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Pulp International - theater
Vintage Pulp Mar 10 2022
YOUTH IN REVOLT
If you can't tame them join them.


We've been meaning to get to Untamed Youth for a long time because we know it's considered one of the cheesier movies from its era. And who can resist a quality cheese? Since it premiered today in 1957, we decided to give it a screening, and it turns out the film's reuptation is deserved. It stars Mamie Van Doren and Lori Nelson as beautiful sisters railroaded into a hicktown jail. In court, the county judge, who seems as though she'd possibly be lenient, instead sentences the sisters to thirty days of hard outdoor work on a farm. We quickly learn this is a free labor racket engineered by a wealthy rancher who pursued and married the judge, then put the idea in her head. Call it a case of private enterprise exercising undue influence over the judiciary to enable advantageous economic ends. You know—business as usual in America.

But none of that is important. What matters is that Untamed Youth is indeed one of the best bad movies we've seen. Interwoven into the plot is the theme of hipster rebellion, embodied by proto-rock music. For this reason dance parties break out at any and every moment, complete with choreography, air guitar, and bad lip synching even Milli Vanilli would be ashamed to call their own. Van Doren, with her swinging pelvis and wacky dance hands, is more like a mime than a Mame. Golf prodigy Jeanne Carmen plays the standard mean girl—whose fire goes out after one solid punch in the face from Nelson. And Eddie Cochran sings and dances through a couple of numbers, one of which, “Cotton Picker,” goes on waaay too long. The movie is so bad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 put it through the wringer back in 1990.

What makes the movie special is the dialogue, which contains too many accidental laugh lines to count. Our favorite is when John Russell, as the evil Mr. Tropp, is mentally slavering over the money he's going to make with his forced labor, and goes, “Don't you see honey? After this harvest I'll be rich. And next season, I'll be wealthy!” We also got a kick out of Pinky, the camp cook played by Wally Brown, who stops the music to make an announcement, then tells the kids it's okay to start dancing again with this jaw-dropper: “Intermission over! Back to your African antics!” Yup—these old movies often have anachronistic clunkers like that. This one is a disaster, but Van Doren, Nelson, and others shake, rattle, and roll their way through it, and you can tell they had fun. We had fun watching it, and we suspect you will too.
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Vintage Pulp Nov 4 2019
KITTY LITTER
Stray cat makes a mess all over the place.


Above is the memorable U.S. promo poster for the drama Kitten with a Whip, with blatant example of Swedish perfection Ann-Margret striking a nice pose. The plot of the film basically follows that of Wade Miller's hit novel of the same name. Ann-Margret plays a juvenile delinquent named Jody who turns up in the home of an unsuspecting man played by John Forsythe and proceeds to upend his day. Things go from bad to worse when three more delinquents show up and seem intent on wrecking Forsythe's life permanently. Ann-Margret was cast to lift her from the ranks of musicals into serious cinema, but considering the film was skewered by Mystery Science Theater 3000 we don't need to tell you the results were mixed. It's worth a watch, though. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1964.

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Vintage Pulp Jan 27 2017
THE WORKING CLASS
Just being able to survive feels like success.


Tonight the Noir City Film Festival is screening the urban drama Blue Collar, possibly the best film on the ten-day slate. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and the underrated but indispensable Yaphet Kotto star, but this is Pryor's show, his star turn. A trio of Detroit auto workers are driven by financial desperation to rob their own union hall. They end up netting three-hundred dollars. Trouble is the union, seeking insurance money, claims it was twenty thousand. The organized crime guy who backed the job isn't interested in stories about a three hundred dollar take—he's owed ten percent and that's two grand. But there's hope—the robbery also netted a notebook filled with information on illegal loans, and if Pryor and company can sell it maybe they can come out on top after all. But just how likely do you suppose that is?

