Above, a 1939 program for legendary Broadway showman Billy Rose’s extravaganza Aquacade, and four late-1930s programs from Casa Mañana. The Aquacade was a music, dance and swimming show that began in 1937 at the Great Lakes Exposition, later moved to New York City, and featured notables like Duke Ellington, Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams. Casa Mañana was a club Rose opened in Fort Worth, Texas in 1936. Built specifically to host his aquatic productions, the venue contained a revolving stage surrounded by a moat. So many landmark mid-century clubs have met the wrecking ball, but Casa Mañana still exists today, though the original stage is gone. 

This is one of the most common images on the Internet, but we’ve posted it anyway because it is, to our eyes, quintessentially pulp. Twenty-three-year-old Evelyn McHale jumped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building after breaking up with her fiancée. She wrote and then crumpled a note that said she "wouldn’t make a good wife anyway." A high fall will result in a catastrophic impact, crushing and often dismembering a human body, but McHale landed on the roof of a limousine, a soft surface (compared to concrete) which accounts for her intact appearance, remarked upon by Life: The body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier. She jumped yesterday in 1947. 

We found two nice covers for Murderer's Holiday by Donald Henderson Clarke, one from the original hardback (left), and one from the Avon paperback published in 1951. Clarke is not what you'd call well-known now, but during his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s he was one of the most popular pulp authors, writing a number of risqué thrillers, and seeing five of them adapted for the screen. He was born in the Northeast and became a journalist in New York City, where he socialized with some of Manhattan’s shadier characters, including Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, who is thought to be the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Rothstein was murdered in 1928, and the next year Clarke published a biography entitled In the Reign of Rothstein. This was the book that really launched his literary career, leading to bestsellers like Millie and The Impatient Virgin. There isn’t much info on Clarke out there, but we’re going to dig up more.

The original King Kong took cinema by storm with its tale of a fantastic lost world, and its revolutionary visual effects. It also had the most consistently wonderful promo posters of possibly any film in history. All were great, but the best, in our opinion, is the version made for the world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, above. The numerous other versions are below, and all are stunning. King Kong, one of the most enduring movies ever made, opened in New York City today in 1933. 

You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it. In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA. In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He wrote screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also became a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read. 

We just saw this movie for the first time a few months ago and it falls squarely into the category: could-not-be-made-today. That doesn’t automatically make it good, but it just so happens this is a pretty good flick. You’ve got a young, intense Al Pacino, noirish direction from William Friedkin of Exorcist fame, and a story focused on sex, drugs, and violence. Basically, Pacino plays a cop who goes undercover in New York City’s gay BDSM subculture. He’s looking for a killer, which requires him to play the role of an available, leather-clad party boy. But there’s deep cover, and then there’s deep cover. When you cross the line trouble always results. The art above comes from a promotional pamphlet, and it conveys the mood of the film quite nicely. We recommend it, with a reservation—if you’re progressive-minded, you’ll probably hate it. But you know that going in. Whenever Hollywood portrays a so-called subculture for a genre flick, it’s an affront to those being portrayed, whether gay, Chinese, black, female, religious, Texan, environmentalist, Iraqi, or what have you. Could Hollywood make films that portrayed all these segments of society in only positive terms? Sure, but who’d go see them? So bring on the action, and we’ll deal with the caricatures by agreeing that they’re just living cartoons, designed to offer some thrills and chills. Cruising premiered in the U.S. today in 1980. 

We’re starting 2010 out right, with an absolutely amazing poster from an equally amazing film. At least, we think it’s amazing. Reactions to Chilean-born director Alexandro Jodorowski’s El Topo run the gamut—some hail it as high art; other think it’s a pretentious and garbled mess. However, it’s undeniable that the film hails from a much more daring cinematic era. It’s also one of the first true midnight films, gaining popularity during its 1970 Stateside run among New York City’s artsy, nocturnal filmgoing crowd after a slow start in conventional release. Basically, El Topo ("topo" means "mole" in Spanish, but is used as slang to describe an awkward person) is a western, but it’s also a commingling of Biblical and eastern religion themes. Doesn’t that sound fun? The two halves of the film have different flavors, and this tends to turn off some viewers. Jodorowski confessed that a couple of important transitional shots got ruined and were never replaced. Add in all the nudity, dwarves, and random events, and it’s easy to think of the film as sloppy. But what isn’t sloppy is the Italian poster by Enrico de Seta, one of the true masters of cinema promo art, who we’ll be featuring again in the future. In the meantime, we recommend a viewing of El Topo. It’s a unique vision by a singular filmmaker—grand, violent, disturbing, and most of all, pulp. 

The above cover can be interpreted a couple of ways. It’s possible the man is the hero, and he’s trying to lead the women on an escape from prison, but it seems more likely he’s just a coward who, in his terror, is about to drag the women to their doom. The metaphors go deep, but whatever the case, we love the art. Adventure began publishing in 1910, and was home to many respected artists and authors, not least among them novelist Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (he had won the Pulitzer earlier but declined it). While he was an editor at Adventure he helped create a novelty identity card that was included in issues of the magazine. Readers carried the card, and if they were killed, whoever found the card would notify the magazine, who would in turn notify the reader’s next of kin. The idea was a flight of pure fancy, but also a stroke of genius, and the cards became such a powerful idea that a group of reader-travelers formed the Adventurers Club of New York in 1912. That club led to similar clubs being formed in other cites. A cursory check on the trusty interweb reveals that at least one—the Los Angeles chapter—survives today, so if the magazine cover has inspired you, there’s a place you can meet with like-minded types. Who knows? With a little effort and good fortune, maybe you’ll get to escape from prison on a bed sheet yourself one day.     

Above are three covers by realist illustrator James Bama, featuring his trademark grimy walls. Even more than walls, Bama loves the crossed leg pose, which he also used on his famous cover for Midnight Cowboy. Bama was born and raised in Manhattan, and you can see his keen eye for urban detail in these pieces, but interestingly, he moved to Wyoming and became a leading painter of western-themed art. In fact, he was inducted into the Illustrator’s Hall of Fame because of his western art. But we prefer the citified Bama. The realism and immediacy of his early paintings is unmatchable. These are three of the best examples.