 Everybody that was anybody was there. 
This photo made today in 1954 shows American singer/actress Abbe Lane posing outside Ciro’s nightclub in West Hollywood, California. Lane had begun in show business as a child actress, but became world famous after she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and began fronting his group as a singer. Although this is a famous photo, one you can find elsewhere on the internet, we thought it was worth posting anyway, not just because of Lane, but because supper clubs like Ciro’s really don’t exist anymore. Ciro’s, which by the way was unrelated to the many famous Ciro’s that existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, from its opening in 1940 to its closing in 1957 was a favorite spot of screen personalities, singers, producers, and writers, a place where the night’s meet-ups and trysts were reported in the next day’s gossip columns. Below you see Lane and Cugat, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Lane onstage fronting Cugat’s rumba band, Cary Grant with Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball with Desi Arnaz, Jr., and others.          
California, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Ciro’s, Abbe Lane, Xavier Cugat, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Cary Grant, Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz Jr., James Dean, Ursula Andress, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, cinema
 Bad luck and trouble in post-war Germany. We’re back to the West German publication Illustrierte Film-Bühne today, supplementing our post from two months ago. These examples are all from American dramas or films noir produced during the 1940s and early 1950s, but which premiered in West Germany later, typically 1954 or after. You can see the earlier IFB collection here.       
West Germany, Illustrierte Film-Bühne, 711 Ocean Drive, Der Henker saß am Tisch, The Bad and the Beautiful, Stadt der Illusionen, City that Never Sleeps, Chicago—12 Uhr Mitternacht, Vor verschlossenen Türen, Lucky Jordan, Gangsterfalle, Vice Squad, Sittenpolizei, Knock On Any Door, Private Hell 36, Hölle 36, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Ida Lupino, Alan Ladd, film noir, cinema
 I just got this a-maz-ing manicure. Nice, right? 
We stumbled across this recently. It’s a promo photo of Humphrey Bogart made for his 1951 crime drama The Enforcer. The image was used on a great Israeli poster for the movie, as well as an almost-as-good Spanish promo. We showed you both of those, among others, a few years ago. If you haven’t seen them maybe click back there and take a look. They’re well worth a glance.
 Sometimes a kiss is not just a kiss. 
The above promo shot was made for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s 1944 thriller To Have and Have Not, in which he played a cynical boat captain and she played a tough girl with a heart ready to be given to the right man. It was set in French Martinique, and it’s one of our favorite old movies. Certainly not in the same league as Casablanca, which is the phenomenon it was trying to recreate, yet it was faster, funnier, and far less grandiose, all of which work in its favor. Haven’t seen it? Rent it. Or better yet—in the spirit of Bogart’s rum running character Capt. Harry Morgan—pirate it. Arrr.  
 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.      
Belgium, Beat the Devil, Mort au diable, Academy Award, S.P.R.L. Belgique, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Marco Tulli, Jacques Thibésart, Nik, poster art, cinema, movie review
 Only the good go to sleep at night. 
The French coined the term film noir, so it seems only fitting to feature a collection of French posters celebrating the genre. Above and below are fifteen examples promoting films noir from France, Britain, and the U.S., representing some of the best ever produced within the art form, as well as some less celebrated examples that we happen to love. Of those, we highly recommend seeing Le salaire de la peur, for which you see the poster above, and Ride the Pink Horse, below, which played as Et tournent les chevaux de bois in France. Just a word about those films (and feel free to skip ahead to the art, because really, who has time these days to listen to a couple of anonymous internet scribes ramble on about old movies?). 1953’s Le salaire de la peur is about a group of men stranded in an oil company town in the mountains of South America. In order to earn the wages to get out, four of them agree to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerine over many miles of dangerous terrain. The idea is to use the chemicals to put out a raging oil well fire that is consuming company profits by the second, but of course the film is really about whether the men can even get there alive. Le salaire de la peur was critically praised when released in Europe, but in the U.S., political factions raised their ugly heads and got censors to crudely re-edit the prints so as to reduce the movie’s anti-capitalist (and by extension anti-American) subtext. The movie was later remade by Hollywood twice—once in 1958 as Hell’s Highway, and again in 1977 as Sorcerer. The original is by far the best.
