vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Here’s yet another entry in our ever expanding collection of office titles—Coast to Coast by Walter Ross. This one isn’t a sleaze novel, but the cover illustration makes it look that way. We couldn’t figure out who painted it at first, but then we saw a signature under the “electricity” in the blurb. It says “Meese,” as in James Meese. Feel free to compare the signature here or here.
Tolle Texasgirls would translate as “great Texas girls,” but the movie that was promoted by this poster was originally made in the U.S. as Outlaw Women. The art here is by Heinz Bonné, and nice work it is. The film is a harmless popcorn muncher about an Old West town run by tough women and coveted by scheming men, worth a laugh if you’re of a certain mood. Which is to say it’s chauvinistic but good natured, like your kind but dumb uncle. You can read more here.
Prostitution was an obsession with mid-century publishers and moviemakers. We keyword for it on Pulp Intl., and if you click that link you’ll be directed to interminable diversion. This low-rent cover for Jan Bennett’s sleazer Night Women adds to the always growing subject. It came from Magenta Books in 1965, with art by an unknown. A few of our favorite prostie paperback covers are (yes, we’re going to link yet again to both Avenue of Pimps and Street of Ho’s) here, here, and here.
It’s winter in the south of Spain, which means rain, not cold (45°F is considered an ordeal here). But heavy precipitation is just as effective at keeping us indoors, and that means lots of movies—as you may have noticed. These two posters were made for the Japanese run of an Italian film called Mission speciale Lady Chaplin, and in English, Operation Lady Chaplin. This one surprised us. It’s low budget, but high budget within that tier. Which is to say that while it suffers from the same performance issues as other ’60s spy flicks that aren’t James Bond, it has nice exteriors shot in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, has reasonably convincing special effects, and even uses real helicopters. We learned after watching it that it’s the third and last of a series of films starring Ken Clark as secret agent 077. So with an audience baked in, it makes sense that real money was spent.
The movie, though, is named for Daniela Bianchi’s fashionista and professional killer Lady Arabella Chaplin. You may remember Bianchi from the Bond flick From Russia with Love. Mission speciale Lady Chaplin feels like her frontline reward for being a memorable Bond girl. She’s as much the star as Clark, and her interplay with him is pure Bond—first adversarial and suspiscious, then increasingly flirtatious. The two cross paths because she’s part of a plot to steal ten ballistic missiles, which are to be sold to the highest bidder. Somewhere in there—maybe it’s that good Clark lovin’—she starts to rethink her participation. If you’re going to watch a Bond knock-off, and it isn’t Deadlier Than the Male (also about stolen missiles, by the way), this may be the one to chose. After premiering in Italy in August 1966, it opened in Japan today in 1968.
Above are three beautiful posters for the horror movie Dracula, which premiered today in 1931. They’re usually credited to Karoly Grosz, but all we know for sure is that he oversaw their creation. He was Universal Pictures’ advertising art director, helped produce at least seven posters to promote the film, and had final say over each. He could have painted these, but a subordinate also could have, or they could be collaborative. In the past we thought the middle poster was signed “GB” at its lower right, but now we aren’t sure. However they were produced they’re great, among the most memorable U.S. promos ever distributed.
Dracula is a movie that—admit it—you’ve never seen. Or maybe you have. If so, apologies. But if not, this post is for you. Dracula isn’t the first vampire movie, but it’s possibly the most important. There are Nosferatu backers out there, and you don’t want to tangle with them. They’ll just say, “Which came first? Case closed!” We’re going to sidestep the debate. In fact, we already did by using the word “possibly”. So—Dracula. Should you spend your hard-won free time on it?
The film’s motifs have been bitten everywhere ranging from video games to The Simpsons, so parts of it may amuse you, but if you strap on your 1930s brain you’ll realize how macabre it must have been for audiences of a century ago, as Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula arranges through his solicitor Renfield to travel from Transylvania to England, where he has leased Carfax Abbey and plans to ravage the country. Everyone is prey, from little girls to the bedazzled Lucy Weston (Lucy Westenra in the novel), but of course his obsession is with Mina Seward (Mina Harker in the novel). You know the story.
Dracula author Bram Stoker died in 1912. His widow Florence signed off on a stage play of the novel, and it was unveiled to the public in 1924. By 1927 it was on Broadway, where the starring role had been taken by Bela Lugosi. He was therefore a natural choice for the screen adaptation, which director Tod Browning expanded from the stage version by adding more scope from the novel. But even with a widened narrative it’s still a 1930s movie—it’s static, stagily acted, has no soundtrack apart from the credits, and particularly absent are the musical stings that are so much a part of horror cinema—how can you be scared unless the music tells you to?
