| Vintage Pulp | Jul 9 2023 |
Once she learned to stop using her hands she graduated from masturbation to PhDbation.
Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, was very good at quasi-sexual cover illustrations, which is no surprise considering he was one of France's top nude pin-up artists and made a point of flaunting a hedonistic lifestyle. The last front we shared from him featured a girl seeming to fondle her own breasts, and on this one for Henry Cerda's Les tourments de la volupté we have a woman who—we don't know what she's doing, but it probably involves a lot of clenching and unclenching. This cover is a winner. The colors are nice, the pose is extremely suggestive, and the rapturous facial expression is perfect. In addition to all that the title translates to, “the tortures of pleasure,” so there's zero doubt you're dealing with an erotic novel here. Maybe if we read it carefully we too can achieve hands-free ecstasy. Oh, the multi-tasking we could do.
| Musiquarium | Jul 4 2023 |
I've shattered censorship barriers and redefined French cinema! My work here is done!
French cinema luminary Brigitte Bardot is easy to recognize even in a wig and wild costume, as shown here in an image from 1967. It was made when she appeared in singer Serge Gainbourg's music video (yes, a few visionaries were making them that far back and ever farther) “Comic Strip.”Serge went the literal route for his clip, which is why Bardot is dressed as a superhero and echoed by a comic strip-like version of herself. The song is literal too, with lyrics that include fight sound effects: “J'distribue les swings et les uppercuts. Ça fait VLAM !Ça fait SPLATCH! Et ça fait CHTUCK!” That all translates as, “I distribute swings and uppercuts. It's VLAM! It's SPLATCH! And that go CHTUCK!” You can hear the tune and see the video at this link.
Bardot made other videos in 1967 and 1968. We think “Contact” is particularly interesting. But only a few years after achieving something as cutting edge as helping to popularize the most important promotional tool used by music artists even today, she retired from performances on both the small and large screen to focus on other pursuits. Below, you see her with Serge.
Bardot made other videos in 1967 and 1968. We think “Contact” is particularly interesting. But only a few years after achieving something as cutting edge as helping to popularize the most important promotional tool used by music artists even today, she retired from performances on both the small and large screen to focus on other pursuits. Below, you see her with Serge.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 22 2023 |
Return to sender, address unknown.
Once again a French imprint comes up with a violent cover. On the front of Guy Mouminoux's 1953 graphic novel Du sang dans la sciure—“blood in the sawdust”—a fight is going poorly for one guy who looks headed to a cosmetic surgeon or a mortician. We don't make that statement randomly. This very thing happened to a friend of ours and cosmetic surgery was the result. We have an entire collection of fighting paperback covers, and if you're interested you can see it here.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 18 2023 |
Oh, it's a body. In my head I'd already blamed the weird smell around here on your dirty tennis shoes.
Originally published in 1940, the above Pocket Books edition of The Norths Meet Murder arrived in 1942. It was also published as Mr. & Mrs. North Meet Murder by Avon in 1958. The characters, Gerald and Pamela North, a Manhattan married couple who find themselves solving mysteries, had appeared in the New York Sun newspaper throughout the late 1930s, but The Norths Meet Murder is their first foray in novel form. We haven't read any of the others, but we own one, and we'll get to it.
We've read a few mysteries featuring married sleuths. What's different here is that the authors Frances and Richard Lockridge write Pamela as an intuitive thinker whose leaps of logic—or illogic—leave her husband and the police scratching their heads. It could read as though she were a space case, but the Lockridges compensate for that by making her right most of the time. It's a winning formula in this tale that commences with Pamela deciding to throw a party in the empty apartment on the top floor of her building and discovering a corpse in the bathtub.
We were surprised that a detective named Weigand was the central character here, with the Norths serving in a supporting capacity. But that's just the Lockridges setting up the cop as a contact and pal for future novels, we suspect. By the end he was routinely enjoying cocktails with the Norths, though he initially suspected them of the murder. Pamela eventually figures out the solution about the same time as Wiegland, and it's clear she's gotten a taste for sleuthing. All very fun. In our view, for mystery fans The Norths Meet Murder is probably mandatory.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 8 2023 |
Africa gets extra hot in Garnier jungle drama.
