belgium, posters from there carried both French and Dutch text. In French Wicked Woman was titled La vicieuse, and in Dutch it was De slet (you can guess what that means). Our header for this post is a play on the never ending debate over whether film noir is a genre or a cycle. Either way, what it produced was always vicious. We briefly talked about Wicked Woman some years ago and shared the U.S. poster. This effort is from the presses of S.P.R.L. Belgique and it's signed by Wik, an artist who remains a mystery. Below, you see Michaels pondering the wickedness of her behavior and deciding she's fine with it.
BelgiumS.P.R.L. BelgiqueDe sletLa vicieuseWicked WomanBeverly MichaelsRichard EganWikposter artcinemafilm noir
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 4 2017 |
James Stewart sees the sights without ever leaving his apartment.
Belgian movie posters are often quite beautiful. We've already shared frameworthy examples for Vanessa and A Thousand and One Nights, as well as a few others, and above you see a promo for Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window. The movie premiered in 1954 and first played in Belgium today in 1955, where it was titled Fenêtre sur cour, which means “window on the courtyard.” The poster was printed by S.P.R.L. Belgique and the artist is Wik, someone who is simultaneously well represented in vintage poster circles while being a total mystery. We plan to dig around, see if we can find more info on this person.
Everyone has a favorite Hitchcock movie. Rear Window is ours. The story, the stars, and the look of the film are all great, and the idea of everyone's lives under a microscope foreshadows the world in which we live in today. Raised shades aren't needed, though—metadata tells corporations and governments more than a glance in a window ever could. In Rear Window, once Jimmy Stewart realizes he is able to spy, he does it even though he knows it's wrong, and once he suspects a crime has been committed, any sense of guilt disappears—instead he feels entitled to intrude. Maybe that's why today's digital spies always claim to be ferreting out crime—because they know most people will accept that as an excuse.
But you don't need us to analyze Rear Window. More qualified writers have gone over every frame of the film. Instead we've decided to show you below what Stewart was looking at, thanks to series of promo images we managed to locate. Thus you see, from top to bottom, the rear courtyard which encompasses the story, the newlyweds Rand Harper and Havis Davenport, the murder suspect Raymond Burr, Miss Torso played by Georgine Darcy, Miss Lonely Hearts played by Judith Evelyn, and Grace Kelly with sidekick Thelma Ritter digging for body parts in the garden. If you haven't seen the film, definitely watch it. You'll have fun.
BelgiumS.P.R.L. BelgiqueFenêtre sur courRear WindowJames StewartGrace KellyAlfred HitchcockGeorgine DarcyRaymond BurrJudith EvelynThelma RitterRand HarperHavis DavenportWikposter artcinema
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 9 2012 |
When we said the Devil is in the details, we had no idea how prophetic that would turn out to be.
So, we got an email a few days ago from a reader named Paul about our Mort au diable post "The Devil Is in the Details" from last month, and we were asked if we were 100% sure the art for that poster was painted by Jacques Thibésart. Well, we thought we were. Then we realized we weren’t. Turns out the poster was from Belgium’s S.P.R.L. Belgique, and they have a mark that, if you aren’t paying close attention, looks like Thibésart’s signature. Thibésart signed his work Mik, Tib, or with his own name sometimes, but the Mort au diable signature, which reads Wik, is obviously different (see above). S.P.R.L. is a famous press, and their signature is well known—to everyone but us, as of a couple of days ago. Below is the last portion of our reply to Paul:
It's actually rather interesting, because for us the site is just simple fun, and we often joke in our posts about how we don't take it seriously. However our analytics tell us that people are continually cross referencing here and using it for research, and the traffic is far larger than we ever expected [snip]. With that in mind, we pledged a while back to try and get all our information correct, and we are quite diligent nowadays, but something still slips through occasionally. Without readers checking our facts, we'd never get everything right, so you've done us a big favor.
So there you have it. Epic fail on Mort au diable, but every mistake makes us a little better. We’ve corrected the earlier post, but didn’t want the change to go unacknowledged. As it happens, yesterday we were in France, in a town called Bayonne, and at a vintage bookshop we saw another piece from S.P.R.L. Belgique. We didn’t have any Thibésart handy to use for a detailed comparison of the signatures, but there was no need—we already knew we’d gotten it wrong. Now the good news. First, we picked up a stack of great French pulp. And second, we’re going to get this Thibésart thing right today. All the great covers below are his. They’re from the imprint Presses Mondiales for their series Amour et Police, and were published during the 1950s. 100% on this. Seriously.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 13 2012 |
Beat the Devil flopped in 1954 but today is appreciated as pioneering camp cinema.
We’ll tell you right now that we are not neutral when it comes to John Huston’s Beat the Devil. We love it. It has Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Gina Lollobrigida, and the exquisite Jennifer Jones, so we loved it immediately. If only audiences had felt the same. The movie was such a flop that not only did it lose money, but its copyright went unrenewed, causing it lapse into public domain. But keen observers, after they got over being misled by the promotional campaign into thinking the movie was a standard Hollywood adventure, soon realized that what they had on their hands was something new—a camp satire bringing together some of the most distinct voices of 1950s cinema.
And we mean voices literally. You have Humphrey Bogart with his famous lisp, Gina Lollobrigida with her 
vampy Italian drawl, Jennifer Jones trying on an English lilt, Peter Lorre with his trademark Germanic accented sniveling, and more. The accents are your first clue that the movie is going to be all over the place.
The plot concerns a group of raggedy adventurers who hope to buy uranium-rich land in East Africa. Problem is, they need to get there. Seems straightforward enough, but the cosmos itself is aligned against them—cars fail, boats sink, betrayals ensue, information gets garbled, and just about any other obstacle you can imagine appears.
But Beat the Devil isn’t slapstick. It’s satire, which means it isn’t funny in a conventional way. In fact, maybe there isn’t a real laugh in the entire movie. Yet you have to smile when Marco Tulli introduces Peter Lorre’s character O’Hara as O’Horror, you have to marvel at Jennifer Jones’ crazy accent that sounds like an English version of Bogart’s lisp, and you have to watch with heightened interest during her famous calesthenics sequence, in which she has an entire conversation with Gina Lollobrigida while doing... well, we don't know what she's doing, but it looks like this.
Despite these and other charms, Beat the Devil is polarizing. Bogart declared that only phonies liked it. Huston, on the other hand, was well aware of its uniqueness and even told Jennifer Jones—who had already been nominated for four Academy Awards and had won once—that Beat the Devil would be one of her most remembered roles. True enough. The French and Dutch language poster you see above is for the Belgian release, and was put together by S.P.R.L. Belgique. Beat the Devil opened in France today, and Belgium this month in 1954.
BelgiumBeat the DevilMort au diableAcademy AwardS.P.R.L. BelgiqueJohn HustonHumphrey BogartJennifer JonesGina LollobrigidaPeter LorreMarco TulliWikposter artcinemamovie review
