Some real world pulp for you today. The news is just coming out in the last day, but apparently on Monday night in Belgium, there was a diamond heist at Brussels National Airport. A group of men driving two black vans with flashing police lights entered the airport through a hole cut in a perimeter security fence, drove up to a Switzerland-bound commercial jet idling on the tarmac, held at gunpoint workers who had loaded a cache of diamonds onto the plane, and snatched the gems right out of the cargo hold. Passengers on the plane were unable to see any of the action. A few minutes later the vans sped away and slipped through the previous gap in the security fence. The vehicles were later found burnt to a crisp outside Brussels. The diamonds are said by industry spokespeople to be worth about $50 million, which must be very interesting news to the men who dig them up somewhere in Botswana or Yakutia. In any case, the theft investigation is ongoing and as yet there are no leads.

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.

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.

Ever notice how often pulps and noirs are centered on circuses and carnivals? We noticed it too, which is why we put together a collection of circus posters from the U.S.A., Belgium, Holland, Britain, the Soviet Union, et.al., circa 1930s to 1960s. Which circus would we see? The dynamite tossing clowns just below are enticing, but Big Otto the blood-sweating hippopotamus is by far the star attraction of this group. Otto and more below, and check out a collection of magic posters here. 

Above, a French-language poster for the Belgian release of the subterranean sci-fi adventure Menaces sous la terre, aka The Mole People. The movie isn’t as good as the killer promo art, but it does rank as one of Mystery Science Theater’s most hilarious send-ups. Menaces sous la terre premiered in Belgium this month in 1957. 

These covers for 1952’s Une âme perdue and 1953’s La passé de Khatmandou and La défaite des radars by prolific French author Jack Screen, aka Charles-Antoine Gonnet, were all illustrated by Jef de Wulf. De Wulf, who was born Joseph de Wulf, painted more than 500 covers during a career in Belgium and France that lasted forty years. You can see more of his art at a French blog dedicated to him here, and we'll have more from Gonnet/Screen later.

Above is German actress Elke Sommer, looking her stunning best in two scans from Belgium’s Ciné-Revue that we stumbled across in an online forum. The issue was published forty years ago today, during a period when the magazine was upping its skin quotient. In this case, they wisely chose photos by Angelo Frontoni, who was one of the foremost glamour photographers of the day. Ciné-Revue still exists, more or less, as Ciné-Télé-Revue. We’ve been meaning to do an entire feature on the publication, because it has a tangled history we haven’t quite puzzled out yet. It definitely began in Belgium during the mid-1940s, but also published in France for a time. Also, there was another Ciné-Revue published in France back in the 1920s, but we aren’t sure if it has the same provenance as the one above. We’ll figure all that out later, now that these great images have reminded us to do so. 

German-Czech actress Barbara Bouchet, from a July 1976 issue of the Belgian film mag Ciné-Revue. 

Ciné-Revue with Brigitte Bardot on the cover, published today in 1957, with a shot from her film Une parisienne. 

We could hardly claim to be the go-to site for vintage tabloids if we didn’t include the National Enquirer. This actually isn’t a stretch, because the Enquirer first began publishing during the heyday of vintage tabs in the early fifties, and had published under another name for decades before that. The Enquirer’s paper stock was cheap, its printing low rent, and its use of color rare to non-existent, but the formula worked. Where the expensive tabs dazzled with their kaleidoscopes of color, the Enquirer offered single ideas paired with large, bold images. The formula set the paper apart, and it is the only vintage tabloid that survives today. This issue, with Belgian-born superstar Audrey Hepburn, was published March 3, 1963.