He's just smart enough to start wondering if everyone is calling him "brain guy" facetiously.
As you probably guessed, Brain Guy is about someone who uses his smarts to climb the ranks of organized crime. That one-sentence synopsis is more than we managed when we wrote about the book several years ago. What can we say? We were more interested in discussing how stylishly written it is, even though it didn’t reach top levels as a complete piece of fiction. It’s remained in our memories, though, so maybe it’s better than we first thought. For what it’s worth you can read our inadequate musings at this link.
Above you see a poster for the exploitation flick La comtesse perverse, which we decided to watch because it was directed by Jesús Franco, and his films have only two outcomes, both entertaining—they’re either cult gems or total train wrecks. La comtesse perverse was originally French made, is known in English as Countess Perverse, and stars Robert Woods, Howard Vernon, and Alice Arno, the latter of whom we last saw in an issue of the tabloid Rampage. The poster gets the idea across effectively: it’s a human hunt movie, a type of exploitation that goes back to 1933’s The Most Dangerous Game, and which has been explored in films like the The Suckers, as well as various women-in-prison entries such as Frauen für Zellenblock 9—coincidentally one of Franco’s craziest efforts.
Here you get a group of people lured to the island house of a countess, played by Arno, who happens to be cannibal. We don’t mean a wild cannibal cooking hanks of dripping meat over an open fire. We mean a gourmet cannibal. A genteel wine-drinking cannibal. A Hannibal cannibal. The guests are first treated to a dinner at which they unknowingly eat human flesh, then the bad news drops that they’re the star attractions in an organized hunt. Arno is not the type of minor royalty who lets others do all her work. She’s the main hunter, dispatching prey with her trusty bow and arrows. And we sort of misspoke earlier. She’s genteel, yes, but she later goes on the hunt stripped to the skin. So she’s wild too.
Her house, by the way—and this will be a long digression—is actually a real place, an apartment building named Xanadu, located on Spain’s central Mediterranean coast, near the city of Calp. The place was designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, who created some interesting buildings, but architecture is about context as well as design, and in this case he defiled a beautiful rocky point with an Escheresque monstrosity. It’s an epidemic here in Spain, the ruining of pristine spots. Casa Xanadon’t has nice views of Calp, but viewed from the opposite direction—which nobody has a choice about—is a monument to ugly excess and an insult to people who care about beauty, nature, sharing the environment, and forging a sustainable future. That it’s central to a horror movie makes perfect sense.
Franco can likewise be said to be a maverick of ugly excess, but in the unobtrusive medium of film. With Xanadu’s exteriors and a couple of other mindbending locales to help set the mood, he revels in his favorite indulgences—everything from transgressive violence to full frontal bushes. Lina Ronay, Tania Busselier, Arno, and the other performers give Franco the total commitment he needs to make his masturbationpiece, and once again present a final product that will leave viewers divided. Do you love cheap cinema in the grindhouse vein? Then you’ll love La comtesse perverse. Do you hate undeniably shoddy cinema that people seem to adore anyway? Then stay as far away from this one as you can. Which group do we fall into? Guess. La comtesse perverse premiered in France today in 1975.
Wow, check out that house. It gives off very inviting vibes, don’t you think?
Here come our dinner guests. Should we just pan sear them like usual or get ambitious and put them in a paella?
As you can see, I’ve done all the stairwells in slaughterhouse red. I consider it a very livable color.
Usually I’m too shy to frolic nude, but I felt more body confidence after the Countess said we had barely enough meat on us to make a meal.
Is this Kobe beef?
No, but it’s a very high quality protein.
Oh, there they are. Clever girls. I almost didn’t see them. They were hiding behind their own bushes.
Above: two U.S. insert size posters for the gangster drama Johnny Eager. The top one was made for the film’s original run, which began today in 1941, while the second bears a 1950 copyright date at lower left, which means it was made for the re-release of the film that year. We wrote about this classic already, but no need to go there (unless you really want to). Just watch it. Johnny Eager is a good night’s vintage entertainment.
Above you see the cover of an issue of Action for Men published this month in 1962. We love to imagine the production meetings for these magazines. For this issue we can picture editor Noah Sarlat discussing Edwin’s Johnson’s story, “Lt. Clevenger’s Survival Hideout with Norway’s Hottest Blonde,” which is highlighted on the cover with eye-catching yellow text. We figure the story was originally titled, “Lt. Clevenger’s Survival Hideout.”
Sarlat: “Lt. Clevenger’s Survival Hideout? Boring! Add a blonde! A Norwegian blonde! A hot Norwegian blonde! I’ve got it—with Norway’s Hottest Blonde!”
The story is pretty good, with the requisite action and skin, and it comes with excellent art by Robert Stanley, whose work is easily recognizable because nobody painted women’s faces quite like him. Elsewhere there’s art by Ray Johnson and Shannon Stirnweis, and the cover was painted by James Bama. We have many other vintage men’s magazines sitting around, and hopefully we’ll be able to scan some of those soon.
Above is a dark poster for a dark movie—the drama Peine capitale. That translates from French into English as “capital punishment,” which kind of gives away the plot, no? It’s better known as Yield to the Night, as well as Blonde Sinner, and starred Diana Dors as—we suppose this means it counts as a women-in-prison flick—a killer who has a date with the hangman. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1956, but we didn’t want to wait until May to post this great piece, so we’re sharing it today, when the movie went into general release in France. The art is by someone who signed as J. Mayo, but that’s all we have on this person for now, except a few other posters we’ve found. It’s nice work. We especially like the fact that, though Dors is a bit of an abstraction, her lips are exactly correct. Have a look at the bottom of this post.
