| Femmes Fatales | Nov 11 2020 |
She was a very intriguing star.
Swedish actress, director, and screenwriter Ingrid Thulin perches on a chair in this blonde on black promo image from 1956. She's best known for appearing in several Ingmar Bergman movies, including 1957's Smultronstället, also known as Wild Strawberries. Interestingly, Thulin guested on a U.S. spy series called Foreign Intrigue in 1954 and 1955, and the next year co-starred in the spy thriller Foreign Intrigue with Robert Mitchum, a movie that was unrelated to the television show despite its identical title. We guess the casting agent must have been like, “So, Ingrid, can you be intriguing? Just kidding. I see on your credits that you've been there, done that, so you're hired.”
| Intl. Notebook | Oct 30 2020 |
When is a monster not scary? When it's a guy in a latex suit.
Maybe yesterday's Halloween themed post was a bit too grim. After all, it's a kid's holiday. So, continuing along the same lines but with less macabre realism, above and below we have a collection of monsters (full disclosure: some are actually monster-fighting good guys) culled from 1970s Japanese television and shlock cinema. There are hundreds of these from the period, but we restricted ourselves to twenty. You may recognize a few. For example, we tossed Hedorah, aka the Smog Monster, into the mix just for fun. You can definitely impress friends and the general public if you dress up as one of these ferocious entities. That'll have to wait until next year, though. Which is actually good, because it would probably take that long just to put one of these get-ups together. Most of these are a bit ridiculous, so theoretically they shouldn't give anyone nightmares. Then again, that's what they say about clowns.
| Hollywoodland | Oct 14 2020 |
I call this one Robbie, the second one Chip, and the third one... well I forget. But they're all great!
Above are three promo photos of U.S. actor Fred MacMurray, two from his film noir Singapore, and one of unknown provenance. While MacMurray made his name in deadly serious films such as Double Indemnity and Pushover, many fans remember him better as the affable father from the television series My Three Sons, on which he starred from 1960 until 1972, as the show chronicled the life of a widower and his three sons Robbie, Chip, and Mike. Why was he a widower? We don't think it's ever revealed, but perhaps a firearms “accident” had something to do with it.
| Femmes Fatales | Oct 14 2020 |
I'd like a medium pizza, thin crust, with mice, birds, and extra cheese.
Julie Newmar has some catnip, comes down with a case of the munchies, and uses her special cat phone to get some food delivered to the crib in this trippy promo shot from the television series Batman. She played the iconic villainess known as the Catwoman, guest starring on the show in 1966 and ’67.
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 17 2020 |
In today's forecast there's a thirty percent chance of radioactive rain.
These two covers from Badger Books with art by Henry Fox and uncredited (probably Fox again) serve as an addendum to our collection of covers featuring nuclear explosions. Author Karl Zeigfreid is an interesting figure. He was really British stage, television, and radio actor Lionel Fanthorpe. As Zeigfreid and other personae he wrote more than one hundred paperbacks, and is still churning them out, with his most recent effort hitting shelves (or online sellers) last year. He published both of the above books in 1963, as well as several others that hit on themes of mass death and apocalyptic destruction and searing heat and melty skin and bloody vomiting and burned out eyeballs. Always keeping it light here at Pulp Intl. Still, it's useful to be reminded occasionally that the threat of nuclear conflict remains high, because humans are bad at sharing, particularly when it comes to planetary resources. Despite all the supposedly complex reasons for geopolitical conflict, the reality is the adults of our species are no better than children. Well, let's hope the melty eyes thing never happens. Then you wouldn't be able to see our website.
| Femmes Fatales | Apr 27 2020 |
There's a new sheriff on the planet.
This photo has sort of ’50s sci-fi look, but it's actually from the 1980s and shows Japanese actress Naomi Morinaga as the character Annie from Uchû keiji Shaider, aka Space Sheriff Shaider, which aired on Japanese television for one season straddling 1984 and 1985. Morinaga played other roles, but Space Sheriff, which also spawned two movies, a video game, and a video short, is her legacy. By the way, Japan is truly the place for space guns. In fact, we did an entire post on them, though it was so long ago you've probably never seen it. But it's here, if you're interested.
| Femmes Fatales | Apr 15 2020 |
Come at me bro. These hands have broken better men than you.
U.S. actress Katie Saylor strikes a martial arts pose in this promo photo from 1977. Saylor had a minor career, appearing in a few cheeseball classics, including The Swinging Barmaids, Dirty O'Neil, and Invasion of the Bee Girls. She also acted on television, and this shot was made as a promo for her role as the half-alien Liana in the series The Fantastic Journey. You can sometimes find episodes of the show on YouTube, so if quarantine is making you daring with regard to your viewing choices, consider that an option.