But we think it’s scary because—well, it’s scary. Renfield is mysteriously summoned to a cobwebby old castle on some wuthering height and there are hovering bats, massive spiderwebs, and scuttling armadillos. That’s scary. The wolves howling in the distance are scary. Count Dracula and his mascara enhanced stare are scary. Seeing Renfield crawl across the floor toward a helpless Mina is scary. Dracula definitely doesn’t suck. In 2026 it merely requires good faith suspension of disbelief. If you’re willing to do that the chills will come, and the film will be time well spent. And if you disagree—there’s always Nosferatu.
Above: a promo of French actress Mylène Demongeot made for her 1967 movie Fantômas contre Scotland Yard, known in English as Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard. It was the last of three Fantômas films she made about the famous thief created way back in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. We’ve seen none of them but we’re going to remedy that soon.
Here’s something we’ve had around for a while. You’ll see versions of this Star Wars poster elsewhere, but with “Darth Vader” printed on it in big letters—like you need to be told. Many vendors claim their posters are originals from 1977. Maybe, maybe not, but this one is the real thing (though Star Wars opened in Japan in 1978). You can tell it’s real because its price of ¥820 appears at lower right. That detail went away not long after the poster’s first run. It’s a nice piece of art, and an entertaining symbol of good eventually triumphing over evil, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
They don’t write ’em like this anymore. Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart was originally published in 1953, with this Panther edition coming in 1960, fronted by uncredited cover art. The book is a tale of Hollywood filmmaking, African big game hunting, and personal conflict.
Viertel writes in first person about a central character named John Wilson, who is a thinly disguised stand-in for real life director John Huston. Viertel and Huston had met in the film industry and been friends for years, but during the making of the classic Humphrey Bogart/Katherine Hepburn adventure The African Queen their friendship disintegrated. The book describes the way and how of that split, but also discusses Viertel’s longstanding reservations about someone he called a friend. He describes his Wilson invention this way:
Things that happened to me always simmered down and became mild little adventures, hardly worth remembering. Things that happened to Wilson exploded. [snip] Some of my friends … ascribed his wild, troubled life directly to his personal mania for destruction and disaster, but these generalizations always seemed inaccurate to me, for although he certainly contributed to the trouble that always sprang up around him, I cannot believe that he caused it all. Violent, irresponsible personalities seem to attract similar personalities and very often it is hard to put your finger on who is cause and who is effect.
Sounds like someone we know very well. Such a person can be a challenge to know, even more so to call a friend, but you get something in return, which is adventures normal people can’t dream of. It’s here that we’d like to go into one or two of our many unbelievable Guatemala stories, but we’ll spare you this time. Our point is that Viertel comes across as a bit of a killjoy. Huston was older than him by fourteen years, so an equal relationship was probably never in the cards. Viertel sounds reasonable in his criticisms, but also just a smidge jealous:
There have been a great many imitations of his style of living. Actors, writers, and even producers have occasionally tried what he did day in and day out and they have all ended badly: in jail or in hock or as recipients of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Perhaps they lacked his talent, but I don’t think that is it. I think they lacked the magic, almost divine ability he had to land on his feet.
Huston didn’t address White Hunter, Black Heart directly (the Clint Eastwood film adaptation came out after he died), but in his 1980 tell-all An Open Book he mentions an unnamed biography and calls it largely untrue. Huston was one of the first Hollywood figures we ever admired, so we’re predisposed to believe him over Viertel. But it doesn’t matter. Few of these wild stories and bitter recriminations are ever sorted out to the extent that the facts are definitively known. In the end, White Hunter, Black Heart is an excellent book, and its lesson may be this: never piss off a writer.
As long as we’re on Africa, here’s another beautiful poster for the adventure Mogambo, which starred Glark Gable as an archetypal amoral game hunter, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly as the women competing for his affection. We wrote about it here, and shared two interesting Italian posters here. The above effort is by the Spanish artist Jano, who was really Francisco Fernández Zarza-Pérez. It’s amazing to us that major European markets nearly always received their own posters. Generally, Spain, France, West Germany, and Italy had different promo art, and versions made especially for Sweden, Belgium, and the former Yugoslavia were common too. Sharing this art is always a pleasure.
Above: a cover painted by Ray Pease for Lucy Herndon Crockett’s 1954 novel The Magnificent Bastards, a war drama set in New Caledonia, dealing largely with a war widow’s hook-up with a colonel who degrades and mistreats her. It was well reviewed. David Dempsey of the New York Times wrote: I know of no novel to come out of the war that so honestly illuminates the relationship between men in combat and the women who are sent out to bolster their morale. This is a tragedy for which Red Cross coffee and doughnuts are no balm. Miss Crockett has caught its essence with honesty and compassion. Crockett was a Red Cross veteran, so when it came to war and human relations she knew what she was writing about. War novels are the least enticing type of books out there for us, so we won’t be reading this, but it sounds interesting.
The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.
In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
