 Poke around inside National Informer and there's no telling what you'll find. 
Today we have another National Informer from a water damaged batch we rescued last year. This issue delivers the usual goods—or bads, depending on your point of view—including breast fondling techniques for men, sex fantasies women are ashamed to talk about, and why married couples should consider the “pro's and con's” of swapping. With all the sex stories here, the few attempts to be a real newspaper come across as jokes, such as when editors pose the question of whether hot dogs cause cancer. Hot dogs? What next? An exposé on the annual Chicopee Kielbasa Festival? Stick to what you're good at, we say. And Informer is good at smut.
Of the smut in this issue, we're partial to the centerspread article on sex resorts. Informer reports that this is a growing trend in the liberal European countries, then claims even Africa is getting in on the act: “There is a little country called Gambia, in West Africa, that has only 300,000 people, three hotels, and a growing tourist boom. The big attraction about Gambia is that the government officially closes its eyes to all goings-on. That's why Gambia has become the IN place for Swedes who come to frolic nude along its sparking white beaches.”
Gambia as a Swede swinger's paradise circa 1972 is news to us, but checking online, it certainly looks worth a visit. White beaches? Plenty of those. White people? Thin on the ground. Perfect, because we prefer friendly locals any day of the week over hoards of backpack lugging foreigners. Elsewhere in Informer, one of the issue's models looks familiar. Didn't the woman in the ad directly below appear—frontally nude with a Mona Lisa smile—in Informer's October 1972 issue? Decide for yourself. We have eighteen scans below and many more tabloids to share going forward. If you like this sort of thing check our tabloid index at this link.                 
 Never try to copy the uncopyable. 
U.S. born actress Barbara Lang was one of many actresses promoted as a Marilyn Monroe type, but it was wishful thinking. She only looked like Monroe in shots like this upnose angle from a 1957 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promo. However, Lang was beautiful and talented in her own right and went on to star mainly on television, including on series such as 77 Sunset Strip and The Thin Man. After a short career and a turbulent personal life she died in Los Angeles in 1982 aged fifty-four.
 Hmm. Should I be mostly impossible me today, or should I go with completely intolerable me? 
In real life everyone has secrets, and they're almost always pointless and tawdry. Not true in mid-century literature, where the secrets are always deadly. In 1950's False Face, a biographer decides to write about a society woman who died in a car crash, and discovers her past to be a labyrinthine trail leading from her oversexed teenage years, to her time as a Chicago gang moll, to her stripping career, and eventually to her to final, respectable incarnation. All her past iterations were under different identities to hide the truth, and now as the writer puts the final pieces together, he comes to have questions about her death—questions it seems some mysterious person is out to prevent him asking. The book was written by Leslie Edgley, who had a small bibliography along with some television credits before fading from the literary scene. He also wrote as Robert Bloomfield and Brook Hastings, the latter in partnership with his wife Mary Edgley. This edition of False Face is from Handi Books and the cover art is by unknown.
 Well, the bad news is they aren't coming back. The good news is we can finally have that quiet swim. 
We read Charles Williams' seagoing thriller Dead Calm a couple of months back, and it was good enough to send us searching for more of his work. We found that he wrote several novels set on the ocean, and settled on reading 1971's And the Deep Blue Sea. Basically, what you get here is a murder thriller aboard a tramp steamer, with the killings all connected to an escaped Nazi. The story is entertaining, but the plot is baffling in one respect—the hero ends up on this deathship because his yacht sinks and, in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, he's rescued. A one-in-a-million chance. That's why we kept waiting for the moment where this becomes crucial to the plot, but it never does—he could have been a ticketed passenger on the steamer and the book would have progressed exactly the same way. We found that strange, to say the least. But Williams was a highly experienced writer by the time he got around to And the Deep Blue Sea, his penultimate novel, and he's surehanded with both the long prose passages and the dialogue. For us, it isn't quite as good as Dead Calm, but it gets the job done.
 You can't have one without the other.  
These two beautiful posters were made for the film Zoku-zoku-Kindan no suna: Akai pantsu, which translates to something about “prohibited man's sands" something or other, but which seems to be known in English as Woman Diver's Beach: Red Pants. The movie is third in a series starring Kyoko Izumi, and as you might guess it deals with an ama—a female diver for clams, treasure, and other valuable submerged items. The plot is a bit convoluted, but basically a villager gets into a fight and accidentally kills a man only to have the man's fiancée show up and, affected by the villager's anguish over his deed, begin to feel sorry for him, then begin to feel affection him. There's much more to the film—for example, both the villager and fiancée are the focus of unrequited love from other quarters, and this will lead to serious complications and even some gunplay, but what you get for the most part is a star-crossed love story. The “red pants” reference, by the way, is for the color of shorts the fiancée wears. We have a poster for a couple of the other films in this franchise and you'll be seeing those soon. This one premiered in Japan today in 1959. 
 You can't keep a good moonshiner down. 
Home brew and rednecks, fast cars and dusty roads, shotguns and lots of banjo music are what you get in Moonshine Country Express, all of which is probably abundantly clear from a glance at the U.S. promo poster painted by John Solie. You also get star Susan Howard, b-movie stud John Saxon, and support from Playboy centerfold Claudia Jennings, which means all the ingredients for a good time are here. The protagonists are righteous, the villains wily, and there's never any doubt that the family oriented 'shiners are going to upend the unctuous local strongman in this nearly scriptless flick about a daughter trying to sell her murdered father's stash of a-grade whiskey. We could say there's a metaphor here for small business versus big conglomerates, or liberty loving sovereigns versus the corrupt and connected, but we'd be making that shit up. It's just a mindless chase movie. It's hard to believe it would take another two years before this highly profitable formula finally moved to television in the form of 1979's The Dukes of Hazzard. We like to think Moonshine County Express was the eureka moment when someone realized it would work. If you watch this one, expect no more and no less than a Dukes episode in long form, but without the confederate flag, mercifully.