Blue Collar is a brilliant work of art. Cinematic maverick Paul Schrader directed it, operating in a gritty milieu that would become his trademark. But the pressurized lives of the working class heroes are truly brought to life by the cast. Keitel studied under Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, as well as at the HB Studio, while Kotto is a guy who studied at the Actors Mobile Theater Studio and made his professional acting debut in Othello, but Pryor the stand-up comic outacted them both, using self-contained fury, razor sharp humor, and just the right amount of improvisation. The man was a once-in-lifetime talent. His comedy was fused with desperation and pain, but Hollywood tried to harness the funny Pryor and jettison the rest. It was like removing his heart. He truly shone only in serious films, where he would break high tension with moments of humanizing comedy. Blue Collar was the best of the lot.
 
By today's movie standards a couple of thousand dollars hardly seems like much to fret over. Audiences are used to crime films dealing with millions. But the small amounts here make the movie feel real. A 2016 study showed that half of adult Americans would not be able to come up with $400 in an emergency—they would have to sell something, borrow money, or not pay. Back in 1978, when Blue Collar wasmade, real wages in the U.S. were higher than they are now, so the movie depicts travails among working class people who were better off than working class people are today. Let that sink in. We think this is a perfect movie to show in San Francisco in 2017, a city overrun by tech workers contentedly pushing longtime residents out. The movie won't change anything in the city. But it will be remembered by the ticketholders at the screening.

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Vintage Pulp Dec 1 2016
SUPER STORM
There's a major front coming in.

And speaking of repeating ourselves, above you see a poster for the documentary The French Peep Show, which on this promo is called Peep Shows of Paris. Same movie though, and it starred Tempest Storm, a young exotic dancer trying to make it big with her fifty inch bust (see below). We talked about the movie last year and shared a killer poster made for its run in Japan in 1954. We suggest having a look at that. As far as the release date goes, most sources say the film first played in 1952, but IMDB says it was today in 1949 in Oakland, California. Why the discrepancy? We don't know. Meyer shot the footage at the El Rey Theater, which was in in Oakland, so perhaps IMDB knows something about the footage being projected back in ’49 before he packaged it for a wider run.

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Intl. Notebook Jul 5 2015
SEEING RED
Sugimoto heats up summer in Tokyo.


We like to keep an eye out for these cinema flyers advertising vintage pinku flicks because they usually feature imaginative reworkings of iconic imagery. In this case, Miki Sugimoto appears front and center on a flyer produced for a film festival at the Jinbōchō Theater, an arts complex comprising a theatre, cinema, and performance space opened in 2007 by Shogakukan publishers in the Jinbōchō neighborhood of Chiyoda, Tokyo. The shot of Sugimoto comes from her 1974 pinku actioner Zeroka no onna: Akai wappa, aka Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, which plays from today through the end of July on a slate with fifteen other films of the non-pinku variety.
 
The nicely designed text in the bubbles at the center of the poster says something like, “Films born from summer vacation special project cartoons,” or put another way, it's a summer festival of films whose source material were all mangas—i.e. Japanese comic books. Zeroka no onna: Akai wappa was based on a manga by Tōru Shinohara, who also wrote the manga that inspired the hit Meiko Kaji series Female Prisoner Scorpion.
 
As a side note, the Jinbōchō Theater is an amazing structure designed by acclaimed architects Nikken Sekkei, and we uploaded a shot of it so you could have a look. It's an intimate space—99 seats, which means it was made specifically for film revivals. Generally we're all about vintage stuff and preserving history, particularly fantastic old cinemas, but nothing significant was torn down to build the Jinbōchō Theater, and in a city as modern as Tokyo a structure like this fits right in. If you're a film buff and you happen to be in that region of the globe you now have something to do in July. 

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Vintage Pulp Apr 13 2015
PEEPING RUSS
Russ Meyer turns what he loves most into a career.

This rare Japanese poster promotes the American movie French Peep Show, which was boob aficionado Russ Meyer’s first sexploitation film in a long, infamous series of them. Shot at Oakland, California’s El Rey Burlesk Theater, it was ostensibly a documentary about dancer Tempest Storm’s quest to make it as a performer, but of course was really just an excuse to film a burlesque show and use the medium of cinema to export it to the masses. The film is presumed lost, which is too bad, because in addition to Storm, it featured Lily Lamont, Terry Lane, Shalimar, Marie Voe, and others. The poster is composed of three famous shots of Storm, one of which we shared a while back, the others of which you see below. You can read a bit more about French Peep Show here. It premiered in the U.S. in 1949, but reached Japan this month in 1954. 

