This beautiful poster for Vicente Minelli’s 1952 drama The Bad and the Beautiful was made for the film’s French release as Les ensorceles. A behind-the-scenes look at the rise of a legendary Hollywood producer, the story is told in triptych, with each section focused on someone the producer betrayed during his rise to the top. The three sections are wrapped in a framing device wherein the betrayed have been called together to hear the producer’s pitch for working together again. Of course, all of them are too angry to consider such a collaboration—at least at first.

Above we have the cover and a few interior pages from an October 1950 issue of Neue Wiener Melange, which is a German celeb and erotic magazine that takes its name from the phrase “Viennese blend”, a type of coffee with milk. We have to admit, the contents are a bit stimulating. You get some deft art, some demure studio nudes, and Austrian actress Vera Molnar, who starred in 1951’s A Tale of Five Cities and 1954’s Ulysses, the latter with Kirk Douglas. We have another of these and if we don’t have a lazy day we’ll scan the whole thing and post it. 

Film noir star Kirk Douglas and heavyweight director William Wyler teamed up for Detective Story, a hard-edged police procedural based on a stage play by Sidney Kingsley. In the course of a day at a typical precinct house, a tough guy detective mixes it up with all sorts of lowlifes, saving particular scorn for an abortionist. Yep, our detective is feeling pretty high and mighty until he discovers his beloved wife was once the man’s patient. Oops. This laugh-a-minute joyride, which comes off a little stagy more than half a century later but is still worth a viewing, premiered today in 1951.