Hi, I heard there are some enormous veggies around here. We've been looking at this image for a few years, and while it's often said to feature U.S. actress Anita Page, there's an amazing amount of disagreement about that. Many sites say this is actually an actress named Marie Hopkins. The debate is a fascinating microcosm of internet behavior. We've seen people called stupid over their opinion. Well, we'll try to weigh in, and hopefully not in a stupid way, about whether this is Page or Hopkins.
Some sites, splitting the difference, essentially claim both, saying this is Marie Hopkins posed as Anita Page, or Marie Hopkins posing under the pseudonym Anita Page. Here's the problem with that: there's no Marie Hopkins listed in cinema or stage databases. There's a Miriam Hopkins, from the right period, but even so, this is probably not her. For clues toward an answer we're turning to the pros—i.e. professional brick and mortar galleries. Black & Whites Gallery is no longer around, but from its London locale during the 1980s and into the 1990s it staged shows by renowned photographers such as Richard Sawdon Smith and David Leslie Anthony. That gives it at least something resembling reputability, because when galleries with actual street addresses sell art with mistaken attributions or under false pretenses, it has a way of turning into a reputational problem that's hard to shake among the habitués of the gallery scene. This is not nearly as true of online sellers.
So for the record: Black & Whites Gallery, once located at 50-52 Monmouth Street, London, sold limited lithographs of this image and identified the subject as the actress Anita Page, shot by Clarence Sinclair Bull in 1929. Is that 100% definitive? Maybe not, but it's getting into the neighborhood. You can see a previous Page here.
Even southern girls get the blues. You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it. In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA. In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He had written screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also had become a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a small collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1927—First Prints Are Left at Grauman's
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established. 1945—Hitler Marries Braun
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia's Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden. 1967—Ali Is Stripped of His Title
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon. 1947—Heyerdahl Embarks on Kon-Tiki
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing. 1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
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It's easy. We have an uploader that makes it a snap. Use it to submit your art, text, header, and subhead. Your post can be funny, serious, or anything in between, as long as it's vintage pulp. You'll get a byline and experience the fleeting pride of free authorship. We'll edit your post for typos, but the rest is up to you. Click here to give us your best shot.
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