Above, Marilyn Monroe on four covers of Filmski Vjesnik, or Film Journal, a Croatian language magazine from the former Yugoslavia. You may remember we showed you a great ex-yu Monroe film poster a couple of years ago. Items from Yugoslavia are highly collectible these days, so much so that a couple of these magazines were priced at $250.00. That’s a lot for a publication of any vintage, even ones from dissolved nations, but when it comes to nostalgia you can never predict what people will pay. We’ve seen similar items sell at that price. These date from 1958, 1957, 1953 and 1953, top to bottom.

Above is a poster for Isao Hayashi’s 1978 roman porno Inzetsu ama: Uzuku, which if you run across in English will be called… well, we don’t really know. Most websites that use English call it “Lewdness Woman Diver,” which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It isn’t a direct translation either, because we know that the big red characters staring you in the face say “tingling.” We also know that an ama is a female diver who traditionally foraged in the water for delicacies like sea urchins and lobsters, but these days is more famous for pearl diving.

We’re jumping right into our treasure trove of newly arrived tabloids today with a glance at this issue of The Lowdown published in March 1965. On the cover you see Jean Harlow, Carroll Baker, and Ed Sullivan. We talked about Baker recently and there she is in that crazy gown again (below)—or is she? No, on close examination this is yet another version of the dress. Clearly, the photo was shot on a different night than all the others because her hair and jewelry are different. But the actual dress also looks slightly different from both the Oleg Cassini and Pierre Balmain iterations. A reference in the story clears things up at least a little: “Transparency gowns are another of her big passions and she often wears them.” There you have it. Half naked was a fairly standard look for Carroll Baker. They just don’t make stars like they used to.

You might be curious what the article is about. On the cover the header reads: “The Night Carroll Baker Played a Call Girl,” but on the inside, it says: “The Night Carroll Baker Played a Harlot!” The story goes that she wanted to research her role as a prostitute in the movie Sylvia, so sheventured down to Tijuana, Mexico, toured a few brothels, and somehow disappeared alone for two hours: “We don’t know what happened in the house in Mexico or what sights she could have barged in on, but that is bouncy Miss Baker’s bit.” Lost in a Mexican whorehouse. The mind reels. Do we buy it? Not for a minute.

In the wee hours of the morning, Jean’s agent [Arthur] Landau received a frantic call from her asking that he come and get her immediately. When [they] got to Landau’s home, according to the agent, Jean stripped off her filmy wedding nightgown to reveal her beautiful body a mass of welts and bruises. “Her back and buttocks were covered with bruises. There was oneespecially bad bruise directly over her kidneys.” The implication here is because Harlow died several years later of kidney failure that she incurred the fatal damage during that wedding night beating. It gets weirder—brace yourselves. Landau goes to Paul Bern’s house, geared for a confrontation:

Paul had prepared himself for death by removing all his clothing and stood before the dressing room mirror. [snip] And, staring at his tormented body, he pulled the trigger. The nudity added a sexual element to his suicide that encouraged a spectrum of interpretations of his farewell note:

What was the comedy? Harlow said nothing to the press. But according to Arthur Landau, she told him Paul Bern had spent $200 on a device to increase his manhood. Wearing the contraption he had entered their bedroom intent on finally consummating their marriage. This hope was doomed from the start and the whole plan turned into such a tragic farce that both he and Jean finally gave way to hysterical laughter. That’s probably one of the sadder stories you’ll ever hear. Is it true? It appeared in a biography about Harlow, but we can never know. We can, however, at least answer the question posed by The Lowdown’s story header. No—Jean Harlow’s sex life was not hot at all.

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 a poster for the Japanese sexploitation movie Tôkyô neon chitai: Josei jishin de go shidô itashimasu, aka Tokyo Neon Zone: Lesson to You, which is pretty much in the same vein as this movie for which we showed you a poster a few weeks ago. Tôkyô neon chitai starred Rina Nagisa, Mami Sakura and Ami Takashima, and was directed by Shoichi Ikeda. Nagisa made several other pinku/roman porno flicks, all of which seem to be fairly obscure today. That is to say, we haven't been able to track down a copy of any of them. However we do have another Nigisa poster we’ll show you later. Tôkyô neon chitai: Josei jishin de go shidô itashimasu premiered in Japan today in 1977.

Above, a poster for Tatsumi Kumashiro’s 1968 sexploitation flick Kaburitsuki jinsei, aka Front Row Life, aka Life of a Striptease Love, et. al. This was Kumashiro’s first directorial effort, and it didn’t do well. Afterward, he was banished back to screenwriting and assistant directing, which is where he’d been toiling for years, but in 1972, when he was forty-five, Nikkatsu gave him a second chance and he helmed the hit roman porno Nureta kuchibiru, aka Wet Lips. Kumashiro went on to direct many successful Nikkatsu productions. Interestingly, he married his Front Row Life leading lady, Hatsue Tonooka, but they divorced after a few months. 

 

We love this. It’s a poster for Nikkatsu’s 1971 sexploitation flick Yoru no saizensen: Tôkyô onna chizu, which starred Satoko Sato and her interesting leather outfit, and was released internationally as Secret Zone of Tokyo. But that isn’t a literal translation of the Japanese title. If you glance at the bottom of the poster, the first two figures, if you’re looking left to right, say “Tokyo.” The red shape with the heart in the middle is a nifty mash-up of the two figures that make up the word “women.” And the last two figures say “map” or possibly “atlas.” Of course, in Japan reading is done right to left, but whichever direction you go, it says “Tokyo Women Map.” Which is something that we really could have used at times in the past. 

Is that Humphrey Bogart? It could be if he’d ever received a makeover. You know, spray-on tan, some blonde highlights. A head-to-toe cure de jouvence, as the French would say. Crack waxing, the whole nine. Not that we know anything about it. Anyway, whether this is Bogart 2.0 or not on the cover (which is uncredited, but very possibly was painted by that slippery devil Jacques Thibésart), we really like it. It’s from Éditions Le Globe and Éditions Le Trotteur for the collection Espions et Agents Secrets. Which is to say it’s a spy novel written by Jak Delay in 1953. After a week, it’s time to move on from France. We will have more French pulp later. 

Above is cover art for Nikou Dobry’s La griffe du démon, aka The Devil’s Claw, published 1956 for Editions de l’Arabesque’s Parme collection. Dobry published several other books, but it’s likely the name was a pseudonym. With these French pulp writers, that’s often the case. One website suggests Dobry was a person named Pruneyrol, but we got zero hits on that name, so a real identification may be hoping for too much. And the art? It’s signed simply M. Boero. With all the false and incomplete identities surrounding French mid-century literature, you’d almost think they were ashamed of their work, but remember that American authors played the same tricks. For instance, sleaze pulps were often written by moonlighting popular authors. The same is probably true with the French. But we will keep digging, and eventually we will unmask them.