Vintage Pulp

December 18 2024

THE TELL-TALE CAT

So far he's shown little interest in the scratching post she bought him.

I racconti del terrore is better known as Tales of Terror. It’s a three-part anthology film based on the writing of Edgar Allen Poe that starred Vicent Price as different characters in the three segments, and featured as co-stars Peter Lorre, Maggie Pierce, Basil Rathbone, Debra Paget, and others. The brilliant art here was painted by Renato Casaro and fits into the proud tradition of posters featuring horrible cats. You can see other examples here, here, here, and here. And just for the hell of it, here’s a poster featuring a horrible rat. It rhymes. Those are only a fraction of the historical total of horrible cat-rats on posters. As for Tales of Terror…

We won’t mince words—it’s bad. We feel the blame is mainly on director Roger Corman. Sure, Poe is melodramatic, but the movie is beyond. It’s stagy and overacted by all involved, most egregiously by Price, Lorre, and Pierce. The second segment, “The Black Cat,” is played semi-comically, but with Price and Lorre jousting hamo a hamo you’ll cringe more than laugh. We’ll admit, though, that its narrative—loosely based on Poe’s tale of the same name about a cuckolded husband who plots vengeance on his wife—contains a sidebar that manages to skewer snobby wine culture effectively. As wine drinkers we enjoyed that.

The third segment, based on Poe’s, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” has some glimmers of hope, but largely because Price, playing a dying man who’s weakening by the day, dials the cheese back from schloss to something in the range of maybe gorgonzola. There’s still a thick slab of ham underneath. However, everything we just wrote comes with a caveat: we’d had no drinks or other substances when we watched the movie. There’s possible potential for improvement if chemical compounds are coursing through your bloodstream. Tales of Terror opened in the U.S. July 1962, and premiered in Italy today the same year.

Italy, I racconti del terrore, Tales of Terror, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Debra Paget, Maggie Pierce, Leona Gage, Joyce Jameson, Edgar Allen Poe, Roger Corman, Renato Casaro, poster art, cinema, horror, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 17

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.

January 17

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

January 16

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

January 14

1967—Summer of Love Begins

The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.