     
 Low visibility and even lower survivability. 
Yes, we're tripling up on films this lovely Thursday because all three premiered today in some year or other. This third poster is the Spanish promo painted by Macario Gomez for John Carpenter's horror flick The Fog, about a town beset by a ghost ship filled with murderous lepers. It's an oldie but a goodie, we'd say, with Jamie Lee Curtis, her real life mom Janet Leigh, Adrienne Barbeau, and Hal Holbrook. Couple of takeaways from this one—Jamie Lee will hook up with any old schlub, and haunted fog really scoots. Think you can outrun it? Forget it. If you hated the 2005 remake (and who didn't) give this one a try. There are some legit chills here. The Fog premiered as La niebla in Spain today in 1980.    
 A tease? Just because I strip down to my frillies and straddle a stool? You got some dirty ideas, mister. 
Above, The Teaser, by Jason Hytes, aka John Plunkett, for Midwood Books, with top notch brushwork by the wizard of sexually suggestive paperback art Paul Rader. The story: a virginal girl is taught about sex by her eager lover, but shows such an aptitude for it that her desires grow to the point where they become perverse and freaky. Sounds like the perfect woman to us. Copyright 1963.
 Lovers in a dangerous time.  
Above are two posters for Nikutai no mon, aka Gate of Flesh, one of the most famous films to come out of Japan during the post-war period. We talked about the pinku remake of this, which appeared in 1977. The original was directed by Seijun Suzuki and stars Jo Shishido, Satoko Kasai, and Yumiko Nogawa. It closely follows the plot of Tajiro Tamura's novel, in which a group of tough prostitutes survive in bombed out post-World War II Tokyo thanks to camaraderie and a strict code of conduct, of which the most important rule is never to have sex for free. When a wounded ex-soldier takes shelter with them, some of the women find emotional distance difficult to keep, while one finds maintaining physical distance even harder. The novel is a tragedy, and since the film tracks the fiction closely, don't expect to walk away from this one with a smile on your face. It premiered in Japan today in 1964.
 The feeling is probably mutual. 
National Star Chronicle scores again with an absurd sour grapes headline on this cover from today in 1964. We checked to see if an illness that makes men sick when they're around women exists but came up with nothing. Nothing clinical at least. Our non-clinical diagnosis is he's a terminal wimp. Interestingly, though, we did find that this phenomenon happens to women. The website circleofmoms.com has an entire discussion thread about women whose husbands make them physically ill. No joke. It's a lengthy thread too, filled with woman after woman writing things like, “My God! I thought I was the only one.”
Their symptoms relate to hygiene, so the jig is up, guys. Shower every day, even days you just lay on the sofa watching sports. Wash your stinky crevices. Cut your toenails regularly and dispose of every last clipping. Trim your nose hairs and don't walk around with them on your shirt afterward. Floss, carry mints, avoid beer breath, and possibly even beer. Let's just say you need to generally get your shit together and accept the harsh truth that achieving non-repulsiveness will take constant effort. Ironic isn't it? Each time Chronicle's stricken man sees a woman his day is ruined; and the only time we've seen this Chronicle our lives were ruined. It's a cold, cold world.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1937—Amelia Earhart Disappears
Amelia Earhart fails to arrive at Howland Island during her around the world flight, prompting a search for her and navigator Fred Noonan in the South Pacific Ocean. No wreckage and no bodies are ever found. 1964—Civil Rights Bill Becomes Law
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Bill into law, which makes the exclusion of African-Americans from elections, schools, unions, restaurants, hotels, bars, cinemas and other public institutions and facilities illegal. A side effect of the Bill is the immediate reversal of American political allegiance, as most southern voters abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. 1997—Jimmy Stewart Dies
Beloved actor Jimmy Stewart, who starred in such films as Rear Window and Vertigo, dies at age eighty-nine at his home in Beverly Hills, California of a blood clot in his lung. 1941—NBC Airs First Official TV Commercial
NBC broadcasts the first TV commercial to be sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC began licensing commercial television stations in May 1941, granting the first license to NBC. During a Dodgers-Phillies game broadcast July 1, NBC ran its first commercial, from Bulova, who paid $9 to advertise its watches. 1963—Kim Philby Named as Spy
The British Government admits that former high-ranking intelligence diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent. Philby was a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing classified information to the Soviet Union. He defected to Russia, was feted as a hero and even given his commemorative stamp, before dying in 1988 at the age of seventy-six.
1997—Robert Mitchum Dies
American actor Robert Mitchum dies in his home in Santa Barbara, California. He had starred in films such as Out of the Past, Blood on the Moon, and Night of the Hunter, was called "the soul of film noir," and had a reputation for coolness that would go unmatched until Frank Sinatra arrived on the scene. 1908—Tunguska Explosion Occurs
Near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, a large meteoroid or comet explodes at five to ten kilometers above the Earth's surface with a force of about twenty megatons of TNT. The explosion is a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic blast, knocks over an estimated 80 million trees and generates a shock wave estimated to have been 5.0 on the Richter scale. 1971—Soviet Cosmonauts Perish
Soviet cosmonauts Vladislav Volkov, Georgi Dobrovolski and Viktor Patsayev, who served as the first crew of the world's first space station Salyut 1, die when their spacecraft Soyuz 11 depressurizes during preparations for re-entry. They are the only humans to die in space (as opposed to the upper atmosphere).
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