Hollywoodland | Mondo Bizarro May 5 2023
MID-CENTURY CUBISM
Hollywood actresses went to the Max to solve their beauty problems.

We've been seeing this photo online of late labeled as an ice cube mask meant to cure hangovers circa 1947. That seemed unlikely to us, because why would ice cubes on your chin help with a hangover? The only thing that helps a hangover is a sustained interval of unconsciousness. So we dug around and discovered that this is in reality a beauty aid. It was created by Polish inventor and beautician Macksymillian Faktorowizc, who would later become globally famous as Max Factor, and it was specifically made for use by actresses to cool and refresh their faces after being under the hot lights of Hollywood movie sets. Back then (and even today for all we know) actresses constantly washed their faces with cold water, but this required fresh applications of make-up after every rinse. So Factor's mask theoretically was both a time and labor saver. Believe it or not, it wasn't the craziest contraption he invented. In any case—not a hangover cure, but another small internet mystery solved.

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Femmes Fatales Feb 21 2020
THE PERILS OF POLA
To shoot him... to shoot him not... to shoot him... to shoot him not...


This photo shows legendary Polish actress Pola Negri, one of the most popular, influential, and highly paid stars of her time. As a megacelebrity she popularized numerous fashion trends, including red toenails. Her fortune was greatly diminished no thanks to the 1929 stock market crash and gold-digging husband Serge Mdivani's bad investment decisions. She divorced Mdivani in 1931, and we hope he counted himself lucky not to have been murdered in his sleep, considering what a terrible husband he'd been. Negri kept acting through the 1930s, had a single role during the 1940s, and finally hung it up after 1964's The Moon-Spinners. In total she appeared in more than seventy films and became one of Hollywood's iconic stars. This shot was made in 1928 for her role as Princess Fedora in The Woman from Moscow.

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Vintage Pulp Dec 27 2019
WEEPING BEAUTY
Polish painter turns pain into an abstract concept.

This Polish promo poster was made for the 1965 Japanese psychodrama Utsukushisa to kanashimi to, which in Poland was called Piekno i ból. That translates to “beauty and pain,” whereas the Japanese translates as “with beauty and sorrow.” Both translations are apt descriptions of the movie, which is just as bizarre and twisted as the poster art. We talked about it a while back, so if you're interested have a look here. The poster was painted by Maciej Hibner, a well regarded illustrator active during the ’50s and ’60s whose output is considered collectible today. A lot of his stuff has this same fine art look, which is very different than what we usually share here, but worth a gander just for the sake of its stark contrast with the Japanese poster. We may try to dig up more on Hibner later.

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Musiquarium Dec 14 2019
BONNY LASS
Faux vintage album cover raises Leeding question.


The above album sleeve looks old, doesn't it? It's actually a new release by Polish deejay Bonny Larmes purposely weathered to have that vintage look. We also have the black and white photo his graphic designer worked from, and you'll notice right away that the record the model is holding behind her back has changed from Polish jazz to Rod McKuen's Time of Desire. Since McKuen's record came out in 1958, that gives us a ballpark date on the original image.

Bonny Larmes is fine, but his music isn't why we posted his album. We're interested in the model. Incidentally, you probably noticed her asscrack hair. If not, look to the right (or above, if you're viewing on mobile). Now you've noticed. Asscrack hair is a relic of the past you'd never see in a modern photo. We think it's cute, but the question is whose asscrack hair is it? Well, the model here is identified everywhere as actress Lila Leeds, but this is another internet replication error, because there ain't no way the woman you see above is also the woman you see below—and the woman below is definitely Lila Leeds.

For even more proof check a 1949 photo, probably her most famous shot, at this link. See what we mean? We also seriously doubt Leeds ever posed nude, and if she did, certainly she never posed asscrack nude. So, hairy girl: not Leeds. But who is she? We took a long look around the internet and came up with nothing, so we'll probably never know. But the main thing is to have at least one site come to poor Lila's defense. And they say chivalry is dead.
I swear to you that is not my hairy asscrack!

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Intl. Notebook Feb 27 2018
ALWAYS A PLAISIR
Pulp and art deco. Two great tastes that rarely went together.


The pulp era is generally agreed as having commenced the last several years of the 19th century and having ended during the 1950s. Art deco is agreed to have begun around 1900 and ended around the beginning of World War II. Despite co-existing, they occupied the same place surprisingly little. You would see crossover in cinematic adaptations of pulp material such as Flash Gordon, with its deco styled spaceships and costumes. Some pulp magazines had art deco influenced fonts, and some hardbacks had art deco sleeve art, such as those designed by Edna Reindel for W.R. Burnett's novels Iron Man and Saint Johnson. But when popular paperbacks and magazines began to focus on high quality cover art they developed their own visual style which we think of today as good girl art, or GGA.

