MANCHE TRAP

You can't spell “demon” without Demongeot.

French filmmakers often gravitated toward English language crime novels for inspiration. Une manche et la belle, another thriller set in the fertile South of France, was based on British author James Hadley Chase’s 1954 thriller The Sucker Punch. Henri Vidal plays an ambitious young exec at Pacific Bank, for whom trouble starts when he aces his colleague out of a rich client. The client, played by Isa Miranda, takes a personal liking to Vidal. Isa’s secretary is Mylène Demongeot, and she takes a liking to Vidal too, in that flirtatious but elusive way she was good at bringing to the screen. Vidal marries Miranda and the two head off on a Venetian honeymoon, but rich people need staff, so the cherubically beautiful Demongeot is brought along for the ride. But three’s a crowd. Under the circumstances, wedded bliss develops a quick end date. A murderous one, if Demongeot has her way.

Can she entice Vidal into a reckless decision? Well, sure, who wouldn’t get reckless for her? Imagine if there were a murder trial. The judge: “Can’t show you any leniency without suffering professional ridicule and the loss of my cushy gig up here on the bench, but bro—I get it.” The entire world got it, which is why Demongeot became a popular cinematic sex symbol. You’ll frequently see the movie cited as one in which she was topless, but the bare frontage on display was that of a body double, which we determined thanks to the wonders of the pause button. Too bad—even playing purest evil Demongeot is special. She might be the original inspiration for the ubiquitous “Distracted Boyfriend” meme. Une manche et la belle, a pretty fun flick all things considered, premiered in France today in 1957.

The Prince of Darkness sets his sights on Elke Sommer. And who can blame him?

Above is a poster for El Diablo se lleva los muertos, which was known in English as Lisa and the Devil—sort of. Most sources say this was originally an Italian movie, though there’s no Italian poster. It premiered at the Cannes Film Fesitval in 1973, and in January 1974 showed at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, which was a French fest that during its existence between 1973 and 1993 was focused on horror. But there’s no French poster. The movie’s first general release was in Spain today in 1974, so the Spanish poster is what you see above. It was painted by Francisco Fernández Zarza-Pérez, who signed it “Jano.”

In the end, the movie was never released in Italy in its original form. Several months after it tanked with the French, The Exorcist exploded onto global screens and the sudden cultural interest in possession presented the seeming opportunity for El Diablo se lleva los muertos to be spiced up with more vivid content—i.e. scenes of exorcism—and re-released. This happened, and the result was titled Lisa and the Devil, but director Mario Bava had his name removed, which is never a good sign. That’s where the “sort of” comes in. Lisa and the Devil is a hybrid film. We didn’t watch that version. Ours was the original.

So, what happens in the original? Not much. While on holiday in Toledo, Spain, Elke Sommer sees a fresco of the Devil, then later, in a weird shop of old books and mannequins, encounters Telly Savalas, who looks unnervingly like the painting. Circumstances lead to her and a few other stranded travelers spending the night in a creepy old mansion owned by Alida Valli, whose servant is none other than Savalas. Pretty soon a series of inexplicable events occur, ranging from Elke discovering her identical resemblance to a former occupant of the house, to gruesome deaths—including one in which a guy gets run over by a vintage car, backed over, run over, backed over, run over, and maybe backed over again. We lost count. Somehow this is all related to Sommer being a target for Satanic possession.

Sommer was never in an outstandingly good movie as far as we’ve seen yet. This one must have really disheartened her. Hopes started high all around because Bava was an auteur of sorts who’d been given free reign to make anything he wished, but proved that most directors can’t be trusted with that level of control. Some people love this film, but objectively, it’s a slog. We drifted off a few times, then someone would press the horn on that killer car—OOOOGAH!—and we were awake again. In our view El Diablo se lleva los muertos is for lovers of gothic or haunted house horror only. Or you can try the U.S. version and get more gore. We won’t be doing that. But our faith in Elke remains unshaken.

Hard work merely requires the right tool.

Above: a 1950 production photo of French-born U.S. actress Andrea King, née Georgette André Barry, from the crime flick I Was a Shoplifter. That’s a big gun. Or at least, it looks big on her. In the movie we gather she doesn’t physically steal anything. Instead, she runs the crime ring that does. We guess that makes her the Kingpin—heh. We shared another promo from the film years ago. You can see that here.

Slide it in her slot! I did and it was great!

French author Roger Martin du Gard’s The Postman, about a mail carrier whose job helps him learn all the dirty little secrets in the village of Maupeyrou, was originally published in 1933 as Vieille France, and, while a bit racy, is a serious novel. Therefore our subhead is juvenile, we admit, and in this case we’re even being crude about a Nobel Prize winning novelist. But we’re no more crude than the publishing companies that repackaged literary masterpieces inside sexualized cover art. This Berkley Books edition from 1958 with art by naughty Rudy Nappi, is a very good example of that phenomenon.

Stop playing coy, mister. This is a desert. I'm your only option for hundreds of miles.

