One thing about writing Pulp Intl. is it gives us an excuse to fill in blanks in our movie résumé. The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, and Joan Blondell, was one such blank—until last night. A rags-to-riches-to-ruin story, it was one of the earliest gangster flicks, one that was a big hit but which had suffered the scissors of Hays Code censors. It’s always interesting to note the scenes cut from a post-Code movie, because those say the most about attitudes of the times. For example, the scene in which Cagney is measured for a suit by a gay tailor differs in no discernable way from such scenes in today’s movies. There’s macho discomfort by the lead and effeminate fussing by the tailor that leads to the inevitable inseam measuring, all played for cheap humor. We don’t condemn or endorse this sort of thing—it’s just fascinating to see how little has changed in eighty some years. Two other scenes were cut due to sexual suggestiveness, and those are also quite interesting to watch.

This two-color cover from Headquarters Detective appeared in March 1958 and features a pose that you see quite a bit on vintage crime magazines—the man standing above a terrorized woman, often with a phallic symbol in hand. We’ve been gathering up some covers in this style and we’ll share what we’ve found pretty soon. This cover is also noteworthy because it reports at bottom left on the last of six murders that occurred in the Chicago area between October 1955 and August 1957. Three boys and three girls ranging from ages eleven to fifteen were stripped, battered, strangled, and in the cases of two of the girls, raped.

But it was the sixth murder that truly horrified already shaken Chicago residents. The killer—and if it was the same killer his violent tendencies were growing—dismembered Judith Anderson and set the body parts afloat in Montrose Harbor in two metal drums. The smaller drum contained the girl’s head, right arm and left hand, the second the rest of her. The head had four bullets in it. Police followed many leads—according to at least one account they investigated 109,000 homes, 40,000 to 50,000 garages and basements, 900 businesses, and 200 boats. They heard countless confessions, all of which turned out to be false—save for possibly one.

Some local fishermen told police that several nights before Anderson’s remains turned up they saw a car on the opposite shore of the harbor. They knew it had backed up to the water because they could see its brake lights. A person they described as well-built got out, opened the trunk of the car and threw something—or several somethings—into the water. When he drove away they noticed that one of his brake lights was out. The detail of the broken light helped generate a suspect, someone with a criminal record and a history of sexual violence, but police were never able to pin the killing on him even though at least one investigator claimed he had confessed. Ultimately police never solved Anderson's murder, or the other five.

The above photos show an interesting looking model circa 1920 demonstrating the usage of a violet ray machine, which was a personal electrotherapy device first invented by Nikola Tesla around 1890. Tesla was way ahead of his time, and some of his electrical applications were simply amazing. For instance, he successfully generated wireless power—i.e., he lit phosphorescent lamps by sending electricity through the air. Think about that next time you trip over one of the twenty power cords you have snaking around your place. Of course, genius occasionally comes wrapped in a bit of lunacy, so in the interests of full disclosure we should probably note that Tesla also spent many years trying to build a teleforce weapon, which he claimed would “bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.”

Tesla’s violet ray device became a major fad during the Great Depression. The contraption consisted of a portable box encasing a discharge coil that produced a high frequency, ozone-generating electrical current. That current was channeled into a bakelite-handled, glass-tipped wand, the business end of which was applied to the recipient’s skin. One company that manufactured these devices was called Renulife, and their pitch went like this: Electricity from your light socket is transformed into health and beauty-giving Violet Ray—powerfully effective, yet gentle, soothing, perfectly safe. Voltage is raised from ordinary lighting current to thousands of volts, giving tremendous penetrative force. The irresistible revitalizing powers of Renulife Violet Ray are carried at once to every nerve, cell, fibre and part of the body.

Above is the cover of an issue of Final, a publication we had never heard of before, but which is certainly big budget and hit the streets this month in 1950 courtesy of Gambit Publishing out of New York City. The cover star is model Joy Niven, who we also had never heard of, but who was photographed by famed Marilyn Monroe lensman Earl Leaf. This Final has taken a bit of wear over the last six decades, but kudos to the Denver Book Fair for acquiring it, sealing it so its deterioration stopped, and selling it to us cheap. Now we’ve carried it across an ocean, opened it, and exposed it to the elements, but all in an effort to scan it for posterity. For as we discussed before, if it isn’t digital and accessible to the masses, does it really exist at all?

Final is basically a tabloid, with a bit of crime, a bit of politics, a bit of sports, and a lot of celebrity dish. There are quite a few interesting items inside. In the Picture of the Month you see Canadian actor Rod Cameron with Portuguese model Angela Alves-Lico. They had just met earlier on the beach and, according to Final, she was driving home, and Cameronwas following in his car, when she had an auto accident. Our first thought, because they’d just met and “following her home” sounds a bit stalkerish to us, is that maybe she crashed because she was trying to get away from him. But perhaps not—Cameron and Alves-Lico soon married each other.

Probably the highlight of the issue, for us at least, is an article asking nineteen prominent ministers if they think the use of a nuclear bomb by the U.S. in Korea could be justified. Of the nineteen, only three unambiguously say it would be wrong. Most of the others echo theopinion of the compassionate Rev. B. W. Hancock: “If our military feels that it would establish peace, then I would favor it.” Truly, Hancock must have spent a lot of time with his cock in his han to come up with that one. It makes us think of the famous Tacitus quote: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” Or, “And where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Yes! Three years of high school Latin and we finally worked that shit into a post. Nice! Anyway, for various reasons, the U.S. never nuked Korea, so we hope the ministers weren’t too disappointed.

Update: Pamela writes in and says, "The best part about that Rod Cameron/Angela Alves-Lico story is that after ten years of marriage, Cameron divorced her. And married her mother. Yep...the woman on the right in that photo.

