Above are three cover treatments for Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, written by Al Palmer, and first published in 1949 (many sources say 1950, but Palmer’s current day publisher Véhicule Press says 1949). Sugar-Puss was set in Montreal in the debauched red light district centered around Dorchester Street (now René Lévesque Boulevard), and spiced with firsthand observations from Palmer, who was a night-crawling columnist for the Montreal Herald and later the Montreal Gazette. His main character, Gisele Lepine, leaves her small farming town, is swept up in bright lights and big city, and pulled into various dramas involving a newspaper man, a cabaret owner, drug-dealers, and chorus girls. Gisele’s situation soon devolves, bringing her up-close and personal with organized crime, murder, and white slavery (always, in mid-century novels, taken to be somehow worse than mere slavery). The novel was Palmer’s only one, but it has managed to endure among collectors, maybe because it has possibly the best title ever. He also wrote a city expose entitled Montreal Confidential. We like all three of these covers, but even if the first two seem of higher quality, with their splashes of purple and yellow, we think version three manages to capture a feeling of loneliness and alienation. The top piece is by Syd Dyke, the middle one by D. Rickard, and the last is by unknown. 

This shot featuring Canadian actress Barbara Kent nicely captures the spirit of Halloween. Kent was born Barbara Cloutman, and began her rise to stardom by winning the 1925 Miss Hollywood Beauty Pageant. Her first parts were in Prowlers of the Night and Flesh and the Devil, but her later roles were usually comedic in nature and were her most popular films. In all, she appeared in thirty-six productions, which sounds impressive until you wonder how well she might have done had this black cat never crossed her path. 

This promo for Boogie Nights was made last year for a Paul Thomas Anderson film retrospective hosted by the company Mondo, which markets limited edition screen printed posters for classic and contemporary films. The artist is the Japanese illustrator par excellence and constant enigma Rockin’ Jelly Bean. You can see this poster around the web with little difficulty, but we have a friend in Los Angeles who actually owns one and it really shocked us how off the colors are on every scan we’ve seen online. The above image, as oversaturated as it may seem, is close to correct. Even so, what appears as red is fluorescent magenta on the real poster, and the pale teal colors are closer to bright turquoise. Compare it to the shot below, which comes from the Mondo blog. The mild skin tones of the presenter tell us the colors of the entire image are true. Which means this is one blazingly garish poster, no? We love it. We could get one for as little as $300.00, but that’s still too rich for our blood. We wanted to share the image anyway, though, because Boogie Nights made its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival today in 1997.

Above, a cover of the Montreal-based tabloid Midnight from today in 1965 with June Wilkinson on the cover and a header offering readers some marital advice. Our advice is never take advice from a tabloid. We’ve featured Wilkinson here quite a bit. You can see all those posts by clicking her keywords just below.

Marilyn Monroe shows up just about everywhere, and here she is yet again where we didn’t expect to see her—fronting a Malaysian film publication that appeared today in 1953. The magazine, called Filmalaya, is in English, which marks it as aimed at the British colonial community that occupied the upper stratum of society in Malaysia and Singapore. The cover photo is from a publicity series made when Monroe filmed the movie Niagara in Ontario, Canada in late 1952, and let’s just assume her perch is not as precarious as it seems and there’s a handy ledge or lawn behind her in case she goes heels up. But if she does, there are other stars in the magazine, such as Joan Collins, Betty Grable, Rhonda Fleming, Ava Gardner, and Nat King Cole.

Here’s another typical cover of the tabloid Midnight. We tend to think of this as a U.S. publication but it actually had offices in both Chicago and Montreal, and was printed in Canada, which presumably makes it a Canadian paper first and foremost. This issue appeared today in 1964 and the imprint had by this point been around for eleven years. We have no idea when it died but we’ve never seen an issue past 1969. We’ll have more from Midnight later, including some complete scans. 

Above, a Midnight from today 1966 with cover star Nobu McCarthy, wild, wicked and willing. Or so Midnight claims. Born Nobu Atsumi in Canada of Japanese extraction, McCarthy won the 1955 Miss Tokyo pageant, and later parlayed a chance Los Angeles encounter with a talent agent into a television and theater career dotted with film roles. As far as Midnight’s suggestion of availability goes, McCarthy was already married with children by 1966, and probably already too well-known to have to stoop to cheap publicity techniques on the covers of second rate tabloids. Which means we’re putting this quote entirely on the editors. After many years on screen and stage, McCarthy died of an aortal aneurysm while filming Gaijin—Ama-me Como Sou in 2002. Below is a still of her from her first credited film role in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy The Geisha Boy.

 

Sad news for the art world came across yesterday with reports of the death of Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan. He once said that he painted and sculpted women because the subject was inépuisable et éternel—inexhaustible and eternal. Certainly the work he produced over the decades has been both. Aslan lived in Canada for the last twenty years and it was there he died of a heart attack yesterday, aged 83. Above and below are two photos, one of him living the good life with two of his models, the second showing him (sort of) working. We'll put together a collection of his art soon.

Not long ago we showed you the cover from one installment of a French pulp series called Les aventures de Zodiaque. That was a lovely piece of art, but the series had modest beginnings. Above and below are one dozen fronts from the series’ early days, when it was being published in Montreal by Éditions PTE under agreement from the French parent publisher Éditions de Neuilly. These are all from the early 1950s.

Edit: Writing six years later, we realize now that these are not random women on these covers. They're celebrities. Or at least, we assume so, because we recognize Belgian actress Dominique Wilms on the fifth cover below, the light brown one. If we identify others we'll update this little addendum, but don't count on it, because if, like Wilms, the other women are French or Belgian, well, we're not as good on those actresses as we'd like. But we'll sure try.