vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: an alternate cover from Bantam Books for W. Somerset Maugham’s set-in-Italy society thriller Up at the Villa. The art by Charles Andres depicts the central event in the story without giving away what actually happens. We won’t either. This showed up in 1947, as did the other, but we suspect this one came first. You can see our original write-up here.
Above: eight Italian lobby cards for Ginger il simbolo del sesso con licenza… d’amare, with Cheri Caffaro. While the posters say “Ginger” they were not made to promote Caffaro’s 1971 sexploitation-actioner Ginger, but rather 1973’s threequel Girls Are for Loving. Each of these is built around a Caffaro promo photo that shows more than seen here (such as this one, this one, and those you’ll find in the write-up we did on the movie a while back). We have the other underlying images too. We may get around to posting those later.
Above: the cover of La strada per l’inferno, by Mickey Dorane, which was a pseudonym used by Gianfranco Parolini, 1960. The art is by Mario Caria. You can see a bit more from him by clicking his keywords below.
We’ve featured femmes fatales in a few iconic vintage chair designs, such as the Arne Jacobsen egg chair here, so why not another? Above you see perched on a Blow Inflatable Armchair revered Italian actress Laura Antonelli. In her time she was an icon, a respected performer who tallied more than forty films, some highly acclaimed. She’s seen here in a shot originally published in 1972 in Le dive nude magazine. The chair she’s arrayed upon was conceived and created by Milanese designers Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, and Paolo Lomazzi. It was the first mass-produced inflatable chair. Bet they never expected it to look this good.
A live auction of numerous vintage carnival, circus, and sideshow posters begins today at 5:00 p.m. on the site Potter Auctions. We like all things carnival related, so we thought we’d share some of the many items that will be on sale. The posters come from numerous western countries. Among the selection here are examples from France (Gustave Saury, poster #1, and Jacques Faria, at bottom), Italy (Mauro Colizzi, #2, and Renato Casaro, #3), Germany, Portugal, Poland, and of course the U.S. These are expensive, but all are frameworthy. We have other items in this vein on the website. Here, for example, are more posters made to promote circuses and carnivals, and if you click through from there you’ll find a collection of posters from magicians and magic shows. We’ll return to this subject later.
We don’t read anything that doesn’t have art suitable for our website except on the rarest of occasions, so it’s lucky the wave of repackagings of earlier literature by publishers allows us to visit some classics. The acclaimed W. Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa came in 1941 originally, with this Bantam edition and its uncredited cover arriving in 1947. It’s about an American widow named Mary Panton, aged around thirty, living in a Tuscan villa. She’s beautiful and desired by two well-heeled men, but is drawn to an impoverished village violinist. When a tryst between the two goes haywire, she’s stuck in a moral dilemma. There’s nothing new in this idea, but Maugham is just a superior writer. Such as here:
The centuries fell away and wandering there you felt yourself the inhabitant of a fresher, younger world in which instinct was more reckless and consequences less material.
Without getting into detail, the pickle Mary finds herself in is the type of fix you’d tend to find in a pulp thriller. How Maugham approaches and deals with this quandary proves that he’s got bigger fish to fry than in any sin-obsessed crime novel. But you don’t need us to tell you that he was excellent at his craft. No less an entity than the British Empire appointed him a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1954, on the recommendation of Winston Churchill, himself a writer. Later Maugham and Churchill were two of the first five writers to be made Companions of Literature. So there you go. Up at the Villa is a nice read.
Above: another great cover from Italian illustrator Giovanni Benvenuti. The lucky recipient of his talent this time was British author Gordon Ashe, aka John Creasy, who published Kill or Be Killed originally in 1949, with this edition sold in all parts of the British Commonwealth beginning in 1959. Benvenuti, who is not nearly discussed enough in vintage paperback circles, was a genius. Full stop. The Alec Baldwinesque look of his armed tough guy is an interesting coincidence, all things considered. Maybe choice three would be a manslaughter charge and dismissed case. See a selection of some of Benvenuti’s unique work here, here, and here.