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Intl. Notebook Apr 10 2013
LEGS FOR DAYS
Attack of the 150-foot woman.

When Michael Todd’s famed musical Mexican Hayride opened in New York City he decided to have the program art, which had been painted by the famed Peruvian arist Alberto Vargas, aka Varga, reproduced at giant scale on the billboard atop the Winter Garden Theater where the show was being staged. This photo shows Varga’s giant pin-up almost completed.

In person the matador-like figure, which is modeled after but isn’t quite a portrait of star June Havoc, was probably garbed in bright red with gold brocade, matching the colors of the program art. The reverse of the photo says: A gargantuan Varga girl, 157 feet wide and 30 feet high, has been completed atop the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway in New York. Sketches for the illustration were made by artist Varga in Chicago.

Of course, the horizontal image doesn’t look very impressive at a mere 433 pixels in width, so through the magic of Photoshop and for no other reason than we wanted to see what it looked like, we’ve reoriented the image below. There’s some egregious pixel stretching happening on the lower half of the figure, but all things considered, it looks pretty good. You can drag it to your desktop and rotate it for a better look. The photo was shot today in 1944.

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Hollywoodland Dec 5 2011
HOLLYWOOD SIGNING
Um, do I only get one shot at this, or can we smooth it over and do it again?

In this publicity photo, Russian-born actress Natalie Wood smiles after imprinting her hands, shoes and signature in fresh concrete in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Wood was the 118th personality to be thus honored, and probably the only one to do it with this particular hairstyle. That was today in 1961. 

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The Naked City Oct 14 2011
DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
Photo diagrams were used as law enforcement and legal tools, but are almost an art form in themselves.


Researching the Hazel Glab case exposed us, as we mentioned in that post, to newspaper illustrations, which in turn led us to some crime scene photo diagrams. These images were used by police, lawyers and jurors to understand the geography of crime scenes and the physics of the events. We were fascinated by the images, and when an online forum pointed us toward the Los Angeles Public Library’s online collection, we headed over there and dug into the archive. We’ve shared our finds below, with details about each crime.

Body found in L.A. River, 1949.

Girl found stabbed to death 26 December, 1936, at 721 Turner Street, with an X marking the location of her body and arrows marking the direction a car arrived and departed.

Armed robbery, 11 August, 1930, on East Pico in Los Angeles.

Armed robbery at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, with $15,000 stolen and a police officer wounded, 16 July, 1929.

This shows the crime scene after the attempted killing of gangster Mickey Cohen, with bullet holes in a parked car across the street from where Cohen was standing, 20 July, 1949.

Photo of a boy pointing to where his friend was sucked into a storm drain. The friend drowned, 1953.

1936 photo diagram showing the last movements of actress Thelma Todd, who was found dead in her car in December 1935.

Unknown and undated crime scene photo with drawing of presumed positions of assailant and victim. 

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Vintage Pulp Mar 17 2011
STICKY PROPOSITION
Mister, the only law I’m breaking right now is the one against concealment of a body, but we can fix that in a jiffy…

Above is 1953’s Beyond the Law by Edward D. Radin, an author who used several pseudonyms to write a series of true crime books, the most famous of which was probably Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story. In that one he proposed that Clarice Blackburn was the murderer, and his theory about the crime was later adapted for a 1961 episode of the television show Armstrong Circle Theater. Beyond the Law is a collection of slightly more prosaic criminal case studies, but the Rafael DeSoto cover art is just sublime, so we had to share it.

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Next Page
History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 28
1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck."
1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack.
March 27
1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
March 26
1997—Heaven's Gate Cult Members Found Dead
In San Diego, thirty-nine members of a cult called Heaven's Gate are found dead after committing suicide in the belief that a UFO hidden in tail of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that it was time to leave Earth for a higher plane of existence. The cult members killed themselves by ingesting pudding and applesauce laced with poison.
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