She's a lady in the front, and a plumber in the rear.
The Italian publisher Grandi Edizioni Internazionali was a great source of paperback art during its existence, employing talents like Benedetto Caroselli, Mario de Bernardinis, and Enzo Nistri for its covers. This one for Van Reynolds’ 1974 novel Un marito per Marta Roses is probably by Caroselli, but it’s actually unattributed. The translator is Luca Martinego, and as we discussed before, since most of the credited authors on Italian crime paperbacks were pseudonyms, that means the translators were usually the authors writing in Italian. Overseas publishers were convinced that their crime novels needed American-sounding authors to entice buyers, so translator credits were a sneaky way to make sure the real writers were credited. Strange but true. We’ll have more from Grandi Edizioni Internazionali, as always. And as a final note, we’re sure we don’t need to point out that American model/actress Vikki Dougan actually wore dresses like this in public, but in case we do, check here.
I've always heard that power corrupts. But what nobody told me is that it also feels really good.
Legendary U.S. actress Myrna Loy strikes a stern pose in this beautiful photo. Because she made more than one hundred films, and some of them are lost, it’s impossible to pinpoint from where this shot comes. At least it is for us, and we spent quite a bit of time on it. At first we thought that because the 1934 comedy The Thin Man is the film that made her a big star, and this was surely shot earlier, we’d be able to narrow the possibilities down to a smallish number of pre-Code dramatic roles. Turns out she made many, many pre-Code dramas. In fact, she almost didn’t get The Thin Man because she was considered a strictly dramatic actress. So the provenance of the photo is a mystery to us, but someone will figure it out eventually. Meanwhile, see another image here. And incidentally, there’s a good Loy themed Tumblr out there with numerous photos, if you’re a big fan. Check here.
Whatever Lola wants Lola gets—except a decent script and a sufficient budget.
A low rent poster usually indicates a low rent movie. The poster you see here for Lola Falana’s crime drama Lady Cocoa, which premiered today in 1975, is obviously underwhelming. Sometimes, though, digging into the dusty archive of cheap cinema yields forgotten gems. But not in this instance. You know you’re in trouble with Lady Cocoa right from the opening theme, which is a sort of mash-up between a disco song and, “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Literally, that’s the chorus. We’ve come across some terrible theme songs (who can forget the indelible strains of “Flare-Up”?—but this one might take the booby prize.
Falana plays a Reno gangster’s girlfriend who’s spent eighteen months in prison for reasons that are obscure, possibly because she’s insanely annoying. She’s released into protective custody when she finally decides to testify against her man. She doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of her decision, but there’s a reason for that—she has no intention of testifying. She just wants out of the joint for a while. She has total confidence her boyfriend will intuit this, but she’s wrong—kingpins don’t become kingpins through trust. He sends assassins to perforate her, and the movie becomes a standard witness protection actioner. While this basic plot has been done many times, it has rarely been done with dialogue so poor.
Gene Washington: “I remember when I got it in Nam.”
Falana: “Nam?”
Gene Washington: “Yeah. Vietnam.”
Let’s fix that exchange of dialogue for them:
Gene Washington: “I remember when I got it in Nam.”
Falana: “It?”
Gene Washington: “Yeah. Syphilitic meningitis.”
See? Much better. Poor Lola never had a chance in this one. But there are a few items of note. Falana, who’s really cute even playing a grating harpy, spends a lot of the movie in a towel and flashes a backside that’ll leave a permanent impression. Late in the program she and co-star Gene Washington share a real-deal hot tango of a tongue kiss, which is something you rarely see actors do. And one of the assassins is played by Joe Greene, as in Mean Joe Greene, as in the Pittsburgh Steelers. If he’d sacked the producers before they had a chance to make the movie, Hollywood would have given him an honorary Oscar. No such luck.
Despite your ample sexual charms I’m irrationally annoyed I have to bodyguard you.
Still hate me?
Abso-goddamned-lutely.
