Whenever a very old actor dies you inevitably read that he or she had been one of the last surviving remnants of Hollywood’s golden age. In reality, there are many actors and actresses still living from that period and above you see a good example in Dorothy Malone, who began her cinema career in 1943 and appeared in films such as Artists and Models, 1955’s The Fast and The Furious, and of course The Big Sleep, in which she played the world’s hottest bookstore clerk. Not sure of the year on the cowgirl shot, but we think 1947 is a very good guess. 

You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it.

In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA.

In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He had written screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also had become a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a small collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read.