In cinema there have always been substances, natural, chemical, or magical, that confer youth. One of many inspirations for—or at least precursors to—the acclaimed Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley gorefest The Subtance, is the Italian sci-fi drama Satanik, which premiered today in 1968, and features Magda Konopka as Doctor Marnie Bannister, who steals and consumes a colleague’s formula that reverses her age and disfigurement. She immediately does what any right-thinking person would under those circumstances—make good use of that new body by becoming a slinky seductress-cum-disruptor. But she soon learns she must re-ingest the formula or revert to her previous state. And she ain’t about to go back to who she was.
Satanik was based on an Italian comic book series created by writer Max Bunker and author Magnus (Roberto Raviola). Some reviews of the film say the youth formula destroys Konopka’s impulse control, but her character kills her colleague to get it in the first place, so she’s bad from the start. From that point she also gets kind of fun. She suddenly likes to dance, striptease, water-ski (really Konopka in those sequences) and behave in that dangerous way femmes fatales do. Ultimately she must deal with the police, who are close, yet miss her a few times due to her changes of physical form. It’s a neat trick, but it won’t keep her safe forever. We can’t say Satanik was good—it was too cheaply made, too dashed together. But we mostly liked it anyway.
Above: a fun shot of Italian actress Paola Pitagora published by Escapade magazine in 1968. Pitagora has been in fifty-plus films, including some we’d like to get to, among them Senza sapere niente di lei, aka Unknown Woman, and Salvare la faccia, aka Psychout for Murder, both from 1969, as well as 1973’s Revolver. Hopefully we can revisit her at some point.
These two posters were made to promote the Italian crime flick Gli occhi freddi della paura, aka Cold Eyes of Fear, which premiered today in 1971. Plotwise, somewhere in the noctural heart of London—though the movie was actually shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome except for some exteriors—an ex-con plans to make a judge pay bigtime for convicting and sending him to jail. Along with two henchmen he’s taken over the judge’s house in order to rob him of incriminating papers, which will expose a frame-up, and justify His Lordship being bloodily murdered.
The only problem is that, despite presumed years of hate-hardened planning forged in the white hot crucible of supermax somewhere, His Lordship isn’t home. Instead, the judge’s nephew ends up trapped inside with the criminals because he wanted to use his uncle’s swanky house as place to get laid, and now stands in the way of sweet retribution. It seems like a failure of planning on the part of the criminals, if you ask us, but what can you do? Improvise, of course.
We could get into the second half of the plot here, but we’ll just say that Italian crime movies were often convoluted (see: giallo) so we were surprised how straightforward this flick was. We could also get into the cast, but that’s what the keywords at bottom are for. The only participants that matter to us are the lovely Giovanna Ralli as the nephew’s hired hooker who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Karin Schubert, who isn’t in the movie for long but deserves mention just because she’s Schubert. As housebound thillers go, with various parties trying to outmaneuver each other in a confined setting, Gli occhi freddi della paura isn’t bad.
David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer known as Son of Sam, is sentenced to 365 years in prison for six killings. Berkowitz had acquired his nickname from letters addressed to the NYPD and columnist Jimmy Breslin. He is eventually caught when a chain of events beginning with a parking ticket leads to his car being searched and police discovering ammunition and maps of crime scenes.
In South Vietnam, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns to death after dousing himself with gasoline and lighting a match. He does it to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Ngô Đình Diệm led government, choosing a busy Saigon intersection for his protest. An image of the monk being consumed by flames as he sits crosslegged on the pavement, shot by Malcolm Browne, wins a Pulitzer Prize and becomes one of the most shocking and recognizable photos ever published.
In New York City, Dr. Robert Smith and William Griffith Wilson, who were both recovering alcoholics, establish the organization Alcoholics Anonymous, which pioneers a 12-step rehabilitation program that is so helpful and popular it eventually spreads to every corner of the globe.
John Paul Getty III, grandson of billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome, Italy. The elder Getty ignores a ransom demand for $17 million, thinking it is a joke. When John Paul’s ear later arrives in the mail along with a note promising further mutilation, he negotiates the ransom down to $2.9 million, which he pays only on the condition that John Paul repay him at four percent interest. Getty’s kidnappers are never caught.
Thoroughbred racehorse Secretariat becomes the first U.S. Triple Crown champion in twenty-five years when he wins the Belmont Stakes. During his triple crown campaign, he sets new records in two of the three events (times that still stand today), and wins the Belmont in an astonishing thirty-one lengths.