Years back when we ran across a cover painted by someone identified only as Blofeld, we were sure we’d never see him again. Well, we were wrong. Blofeld also painted the above cover for French author Henry de Montherlant’s Desert Love, copyright 1959 from Bestseller Library, but with a publication history that goes back to 1938. Basically, Desert Rose is a piece of a larger narrative titled La Rose de Sable that Bestseller Library extracted and published as a standalone novel. This may have happened because the complete work examines and criticizes French rule in North Africa, particularly the takeover of the Sultanate of Morocco that resulted in more than 20,000 deaths. We’ll see if we run across Blofeld down the line. This is a really unusual piece. See the previous one here.

The line between the ravager and the ravaged gets pretty thin.

This Japanese poster was made for Dany la ravageuse, a French sexploitation movie known in English as Dany the Ravager, which premiered in Japan today in 1972. Is it just us, or does Dany the Ravager sound like the name of a Marvel character? Well, Sandra Julien as the titular Dany certainly has a super effect on those around her. She hitchhikes from Paris to the Côte d’Azur and gets into a series of adventures. In one, a driver fantasizes about getting naked and netting butterflies in the woods with her (we have some brilliant production photos of that below). In another, she spends quality naked time lakeside with another woman. In the next she’s picked up by two fugitive gangsters who soon turn on each other over her. And in yet another she meets a couple of hustlers in Monaco who pull the ole switcheroo in the dark so Julien ends up in bed with the wrong guy. It’s played for laughs, but still, it’s rapey.

Overall, the movie is brainless sexploitation, but not of the most pleasant variety, exemplified by a backseat sexual assault in the fugitives episode that turns into mutual attraction. It’s always jarring to experience cinema made before any form of social change took hold, whether change around what consitutued rape, or changes around portraying people of color, or changes around humor and ableism. Our favorite movies from the sexploitation genre feature women in control of their fictional adventures. However, on the opposite side of the social change coin, Dany la ravageuse is unflinching in its approach to male frontal nudity, so in that respect it was well ahead of its time. We think it’s worthy of deeper discussion academically, but as pure entertainment, unless you adore Julien or want to see a lot of French countryside, you can take a pass.

I said one hour, yet here you are, still in your underwear. Take your time. We're only being hunted by killers.

This is pretty nice work by French illustrator James Hodges for Éditions Baudelaire and its Détective Pocket edition of William Ard’s Donne moi cette femme. It’s copyright 1963, and bears Hodges’ signature on the lower left of the front cover.

The title translates as “give me this woman.” Usually French retitles are wildly different from the English originals, but this is a rare case where that isn’t true. This book is the French version of Ard’s 1962 thriller Give Me This Woman.

We’ve talked about Ard, aka Ben Kerr, aka Mike Moran, et al before. We especially enjoyed Hell Is a City, When She Was Bad, and Club 17. Luckily, we also have four more of his efforts awaiting attention on our shelves. In short: we think he’s great. Read anything you can find by him.

James Hodges was a prolific artist who worked not only in publishing, but advertising, television, set design, puppet making, and live special effects, at one point designing the visuals for Christian Fechner’s Grand Guignol at the famed Théâtre de l’Européen. Later in his multi-faceted career he even delved into illusion and stage direction. We’ve shared many of his pieces, and you can see a few here and here. He’ll surely pop up on our website again.

Everybody falls in love with Bardot.

We’ve finally gotten back to French illustrator Clément Hurel after visiting with him in 2011 and 2017. He produced this breezy piece for the Brigitte Bardot film En effeuillant la marguerite, which means “pulling petals from the daisy,” a reference to the “he loves he loves me not” game played with flowers. The movie was called in English Plucking the Daisy. It was fun in a Marilyn Monroesque way. We don’t mean to derivatively compare Bardot to Monroe, but who came first? You know the answer. They’re both great, though, and Bardot, with her flashes of nudity, helped advance cinema into the modern era. We talked about En effeuillant la marguerite and shared a nice Japanese promo a while back. If you wish, proceed.

For Bardot fans it's a good time to be in Japan.

Brigitte Bardot’s ninetieth birthday is upcoming Saturday. Above is a double-sided Japanese poster advertising a film retrospective meant to coincide with that event. Eleven of Bardot’s films are on the slate in Tokyo at the Shinjuku Musashinokan Cinema and the Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho, as well as at other venues across the country. This began last Friday and runs through October 18, with not only screenings, but talks and panels. Scheduled movies include 1956’s En effeuillant la marguerite, aka Plucking the Daisy, 1957’s Une parisienne, aka A Parisian Woman, 1962’s Vie privée, aka A Very Private Affair, and even 1971’s Boulevard du Rhum, aka The Rum Runners. If you happen to be in Japan the next week or so, you’ve now been duly informed.

Everyone on the boat is cruising for a misusing.

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.

Femme Fatale Image

ABOUT

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

VINTAGE ADVERTISING

Things you'd love to buy but can't anymore

Vintage Ad Image

Around the web