Above, a cover of Master Detective from July 1949, inside of which is a story on Ruth Snyder. In March 1927 Snyder garroted her husband with the help of her lover, a corset salesman named Henry Judd Gray. The couple had been after insurance money, but instead they were caught, tried, and sentenced to death by means of electrocution. On the day of the event, which took place at Sing Sing Prison, a photographer named Tom Howard entered the execution chamber as a witness. He was under assignment for the New York Daily News, but was actually based in Chicago, which meant he was unknown to prison authorities in the New York area. That was important, because Howard’s assignment was to illegally take a photo of Ruth Snyder’s execution, which had considerable tabloid value because she would be the first woman put to death at Sing Sing since 1899. Howard was ingeniously prepared—he had strapped a camera to his ankle, and had fed a shutter release up one pant leg to an accessible point inside his suit jacket. At the moment the executioner threw the switch, Howard lifted his pant leg and snapped the blurry photo below, which appeared the next day in the New York Daily News under a huge header that read simply: Dead! The issue was a sensation, the image became iconic, and Howard became nationally famous. 

Prime Cut is another one of those movies that falls squarely into the could-not-be-made-today category. Starring Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, it’s the story of a Chicago mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to make a local meatpacking and prostitution kingpin pay a debt of $500,000. The meat aspect of Hackman’s KC operation is both literal and metaphorical, with his enemies occasionally ending up ground into actual hot dogs, and young girls being sold like cattle. Marvin starts as just a debt collector but soon becomes a white-haired angel of retribution, an avenger intent on righting a few moral wrongs. When Marvin gets that familiar look in his eyes, is there any doubt Hackman and his sleazebag underlings are in seriously deep shit? Prime Cut is an uneven flick with a few jarring 1970s quirks, but we sure enjoyed it. It’s bold, violent, and offensive by today’s standards, but nicely rendered by director Michael Ritchie and cinematographer Gene Polito. Of special note is Sissy Spacek, who makes her first credited film appearance. Prime Cut premiered in New York City today in 1972, but what you see above is the great Japanese promo, with its alternate title Kansas City Prime. If you like 1970s crime thrillers, you’ll certainly appreciate this one. 

In honor of baseball season in the U.S., we have for your enjoyment today an extreme rarity—an official 75th anniversary baseball program from Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, circa 1951. Casual baseball fans are scratching their heads right now, because Wrigley Field is located in Chicago. Well sure, that one is. But the first Wrigley Field, which opened in 1926, was in L.A. Chewing gum millionaire William Wrigley used the park to house his Los Angeles Angels, a minor league team that played in the Pacific Coast League. Wrigley also owned the Chicago Cubs, but though the park in Chi-Town was built before the one in L.A., it wasn’t named Wrigley until 1927. The original Wrigley Field, with its unusual off-center clock tower, was a marvel of Spanish revival architecture, but L.A. being L.A., it was demolished without a thought in 1966. Check the images below. And... play ball! 

And now for something completely different. At an antique store we happened to run across a few vintage candy boxes, which we stole some shots of and cleverly brightened and reoriented in Photoshop. Are candy boxes pulp? Close enough, we say. Certainly the design work on them is worth note. The above box, with its pin-up style image, adorned the lid of Chicago, Illinois based Goldwyn Co.’s line of summer candies. No idea when they were produced, since candy boxes don’t carry copyright dates, but we can assume from the art that we’re looking at an early 1940s product. We suspect the rest of the boxes, which we've shared below, are from around 1930. Check out yet another interesting vintage candy box and the controversy surrounding it here. 

Dalton Stevens’ cover for this January 1931 issue of True Detective looks a bit like a horror illustration, but it's actually supposed to represent Robert E. Burns, who in 1922 helped rob a Georgia grocery, earned himself 6 to 10 at hard labor, but escaped and made his way to Chicago, where he adopted a new identity and rose to success as a magazine editor. Years later, when he tried to divorce the woman he had married, she betrayed him to Georgia authorities, and what followed was a legal battle between Georgia courts and Chicago civic leaders, with the former wanting Burns extradited, and the latter citing his standing in the community and calling for his pardon. Burns eventually went back to Georgia voluntarily to serve what he had been assured would be a few months in jail, but which turned into more hard time on a chain gang.

Angered and disillusioned, Burns escaped again, and this time wrote a book from hiding, which True Detective excerpts in the above issue and several others. This was a real scoop for the magazine—it was the first to publish Burns’ harrowing tale. The story generated quite a bit of attention, and Vanguard Press picked it up and published it as I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, which led directly to Warner Brothers adapting the tale into a hit 1932 motion picture starring Paul Muni. The movie differed somewhat from the book, of course, which differed somewhat from reality (Burns himself admitted this later), but his account cast a withering light on the chain gang system. The exposure helped chain gang opponents, who claimed—with some veracity—that the practice was immoral because it originated with the South's need to replace its slave labor after defeat in the U.S. Civil War.

Burns continued to live life on the run, but was eventually arrested again, this time in New Jersey. However, the governor of the state refused to extradite him. The standoff meant Burns was, in practical terms, a free man. That practical freedom was made official in 1945 when he was finally pardoned in Georgia, and his literary indictment of the chain gang system helped bring about its demise. Well, sort of—it returned to the South in 1995, was quickly discontinued after legal challenges, but may yet be reintroduced as politicians push for more and more extreme punishments to bolster their tough-on-crime credentials. 

Interesting cover of The National Insider published today in 1964, promising to expose gay life in America, specifically New York City, Hollywood, and Chicago. Think there’s any chance it was a non-homophobic depiction? Well, different tabloids had different approaches. We’ve stored up some material on this and we’ll be getting into it a bit later.