vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Alida Valli was born in Pola, Italy, a place that’s now part of Croatia, back in 1921, and was acting in Italian movies by 1935. She eventually became a global star and racked up more than one hundred film credits, including in The Paradine Case, The Third Man, Les Yeux san visage, aka Eyes without a Face, and The Cassandra Crossing. The shot you see here was made for her 1950 drama Walk Softly, Stranger.
Something unusual we ran across recently. Above you see a Yugoslavian poster for AfriÄka veza, an Italian film originally made in 1973 as Contratto carnale, released in English as The African Deal, and shot in Ghana. The poster is unusual because, though its text is Croatian, the actual art very much echoes vintage Ghanaian movie posters, such as here and here. We’ve never seen a Yugoslavian poster in this style. Our opinion is that because the movie was made in Ghana and was certainly released there at some point, the art was painted for a Ghanaian poster then borrowed by the Yugoslavian distributors Inex Film. We talked about Contratto carnale a few years back. It starred George Hilton, Calvin Lockhart, beautiful Anita Strindberg, and yummy Yanti Somer, was originally released in 1973, and premiered in Yugoslavia sometime in 1976.
In the promo photo above Femi Benussi appears in costume—in amazing costume—as Lola in the film Il domestico. Benussi was born in Rovigno, Italy, which is now Rovnij, Croatia, and debuted in 1965’s Il boia scarlatto, aka Bloody Pit of Horror. She went on to appear more than eighty films, including the giallo Nude per l’assassino, aka Strip Nude for Your Killer and the actioner Storia di sangue, aka Blood Story. The above image is from 1974, and just to make Benussi’s outfit complete it also came with a hat, shoes, and a bruise courtesy of the makeup department, below. As we continue to work our way through various 1970s schlock classics you can be sure that Benussi will show up here again.
Here’s a little treat for Monday, because Mondays are universally acknowledged to suck. Above is the cover and below are a ton of scans from the cutting edge cinema magazine Sex Stars System, which billed itself as “Le Magazine du Cinema Erotique.” It was published out of 55 Passage Jouffroy, in Paris, France, and for a while it was the top magazine with reviews and features on the new, sexually liberated mainstream cinema of the early 1970s, and the new pornography of the same era. Because porn was taken seriously as an art form back then (hard to imagine, we know) certain magazines discussed and critiqued the films and regarded the performers as equal with those in mainstream cinema. We talked about this phenomenon with Cine-Revue a few years ago. Sex Stars System was similar, but much edgier, as you’ll see.
On the cover and in the centerfold you see Croatian born star Sylva Koscina (a mainstream actress), and elsewhere you get Emmanuelle Parèze (porn), Dany Carrel (mainstream), Valérie Bosigel (mainstream), Karin Schubert (both), Catherine Spaak (mainstream), Ornella Muti (mainstream), Chesty Morgan (porn, obviously), Marilyn Monroe (mainstream, though some scam artists claim she was the other too), et al. They don’t make magazines like this anymore, because they don’t make cinema like this anymore. Sex in U.S. movies is strictly taboo, unless, generally speaking, the actors keep their clothes on. You do see it on cable television, however, though such shows generate reams of online criticism about how terribly wrong it is (we agree, however, that more sex and nude scenes need to be filmed from the vantage point of the female gaze). In Europe, as always, things are a bit more liberated.
We aren’t sure how long Sex Stars System published. It debuted in 1975. Also in 1975, or possibly 1976, a magazine called simply Stars Systemappeared. Stars System had a softer editorial approach and featured solidly mainstream cover celebs such as Jane Fonda and Romy Schneider. At some point it changed its name slightly to Star System and, thus rebranded, published at least as late as 1982, which seems to be longer than Sex Stars System was on the scene. The information online about these magazines is, as you can probably guess, a jumble, but we’ll keep looking into it and maybe have something more concrete to report later. There’s also a Star System celeb magazine around today, but it’s Canadian and presumably unrelated. Many scans below, and we have a few more issues we’ll post later.
Above is the cover of yet another magazine we’ve never seen before—Sensational Exposés, produced by New York City based Skye Publishing. We’ve scanned and uploaded a couple of other rare tabloids in the last year, including Dynamite and Nightbeat. This fits right into that group. Rarity doesn’t make it special, though. It’s a great little historical tidbit but it doesn’t compare favorably to the big boy tabloids of the era—Confidential, Whisper, Hush-Hush, et al, either graphically or content-wise.
Sensational Exposés resided near the border between tabloid and true crime. The magazine came from Skye Publications out of New York City. Inside this issue published this month in 1958, the Mafia is extensively mentioned, the psychology of arsonists is discussed, pornographic films get long look, and random bodies turn up. Since it billed itself on the covers of earlier issues as offering, “daring, hard-hitting disclosures in the world of crime,” we’re calling it mainly a true crime magazine.