Once again we delve into Hollywood name changes, this time with née Rita MacKay, who had a pretty good name to work with, we’d say, but changed it to Rita Gam and achieved stardom. We may put together a list one day of the most interesting showbiz name changes—Diana Fluck to Diana Dors, Archibald Leach to Cary Grant, Willis Van Schaack to Lili St. Cyr, Ingeborg Klinkerfuss to Kaaren Verne, et al. We kind of just made a list there, didn’t we? Well, a longer list. Or maybe that notion will go into the giant bin of forgotten ideas for posts never brought to fruition.
The point is, in Hollywood it can help to have a catchy name. It isn’t an absolute rule, but without a cool handle some aspirants feel hobbled right from the jump. Gam jumped into television to start, managed to fit in some movies, but was more of a small screen star, appearing in shows like Mannix, The Jackie Gleason Show, and The Rockford Files. Despite a pretty extensive résumé we can’t recall seeing her in anything except the classic detective drama Klute. We’ll watch that again, because it’s good, and we’ll see what else we can dig up. These shots were made to promote the 1954 drama Night People. Gam and her gams will return.
Wow, it's unusually bloody out tonight. There's always been some slaughter, but lately the neighborhood's really gone downhill.
Victor Kalin painted this cover for Louis Falstein’s 1953 novel Slaughter Street, published by Pyramid Books. It’s excellent art, and this was an interesting book. It’s about a regular guy named Johnnie Constable who snitches the whereabouts of a wanted organized crime figure and experiences two negative results. First, the two detectives who later arrest the crook try to claim the $10,000 reward for themselves; and second, Constable comes increasingly under threat by unknown figures, presumably avatars of the mob boss, until his life, his pregnant fiancée’s life, his parents’ lives, and even those of his neighborhood friends are all at risk. He can’t even escape his block without coming under attack, and wouldn’t be able to go far without the reward money. He buys a gun, holes up in his apartment, and prepares for the worst. The narrative mostly operates as a family drama, and keeps the mob figure and police in the far background. The dual moral offered by Falstein is clear: never stick your neck out; never help the cops. This is a good, well written tale.
Above: an alternate cover for The Perfect Frame, the debut novel from William Ard (aka Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, et al). The version we read was published by Corgi Books in 1954. This edition is earlier—1952, with uncredited art.
An order of fish and chips? No, sorry, that must be next door. I'm expecting some spotted dick.
This striking Japanese poster’s large red figures—売春仕業速—translate as something like, “work fast prostitution.” Japanese posters for movies made in Britain and the U.S. sometimes also bear the original titles, and in this case you see Room 43, cleverly present in the form of a key fob. But that was just one English title. The movie is also known—and probably best known—as Passport toShame. It’s a sex work drama starring the inimitable Diana Dors. We discussed it here. Oh, and for any who don’t know, spotted dick is a type of British dessert that to the rest of the world would be considered a cake. Dors, being British, would have found the dick mouthwatering. Passport toShame premiered in 1958 and reached Japan today in 1962.
Two craggy middle-aged guys that go great together.
There are movies, and there are beloved movies. We first saw the Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds vehicle City Heat a long time ago, and it’s been a go-to evening for us since, something we screen every several years. While a comedy, it’s also a period piece set during the Great Depression, thus it falls comfortably within the pulp era and is, doubly, an action flick with plenty of fights, gunfire, and general mayhem. In a similar way as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it tries to push hard-boiled detective tropes to absurd extremes, while wearing a pervasive love for those ideas on its sleeve.
Reynolds plays a low-rent private dick named Mike Murphy who tries to solve a murder, but gets caught between organized crime, the police, and his personal obligations. As we said a while back, anything with Reynolds is worth watching, and this features him at his smart-mouthed best. Eastwood, as Reynolds’ police lieutenant frenemy Speer, mostly channels a 1935 version of Magnum Force, portraying with grim-countenanced perfection the one man in the department with whom nobody in their right mind wants to tangle.
For fans of vintage crime fiction or film noir, City Heat is a must. The slapstick-adjacent fistfights alone—of which there are many—are reason enough to queue it up. With Reynolds carrying the bulk of the film using his incandescent charm, and with contributions from an iconic movie dick in the form of Shaft star Richard Roundtree, plus comic relief from Madeline Kahn, all your bases are covered here. If you know what’s good for you you’ll watch it. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1984.
The Downtown Athletic Club in New York City awards its first trophy for athletic achievement to University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger. The prize is later renamed the Heisman Trophy, and becomes the most prestigious award in college athletics.
1968—Japan's Biggest Heist Occurs
300 million yen is stolen from four employees of the Nihon Shintaku Ginko bank in Tokyo when a man dressed as a police officer blocks traffic due to a bomb threat, makes them exit their bank car while he checks it for a bomb, and then drives away in it. Under Japanese statute of limitations laws, the thief could come forward today with no repercussions, but nobody has ever taken credit for the crime.
1965—UFO Reported by Thousands of Witnesses
A large, brilliant fireball is seen by thousands in at least six U.S. states and Ontario, Canada as it streaks across the sky, reportedly dropping hot metal debris, starting grass fires, and causing sonic booms. It is generally assumed and reported by the press to be a meteor, however some witnesses claim to have approached the fallen object and seen an alien craft.
1980—John Lennon Killed
Ex-Beatle John Lennon is shot four times in the back and killed by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota apartment building in New York City. Chapman had been stalking Lennon since October, and earlier that evening Lennon had autographed a copy of his album Double Fantasy for him.
1941—Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor
The Imperial Japanese Navy sends aircraft to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its defending air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While the U.S. lost battleships and other vessels, its aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and survived intact, robbing the Japanese of the total destruction of the Pacific Fleet they had hoped to achieve.