1947’s Ride the Pink Horse is an obscure noir, but a quintessential one, in our opinion. If many noirs feature embittered World War II vets as their anti-heroes, Robert Montgomery’s Lucky Gagin is the bitterest of them all. He arrives in a New Mexico border town on a quest to avenge the death of a friend. The plot is thin—or perhaps stripped down would be a better description—but Robert Montgomery’s atmospheric direction makes up for that. Like a lot of mid-century films featuring ethnic characters, the most important one is played by a white actor (Wanda Hendrix, in a coating of what looks like brown shoe polish). It's racist, for sure, but within the universe of the film Lucky Gagin sees everyone around him only as obstacles or allies—i.e., equals within his own distinct worldview. So that makes up for it. Or maybe not. In any case, we think Ride the Pink Horse is worth a look. Fourteen more posters below. France, Le Salaire de la peur, Le crime était presque parfait, Dial M. for Murder, L’Etreinte du passé, Out of the Past, Le corbeau, Les filles du service secret, Et tournent les chevaux de bois, Ride the Pink Horse, Les forbans de la nuit, Night and the City, Gilda, Singapour, Singapore, Un condamné a mort s’est échappé, Nous sommes tous des assassins, À 23 pas du mystère, 23 Paces to Baker Street, Le coup de l’escalier, Key Largo, 13 Rue de Madelaine, John Huston, Andre Cayatte, Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Robert Bresson, Ava Gardner, Fred MacMurray, Van Johnson, Vera Miles, Harry Belafonte, Shelley Winters, Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, Grace Kelly, Ray Milland, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, poster art, film noir, cinema
 Everything I’m not made me everything I am. 
There’s no shortage of Humphrey Bogart images out there, but this is a particularly good one, showing the distinctive scar on his upper lip. Scarred, kind of short, not amazing looking, and with a lisp, he still became the greatest star in American history. The shot is from Germany’s Das Magazin, and it appeared this month in 1949.
 Ever seen a $75,000 book? This is what it looks like. 
You really can’t discuss pulp and San Francisco without mentioning The Maltese Falcon. Written by San Fran resident Dashiell Hammet and published by Knopf in 1930, the book’s protagonist San Spade became the archetypal private eye as he haunted the Bay area trying to solve his partner’s murder. The first edition has since become one of the Holy Grails of book collectors, which probably explains why the international auction house Sotheby’s sold a copy of the novel’s first pressing for $75,000. Before you say, “You’re shitting me,” we’ll add that 75K was actually lower than their upper end estimate of $90,000. The 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston is considered by most cinema experts to be the first real film noir, and Bogart said it best when asked in the movie exactly what the falcon was. His answer: “The stuff that dreams are made of.” 
 A siren in the desert. 
This Columbia Pictures promo photo of Swedish actress Märta Torén was shot when she appeared in the adventure Sirocco in 1951, starring opposite Humphrey Bogart. The film, which was set in Syria, was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, and one of its taglines was: “Beyond Casablanca... Fate, in a low-cut gown lies in wait for Bogart!” The movie didn’t recapture that Casablanca magic, but it was a nice role for Torén. She worked steadily until 1957 when she died of a sudden brain hemorrhage at age 30.
 The pain in Spain stays mainly in the brain. 
The cover of this December 1956 issue of the American tabloid Exposed offers teasers on Kim Novak, Laurence Olivier, and Hollywood bad boy William Holden, but it's Ava Gardner who's front and center as readers learn about her mingling with Spanish bullfighters. Gardner had been introduced to the spectacle of the plaza de toros several years earlier by Ernest Hemingway, and she became a fixture at both the fights and on the Madrid social circuit. Since she was married to Frank Sinatra, this was of great interest to U.S. readers, not to mention Sinatra himself, and all the tabloids were reporting on it. The publicity didn’t help what was already a stormy marriage. Gardner eventually pursued and bedded matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, and not very discreetly. Everyone knew. Sinatra knew, and it tortured him. His buddy Humphrey Bogart rebuked Gardner, telling her, “Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet and you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and ballerina slippers.” Sinatra knew he was losing the love of his life, and he wasn't about to let it happen without a fight. He flew to Spain in a desperate bid to win his wife back, but it was no use—seven months after this Exposed hit newsstands, he and Gardner were divorced.   
Spain, Cuba, Madrid, Exposed, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Ernest Hemingway, Luis Miguel Dominguín, Humphrey Bogart, tabloid
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1953—The Rosenbergs Are Executed
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted for conspiracy to commit espionage related to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet spies, are executed at Sing Sing prison, in New York. 1928—Earhart Crosses Atlantic Ocean
American aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean, riding as a passenger in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stutz and maintained by Lou Gordon. Earhart would four years later go on to complete a trans-Atlantic flight as a pilot, leaving from Newfoundland and landing in Ireland, accomplishing the feat solo without a co-pilot or mechanic. 1939—Eugen Weidmann Is Guillotined
In France, Eugen Weidmann is guillotined in the city of Versailles outside Saint-Pierre Prison for the crime of murder. He is the last person to be publicly beheaded in France, however executions by guillotine continue away from the public until September 10, 1977, when Hamida Djandoubi becomes the last person to receive the grisly punishment. 1972—Watergate Burglars Caught
In Washington, D.C., five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. The botched burglary was an attempt by members of the Republican Party to illegally wiretap the opposition. The resulting scandal ultimately leads to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and also results in the indictment and conviction of several administration officials.
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