Once again we've been drawn to literature set in Africa, this time in the form of Christine Garnier's romantic drama Fetish, originally published in 1951 in French as Va-t'en avec les tiens! Our edition is from 1953, published by Dell, translated into English, and bearing excellent cover art by Griffith Foxley. The rear cover is interesting as well, particularly because Dell toplined a middling review from Time magazine after molding it into glowing praise: As stirring and authentic as a native dance... throughly convincing... effective... flashing. What the review actually said, in part, was: Garnier [combined] her minor talent for fiction with her knowledge of African life. The result was Fetish, a novel which sold a phenomenal (for France) 135,000 copies. Garnier still lacks skill as a novelist, but in Fetish it scarcely seems to matter. The book's main virtue is its French West African background, as stirring and authentic as a native dance.
Okay, Time magazine can take a flying leap. Garnier can write just fine. Fetish is about a Westernized African woman named Doéllé who works in the Manoho district of Togoland as a nurse for a French doctor. She has a white lover named Flavien who's a local magistrate. When the doctor's hot wife Urguèle arrives from Paris, every white man in the district—including Flavien—desires her. Doéllé is likewise thought by all to be quite a dish. But she isn't white. Urguèle's easy assertion of privilege, and her husband's eventual realization that she wishes to stray, sets up a dangerous love rectangle that propels Doéllé toward—let's say—locally traditional solutions for the problem, despite her education and Westernization.
Fetish avoids some pitfalls of mid-century novels written by whites about Africa. Actually, “avoid” makes it sound conscious. Garnier is simply a sensitive writer, and because the story is narrated by Doéllé, it lacks some of the usual arrogance toward its setting. Time noted that authenticity is a strength of the book, and that's correct. One aspect of this authenticity that goes against the grain of every book we've ever read set in Africa is that, according to Garnier, it was impossible for whites to have a secret affair. Africans were so fascinated and mystified by these pale aliens, as well as wary of them, that they never left them unobserved, and shared everything seen and overheard. Even barred from places, they still noted all who came and went where they themselves weren't allowed. That extreme lack of privacy rings true to us, due to our many experiences as foreigners in tropical hamlets.
As we said, Doéllé narrates Fetish, and because she's acquainted with so many native children and servants in Manoho, she's the beneficiary of all their observations, eavesdropping, and gossip, as described above. The book's point of view shifts between first person, to third person filtered through the many eyes and ears of the district, and even farther, as Doéllé extrapolates Urguèle's, Flavien's, and others' innermost thoughts and musings. In practice she's a first-person, limited-third-person, and unlimited-omniscient narrator. We thought that was a nice trick by Garnier. So Fetish has authenticity, atmosphere, star-crossed lovers, and a good story, all well woven. Time can get bent. Was the book pulp? Not really, but there's passion and danger, and we found it enjoyable.
| Vintage Pulp | May 31 2023 |
Okay, first of all he never listened to me. That's where the blame for this really starts.
Above: an unusual cover for Hank Janson's novel Beloved Traitor, published by the British imprint Roberts and Vinter in 1960, with a lettering style the company used to good effect on other novels. The cover painting is by the Spanish artist Joaquin Chacopino Fabré, sometimes known as merely Chaco. We have two more good examples of his work here, and we'll see if we can dig up more later.
EnglandSpainRoberts & VinterHank JanssonStephen Daniel FrancesJoaquin Chacopino FabréChacocover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | May 29 2023 |
Venus shows her dark and light sides.
Above are two versions of a piece of Alain Gourdon art first used on Yann R. Patrick’s Vénus des neiges by Éditions de l’Arabesque in 1955, then repurposed by Antwerp based Uitgeverij Eros for Mickey Spencer's Geen tijd voor Kusjes. Everyone's an aka here. Gourdon painted under the moniker Aslan, Patrick was really Jacques-Henri Juillet, and Spencer is an obvious pseudonym, though we don't for whom. Whether dark or light, this is lovely work.