You sure?
I can’t even budge I’m so filled with loathing.
What if I let you slowly rub this lotion all over me, we enjoy some leisurely oral sex, then fuck like beasts?
Well? Don't just stand there staring. Undo something!
1960’s So Willing is credited to Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall, but they were pseudonyms used by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. According to Block, the two wrote this, their second collaboration as Lord and Marshall, by trading chapters through the mail. They would occasionally try to trip each other up with unexpected plot twists, and we can only imagine it must have been a hell of a lot of fun. They tell the tongue-in-cheek tale of a seventeen-year old upstate New York horndog named Vince who’s so successful with girls he decides for variety to hunt up a virgin. He fails a couple of times, ends up running away to New York City with a nineteen-year old married nymphomaniac (their term, not ours), and eventually hooks up with an heiress. Good sleaze novels are diamonds in the rough. You have to dig through a lot of filth to find one. So Willing is better than average because it’s so obviously a lark, but even with Westlake and Block behind the typewriter it’s no gem. We think erotica is the most challenging of all genres for writers. The cover art on this Midwood edition is nice, but uncredited.
Hey, buddy! You can't be dead here. We have a zero-tolerance policy toward lifelessness in this city.
This image shows the body of New York City gangster David Beadle, aka the Beetle, outside the Spot tavern in Manhattan, where he was gunned down by men who emerged from a passing taxi. Beadle took at least a few bullets in the head and died instantly. As gangsters go he wasn’t very high in the rackets, but his fame surpassed his stature posthumously because Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, photographed his corpse. Another shot appears below, and you can see how back then the integrity of crime scenes was a malleable concept. Changes between the shots include the sheet, the position of Beadle’s hands, and the arrangement of debris in the gutter.
And in fact, the top shot shows Weegee himself, seeming to make an adjustment to the corpse, possibly to make for a more pleasingly composed shot. The first photo, therefore, was made by an unknown, though it’s often credited to Weegee. He made the second shot himself. Most of his archive, including these, reside at NYC’s International Center of Photography, to which Weegee’s longtime companion and caretaker Wilma Wilcox donated 16,000 photos and 7,000 negatives, as well as transferring all copyrights, in 1993. You can see many of them at the Center’s website here.
Computer scientists go back to drawing board after first self-aware robot is arrested for sexual harassment.
This rare promo poster is signed by Italian illustrator Giuliano Nistri, who we think only produced the background, considering it’s obviously a production image. The movie is Saturn 3, a sort of forgotten British sci-fi adventure from the early 1980s. How to describe it. A little bit Star Wars, a little bit Alien, and a little bit 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably how it was pitched to the studios. The actual result was a little more like b-movies such as Star Crash and BattleBeyond the Stars. But it starred Kirk Douglas, helped launch Harvey Keitel, and had Farrah Fawcett, seen here being brutally suspended by the movie’s deranged AI robot.
The immediate post-Star Wars period was a time when even well known performers had to look twice at cheeseball sci-fi scripts. No actor wanted to miss out on the next cultural phenomenon. That’s the only way to explain Douglas’s involvement. Sadly for him, Saturn 3 came up about 887 million miles short of achieving any lasting impact. Other than a convincingly scary robot, Douglas’s naked ass, and Fawcett wearing a series of negligees and other scanty items, it didn’t offer much of note. At least back then. But these days, the AI that copies its programmer’s worst traits seems plenty relevant. After its U.S. premiere in February 1980, Saturn 3 made a controlled burn into Italy today the same year.