The Swinging BarmaidsDirty O'NeilInvasion of the Bee GirlsThe Fantastic JourneyKatie Saylortelevision
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 1 2020 |
No time to wallow in the mire.
Above is a poster for the Roger Corman produced b-movie Swamp Women, which starred Marie Windsor, Carole Matthews, Beverly Garland, and Mike Connors, the latter acting under the name Touch Connors. Connors was Armenian-American and thought—correctly, we suspect—that his real name Krekor Ohanian wasn't going to help his show business career. He accumulated at least twenty credits as Touch Connors before he jettisoned it and eventually became the guy everyone remembers from the cop show Mannix.
In Swamp Women Connors plays an oil prospector boating around the Louisiana bayou who stumbles across a group of escaped female convicts searching for a stash of diamonds. Among their number is an undercover police woman charged with finding the stones and apprehending the group. It's fully as ridiculous as it sounds, and with Corman at the helm you know it's cheap, too. Plus this was only his fourth full directing gig. But we give him credit—he really made his cast slog through the Louisiana mire, which means you get realism to offset the use of stock footage.
The thing about Corman is that he always did more with less. But despite his particular set of skills, the script here hamstrings any attempt at making a decent flick. As an example of what we mean, Mike Connors doesn't go into the swamp alone. He takes his girlfriend with him, and she's eaten by an alligator. Hours later he's smooching the undercover policewoman. Not as part of a ruse or escape attempt. Just because he digs her. His girlfriend was a gold digging pain in the ass, but still, you'd think seeing her ripped to pieces would cool his ardor. But they don't call him Touch Connors for nothing. Plenty more fish in the bayou.
If you look on Wikipedia Swamp Women is classified as a film noir. That's purely comical. It's a proto-exploitation flick along the lines of what American International Pictures would routinely do fifteen years later with more skin and better efx. By the time the swamp women finally reach the site of the hidden diamonds and dig up a box, you'll be hoping they open it and find a new script and more investment money. But no such luck. Corman would do better later. Windsor, Matthews, and Garland had done better in the past. That's show business—one day you're at the top, the next you're sinking in the bog. Swamp Women premiered in the U.S. today in 1956.
ArmeniaLouisianaSwamp WomenMannixKrekor OhanianMike ConnorsTouch ConnorsMarie WindsorCarole MatthewsBeverly Garlandposter artcinematelevisionmovie review
| Femmes Fatales | Mar 21 2020 |
There's never a bad time to get into high spirits.
Above is Romanian actress Lisa Ferraday doing a little day drinking, which everywhere outside the U.S. is known as simply having a drink, something we might do ourselves in a minute or two to break up the quarantine boredom. Ferraday was an actress in all four media—radio, stage, television, and cinema. In terms of movies, she appeared in such efforts as I Was an American Spy and Death of a Scoundrel. This particular photo was made when she was filming the musical The Merry Widow in 1952.
| Femmes Fatales | Mar 13 2020 |
She surfed a wave that lasted four decades.
The wonderful surfing themed photo you see here shows Japanese actress, model, and singer Maria Anzai, who debuted in show business in 1973, and that year won the Japan Record Grand Prize Newcomer Award. As an actress she appeared in a handful of television shows and two movies, one of which was Rupan Sansei: Nenriki chin sakusen, which in English had the amazing title Lupin the Third: Strange Psychokinetic Strategy.
Obviously with such a slight filmography, the wave we suggest she caught isn't her film career. Nor are we referencing her music work, though she was quite popular for awhile. That leaves only her modeling. Anzai, like luminaries such as Rita Moreno and Helen Mirren, looked amazing until a very late age. The photo above appeared in 1975, when she was twenty-two, but below you see her aged fifty-plus, in two shots published in a photo book devoted entirely to her called Dear M.
The cover text says something like, “The legendary diva also had a legendary body.” We should say so. Even if you factor in a little photo retouching she looks great. She even outlasted Japan's 1970s-era censorship of pubic hair and was able to go full frontal in the new millennium. But where her beauty genes were excellent, other genes may not have been—she died only two years after Dear M. was released, victim of a heart attack. You can see another image of her next-to-last in this group of magazine covers we posted several years back.
JapanRupan Sansei: Nenriki chin sakusenLupin the Third: Strange Psychokinetic StrategyDear M.Maria Anzai安西マリアtelevisionnudity
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