V magazine from France, published February 8, 1948, with a photo-illustration of an almost unrecognizable young Marilyn Monroe on the cover. 

3-D pin-up book with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. If her outfit looks familiar, that's because it’s pretty much identical to the one she was wearing in those amazing shots we posted Christmas Eve, right down to the shoes, except everything is red instead of blue. So, what exactly do 3-D pin-ups look like? Let's just say it's a good thing Avatar isn't this blurry.

The Asphalt Jungle is half a century old, but remains one of the best procedural heist films ever made. The men who commit the robbery at the center of this movie come from all walks of life—some are perennial losers, others are opportunists, and others are just having a hard time and need a way out. All of them long for better lives. All desperately need the money to get there. These footmen, facilitators, and financial backers plan every aspect of a lucrative heist, but the caper begins falling apart almost immediately, due to back luck, mistrust, and greed. Sterling Hayden, who we’ve mentioned before, is incendiary in the lead, exuding extreme menace but with a hint of recognizable humanity behind the eyes. One of his best moments comes in a brief but exquisitely choreographed shooting involving a thrown valise. All of this takes place under the sure hand of legendary director John Huston, working from a 1949 book by William Riley Burnett. Burnett was a bit of a legend himself. He was a prolific crime novelist who wrote the source material for Little Caesar, Scarface, and High Sierra, and whose screenplays include This Gun for Hire, I Died a Thousand Times, and Nobody Lives Forever. Put Burnett, Huston and Hayden together (not to mention James Whitmore, Jean Hagen, Sam Jaffe, and a young Marilyn Monroe in a small role as a rich man's plaything) and you get exactly what you’d expect—a genre classic that transcends its boundaries and becomes instead a piece of high art. The film was a major hit that wowed audiences worldwide. At top you see the Italian promo art, and below that we have both the hardback and paperback cover art. The Asphalt Jungle opened as Giungla di asfalto in Italy today in 1951.

Publicity images are used for multiple purposes, and today we have a 1954 promo shot of Marilyn Monroe that was also used for a post card, which you see just below. Under that we have other shots from the session, reversed. One of those reversed versions appeared later that year on an Israeli magazine, partnered with a shot of Mamie Van Doren. And finally the truly priceless version, featuring Marilyn flipped back around again and slightly slenderized, was used on the breathtaking Japanese promo poster at bottom. There are thousands of Monroe images in existence, but this poster is one of the most rare. Enjoy it, and enjoy Christmas too. 

An American artifact collector is generating quite a buzz with an image of a smoking Marilyn Monroe he recently put up for auction on Ebay. According to owner Keya Morgan, the image, which is printed from an 8-millimeter film clip dating from the late 1950s, shows Monroe partaking in a little illegal pot smoking. Morgan acquired the film for a planned documentary about Monroe’s later years, a turbulent time during which the actress turned increasingly to pills and booze. While Monroe does indeed look blissed out in the footage, the only actual evidence she was smoking weed comes from the former owner of the clip, who says he knows it was marijuana because he gave it to her. While neither his claim nor the footage would hold up in court, we have much lower standards of proof at Pulp Intl. and we’re convinced. You can check out the clip here (we chose MSNBC because we absolutely love watching terminally unfunny news hacks try to joke about something they know less than zero about, but for those who can’t stomach such lame grandstanding, here’s a You Tube link which comes with its own perils—it's already been set to music). Enjoy.   

Marilyn Monroe, 1962.      

The publishers of The Lowdown went for titillation overload on this screamingly bright November 1961 cover, managing to hit several of the hot button issues of the day, from birth control to lesbianism. Frank Sinatra gets the star treatment here, and The Lowdown actually gets one right—Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe (bottom left) were involved in 1961, around the same time her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio (second from left) was growing concerned about the people around her and asked her to remarry him in hopes of stabilizing her life. Was Sinatra one of the people DiMaggio distrusted? Perhaps, but Monroe said no to Joe's proposal and was dead the next year. As for Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot (bottom right), we can’t find any references to the two being involved, but they did meet during 1959 to discuss co-starring in a film to be helmed by Bardot’s ex-husband Roger Vadim (second from right). After the three of them talked about the project for a couple of days the idea fell through because Bardot didn’t want to work in Hollywood and Sinatra didn’t want to work in Paris. Did Sinatra and Bardot manage to sneak off for some international relations? We tend to doubt it—in addition to traveling with her ex-husband Vadim (who surely would have frowned on her cheating), she was married to actor/producer Jacques Charrier. Still, you can’t really put anything past Sinatra. But short of reading every Hollywood tell-all ever published, we just can’t say whether he and Bardot got together. The Lowdown hints yes, but take it for what it’s worth.  

The Monroe story is equally fascinating. When she was making the film Something’s Got To Give, she was supposed to appear in a swimming scene wearing the usual flesh-colored body stocking to conceal her lady parts. Monroe had caused problems on many sets by then, and her reputation was in tatters. When the time came to shoot the scene, she did it totally nude, with publicity photographers and a full crew present. Theevent caused a sensation, and seemed to signal a renewed focus from Marilyn to reclaim her status as America’s top sex symbol. Sadly, it was the last splash she ever made—she was dead before the film was finished. But a precedent had been reestablished—for the first time since the Hayes Code, actresses were showing skin. Soon, Hollywood males would be doing the same. In less than a decade the human body would be fully uncovered on film, and there was no putting it back under wraps.     

It had a classic premise: two Jazz Age musicians witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and have to flee Chicago before the Mafia massacres them too. They disguise themselves as women and hide as members of an all-female musical troupe. One of the men, played by Tony Curtis, falls in love with fellow musician Marilyn Monroe but can’t reveal his gender; the other man, played by Jack Lemmon, is pursued by a rich and persistent suitor who thinks he’s found the woman of his dreams. It was called Some Like It Hot, and it was the type of absurd adventure only a confident veteran like Billy Wilder could have directed. He used all of his experience to coax top-notch acting out of a troubled Marilyn Monroe, who needed twenty to thirty takes to get some of the scenes right. In the end you’d hardly notice—her performance as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk looks effortless, as does those of Curtis and Lemmon as the two bickering buddies running for their lives. The final result was an award-winning comedy that even fifty years later has the power to deliver out-loud laughs. Above you see the film’s German promo art, which in our humble opinion is a masterwork in its own right. Some Like It Hot premiered in West Berlin today in 1959.

A-list Hollywood celebrities have traditionally made a little extra coin by allowing their faces to be attached to products in Japan. With even a cursory web search you can find images of George Clooney and Cameron Diaz being used as shills for cars, booze, and stereo equipment. That kind of exposure would damage a star’s brand in the U.S., but in Japan no such consequences exist. Still, we didn’t realize just how far back the tradition went until we ran across these vintage ads for Opera lipstick. Unfortunately, our movie star recognition skills are a bit rusty today, which means we can only place Marilyn Monroe and Ingrid Bergman. Any ideas on the face in panel two? Shoot us an e-mail with the subject line: How on Earth can you fail to recognize... and tell us who she is.