This photo-illustrated poster was made for the 1948 suspense thriller Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which demands to be watched if for no other reason than its lyrical title. The awesome Edward G. Robinson plays a phony psychic who’s thrown for a loop when he unexpectedly starts to have real visions—or seems to. Has he merely refined his scam, or can he really see the future? He tells Gail Russell she’s fated to die in mere days but claims he wants to help her avoid her destiny. She believes the prediction, but her beau and a handful of cops keep trying to pin various crimes on Robinson as Russell’s clock dwindles to zero hour. The base ingredients here—the good cast, experienced director John Farrow, a source novel by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich, aka George Hopley—were probably pre-destined to produce something worthwhile. We’d say the novel is better, but as adaptations go Night Has a Thousand Eyes mostly works. We sense that… Wait! It’s becoming clear… It’s you! With a bowl of popcorn and a beer! Watching the movie!
Guess he never heard the old saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight.
In so many instances an author’s first novel is their best, but in 1951’s The Perfect Frame William Ard had not yet fully harnessed the wordcraft that would serve him in composing sparkling crime thrillers like Club 17, Wanted: Danny Fontaine, and When She Was Bad. The seeds are there, but in this debut outing for both him and his franchise character Timothy Dane, he hasn’t yet reached the elevation of subsequent work. The story deals with Dane being hired under false pretenses by a beautiful woman in danger, and leads to a New York City insurance brokerage called Oceanic where things are not quite as they seem. It doesn’t work as well as it could, but as Dane’s origin story it’s probably obligatory. Ard would later become one of the top talents in crime fiction and, later, even westerns.
I hear they made a black panther movie. And it's not about me. How weird.
Above: a 1974 photo of Pam Grier from Players magazine, wearing a leather outfit from her movie Foxy Brown. Not much to be said here except that she looks her absolute best.
The breezy Robert McGinnis (so say several online sources) cover art of a femme fatale sexily shedding a commander’s jacket belies the fact that Peter Baker’s 1967 novel Cruise is a deadly serious ensemble drama featuring seriously flawed characters that wear on the nerves from the moment they board. It’s only a rule of thumb that you must create a likeable character or two for your novel, but only the best writers can ignore it and succeed. Lolita, Gone Girl, and American Psycho might be examples. Baker is no Nabokov or Ellis, and when writers of lesser ability break rules of thumb they can break entire books. You won’t quite want the 33,500 ton cruise ship Queen Dee to sink, but you’ll wish a few people tumbled overboard.
Baker is actually a better writer than many. And his characters aren’t accidentally intolerable—there was a plan: Highsmithesque portraiture of upper class discontent and relational disfunction. His most palatable creations are Pamela Westcott and her son Richard, thirty-eight and eighteen respectively, widow and naïf, both seeking something they can’t quite define among more resolute and worldly passengers, on a Mediterranean pleasure voyage from Southampton to Beirut and back. Pamela hooks up with Chief Officer David Welch (who’s so terrible that for pleasure he brutally beats a hippie stowaway), while Richard has, first, a gay flirtation with an American theater student, then a crush on a French beauty named Simone, then a fling with a rich older lady.
Most of the action is aboard ship, but some of it happens in the ports of call—Southampton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Rhodes, Naples—in that order. That would have been a scintillating real-life cruise at the time, but as a piece of fiction, the selfish, mean, and entitled passengers give the book the feel of a seagoing season of The White Lotus sans humor. Yet after a slow and taxing start, a funny thing happens on the way across the Med—the story starts to click, but only in pieces. By the end we were invested in learning how it all would turn out because the characters of Pamela, Richard, and his crush John grew on us.
We’d wager that Cruise is probably too ponderous for most readers. About one third of its omniscient interior musings could have been jettisoned. Patience is often rewarded in fiction. But time is precious. For those not impressed by its story the book may still have value—and that would be as travelogue. It’s enjoyably detailed on that score. If you’ve visited any of Queen Dee‘s stops you’ll be fascinated by Baker’s depiction of them from a lifetime ago. Maybe that isn’t the strongest endorsement for a novel, but it’s something. Baker is a good writer without an innate sense of conciseness, nor an editor cruel enough to do the job for him. But we’re glad to have gone on the trip.
Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.
1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.
1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time
Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.
1974—Ford Pardons Nixon
U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.
1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.