That said, Croatian actress Tana Velia, aka Tania Velia, gets a deep feature as she tells of her escape through the Iron Curtain. It wasn’t as hairsbreadth as journalist Bill Wolf relates it. Velia’s home country of Yugoslavia had begun to shift toward non-alignment, rejecting both Soviet and U.S. control, and Velia was competing in swim meets around Europe. She simply didn’t go back after a competition in Graz, Austria. She took several trollies to avoid being followed, walked into a British Military Zone and turned herself over to an officer.
Even so, it remains an interesting episode. Her ambition had always been to act. She says in the article that in the U.S., “every son can hope to be a president and every girl can wish for a movie career.” Edit: *eyeroll* She got her wish, but after making Queen of Outer Space, Fiend of Dope Island, and Missile To the Moon we wonder if Velia wished she’d kept swimming. As for Sensational Exposés, it launched in 1957 and didn’t last past 1958, as far as we can tell. Scans below.
Above: assorted scans from Adam magazine of January 1971, with cover art illustrating Ross Alexander’s story “Struggle for Survival,” about two kidnap victims in Northern Australia who decide after days of captivity that their only route to escape is across a crocodile infested river. Naturally, what began as obstacles become allies, as the crocs eventually chow down on the villains. You get lots of photos, including one of Croatian born actress Femi Benussi, three panels from the bottom. You can see forty-two more issues of Adam by clicking its keywords just below.
We’re looping back to the former Yugoslavia today, this time with a rare film program for Raquel Welch’s One Million Years B.C. If it seems we just talked about this movie, you’re right. We shared a promo from the film last week. What you see above is the front of a dual language promo pamphlet, half written in… well we aren’t sure. The language situation is complicated there. Half in Serbo-Croatian and half in Slovenian, we think. Feel free to correct us. In any case, it’s a pretty cool little item.
We call it Pulp International because we try to feature pulp style art from all over the world, but this may be the first item we’ve found from Croatia. It’s an eye-catching off-angle poster promoting a pinku film festival in Zagreb, which starts today at the Kinoklub Zagreb—a cinema first established in 1928—and runs through the end of this month. Our analytics tells us where our website visitors come from, and we do indeed get the occasional glance from Croatia, so for all of you in Zagreb and environs—go to this festival. You get Girl Boss Guerrilla, Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, and School of the Holy Beast. We’ve done short write-ups on all three films, so if you want to know more check, respectively, here, here, and here.
Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day—the Allied landings in Northern France—and since most observances take the same form, we thought it would be a good opportunity to look at the event from a different angle by sharing something you might not see anywhere else. So above and below are some front and back covers of Signal, a German propaganda magazine printed from 1940 to 1945 and distributed in neutral, friendly, and occupied countries. These are from Yugoslavia, and their text is Croatian. Glancing at the images is to marvel at the always yawning chasm between propaganda and reality, for though Signal showed Hitler’s soldiers defeating foes while winning hearts and minds, when most of these were printed his army was not only the most hated entity in the Western world, but was already in the process of being fatally smashed in the crucible of a bitter Russian winter against a hardened foe that had always considered ice, snow, wind and frostbite its most important allies.
Once the other allies, led by the U.S., dragged the Germans into a two-front war, defeat was assured. That outcome could have been forestalled perhaps by the development of advanced technology, particularly a German atomic bomb, but it never quite happened. And yet under the direction of the Wehrmacht and Hasso von Wedel, winning imagery kept spinning from the web of German presses, depicting beautiful frauencavorting in the homeland and smiling soldiers abroad doing the tough but necessary work of unifying Europe. But the intended recipients of these messages had begun to understand the truth—the Germans were finished, and the devastation they had wrought on foreign lands was coming home to roost. When bombs finally fell like rain on Berlin and enemy soldiers stormed the ramparts east and west, Hitler’s imagined 1,000-year Reich was over. It had lasted barely five years.
Above, Marilyn Monroe on four covers of Filmski Vjesnik, or Film Journal, a Croatian language magazine from the former Yugoslavia. You may remember we showed you a great ex-yu Monroe film poster a couple of years ago. Items from Yugoslavia are highly collectible these days, so much so that a couple of these magazines were priced at $250.00. That’s a lot for a publication of any vintage, even ones from dissolved nations, but when it comes to nostalgia you can never predict what people will pay. We’ve seen similar items sell at that price. These date from 1958, 1957, 1953 and 1953, top to bottom.
Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.
Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.
As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.
The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