FranceBelgiumAntwerpEditions de l'ArabesqueUitgeverij ErosAslanAlain GourdonMickey SpencerYann R. PatrickJacques-Henri Juilletcover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | May 28 2023 |
They're willing to hustle, side-hustle, and even hustle on their backs to get what they want.
When we stumbled across this Italian poster and saw that it was for a film starring the lovely Catherine Deneuve and her unbeatable hair, we felt a screening was needed. Due prostitute a pigalle is a French/Italian co-production that was originally titled Zig-Zig, with the name changing to Zig-Zag for the U.S. The movie is about two Parisians played by Deneuve and Bernadette Lafont who work as cabaret entertainers, bookies, and prostitutes in order to raise enough money to buy a chalet in the mountains. Their signature song and dance number “Zig Zig” earns them a small measure of fame around Paris, and the dream home seems closer by the day.
However, Deneuve has no idea that Lafont is involved with a gang of cross-dressers who've kidnapped the wife of a prominent politician. When she finds out, she freaks out, and it looks like her friendship with Lafont is cooked and their house will never come to be. The movie has its moments, but jarring shifts of tone from serious to farcical and an insistence upon an ironic and unrealistic ending definitively sink it. Even so, it has Deneuve, and her hair can't be sunk under any circumstances. Due prostitute a pigalle premiered in France in early 1975, and in Italy today the same year.
ItalyFranceParisDue prostitute a pigalleZig-ZigZig-ZagCatherine DeneuveBernadette LafontWalter ChiariPaola Senatoreposter artcinemamovie review
| Intl. Notebook | May 18 2023 |
Lindberg unveils more than just her movie for the Cannes press corps.
The above image shot today in 1971 shows Swedish star Christina Lindberg in Cannes, France, where she was promoting her movie Exponerad at the Cannes Film Festival. She was also at the prestigious event in 1973 to promote Thriller - en grym film, aka Thriller: A Cruel Picture, so you have to give her production companies Olympic Film and BAV points for effort, even though Lindberg's movies are just arthouse sleaze when boiled down to their essence. And when your movies are not of particular merit what better way to bring attention to them than with random nudity? Shedding clothing was a go-to gimmick for Cannes starlets back when the line between mainstream and erotic film was blurrier than today.
In the first photo Lindberg is on the patio of a Cannes bar, and from her perch atop a table she stripped off everything except her panties while dozens of photographer captured her likeness and bystanders gawped at the spectacle. You can see some of assembled press in the fuzzy reverse angle at right. A bit later, on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel where she was staying, her clothes hit the tiles again, as you see below.She wasn't remotely finished. Here's her memory of a publicity stunt that set Cannes ablaze: “I was going to meet the press out on a pier over the water. After having signed about a thousand invitations, which were given out to select people, I was lowered down from a rented helicopter to the pier topless. There were hundreds of photographers.”
We find it amazing that so few photos of such an event seem to survive today. There must have been thousands of frames shot of that helicopter stunt. Lindberg's recollection of so many photographers shows you the sheer volume of imagery that's lost to time. Luckily, she's well documented anyway thanks to the photo sessions she made for various international magazines and her 1973 photo book. A few of our favorites are here, here, and here. She'll return to Pulp Intl. soon.
| Femmes Fatales | May 7 2023 |
It's better to apologize later than to ask now. But she's not going to do either.
This photo shows French actress Nicole Calfan and was made for her 1975 thriller Permission To Kill, also known as The Executioner, a film we've taken notice of because it starred Ava Gardner in one of her later roles, and future Bond boy Timothy Dalton in one of his first. Calfan has made more than seventy movies and is still busy today, having appeared in four in 2022, plus a television series. We'll try to track down Permission To Kill and report back.
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