But even if pulp and art deco didn't mix much back then, they mix on our website. Today we have an issue of Paris Plaisirs published in 1929 with drawings, paintings, studio photography, French wit and more. The cover photo-illustration was shot by Lucien Waléry, also known as Stanisław Julian Ignacy Ostroróg. Though his name was Polish he was a British citizen, born in London after his father Stanisław Julian Ostroróg—also a famed photographer—emigrated there in 1856 and became a citizen in 1862. The younger Ostroróg took the pseudonym Waléry and thus forever created confusion with earlier photographers who had used the same name. We won't bother unwinding all those Walérys. You can see another of our Waléry's beautiful art deco covers
here
, and we have other issues of Paris Plaisirs you can see by clicking the keywords at bottom.

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Vintage Pulp Apr 25 2017
DINNER TAKES ALL
Who, him? He'll be fine in a minute or two. Everyone who eats here reacts that way when they see their check.

Author Igor B. Maslowski was born in 1914 in Smolensk, Russia, which his parents left to settle in Poland, where Maslowski grew up. After studying French in Warsaw, he went to Paris to study law, and in 1935 he became a reporter for French radio. Later he became a film and theater critic, and from there he moved into writing fiction under his own name and the pseudonym Renée Gaudin. Above you see a very nice cover for his mystery Le jury avait soif, with unattributed art. The book was published by Éditions le Bruyère for its Collection la Cagoule in 1950, and the title in English means “the jury was thirsty.” However, the type of jury here is not a judicial one, but a literary one, convened to select the winner of a prize, a pursuit that's disrupted when one of the panel turns up dead. Pretty soon someone else is dead, and someone else, which in a way isn't a surprise, because the world of literature is actually pretty cutthroat. Aspiring novelists beware. Below, as a bonus, you see a cover of the same novel from Éditions du Chardon's Collection le Carillon, 1954.

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Femmes Fatales Feb 18 2016
GOING OVERBOARD
You know something? Umecka me crazy.


Polish actress Yolanta Umecka appeared in only five films, one of which was Roman Polanski's Academy Award nominated drama Nóz w wodzie, aka Knife in the Water, in which she plays a young wife whose husband (studpidly) invites a (virile young) hitchhiker along on (what was supposed to be) their romantic lake outing, and is shocked when she (enthusiatically) cheats on him. These husbands just never learn. The above image is a promo from the film, 1966.

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Vintage Pulp Jan 19 2016
TO HILL AND BACK
Reaching the top isn’t easy. Staying on top is even harder.


Above is a Spanish poster by Josep Soligó Tena for La casa de la colina, which was originally released in the U.S. as The House on Telegraph Hill. The movie tells the story of a Polish concentration camp survivor—played by Valentina Cortese—who upon release takes the identity of her dead friend, and later insinuates herself into the lives of the dead woman’s San Francisco relatives. This identity swap is the classic Hitchcockian MacGuffin, which is to say it initially seems to be the plot driver, but later isn’t important at all. While Cortese’s labyrinthine lie is always a worrisome background element, the movie is really about how she finds herself embroiled in an inheritance mess and a love triangle. We thought this movie was quite good, but you do have to ignore bits like the improbable placement of a child’s playhouse above a sheer drop (in a sense, another MacGuffin, as the threat of falling has no bearing at all on later developments). Highly recommended movie, and it has nice San Fran exteriors as a bonus. The House on Telegraph Hill premiered in the U.S. in 1951, and as La casa de la colina in Spain today in 1952. See more work from Tena here.

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Vintage Pulp Nov 20 2015
RUNNING WILD
A Rampage of epic proportions.

Lots of skin this week. Don’t blame us. It’s all a matter of publishing randomness. You know we like to share items on the date they originally appeared, and it seems the stars have aligned for a naked mid-November. Above you have a Rampage published today in 1973, with rare photos of German actress Alice Arno and men’s mag fave Joyce Gibson. The monster referenced on the cover is Dean Corll, a serial killer who abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least 28 boys in and around Houston, Texas, from 1970 to 1973. He had been killed two months earlier by his accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley during a showdown over two potential victims, and terrifying details of the crimes had been laid bare for the American public, which was still trying to wrap its head around the concept of serial killers. We may get into the Corll murders a bit later. This is our eighth issue of Rampage, and you can see the others at our trusty tabloid index. 

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Intl. Notebook Sep 7 2014
A RIP IN TIME
History’s most storied serial killer finally identified.

Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper has published a story in which it claims infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper has been identified through DNA testing. The analysis was performed on a shawl found by police on the body of Catherine Eddowes, the fourth of the Ripper’s canonical victims, killed on the same night as Elizabeth Stride in what is termed by Ripper scholars as “The Double Event.” The shawl had recently been bought at auction by an amateur sleuth and passed on to genetic experts, who took samples from the fabric and found matches to the DNA of descendants of Eddowes, and to the descendants of Aaron Kosminski, an original Ripper suspect who had been questioned and surveilled by police back in 1888.

The Mail has said the new evidence “puts to end the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity,” but we imagine independent corroboration will probably have to follow before that’s true. Kosminski was of Polish descent and had emigrated from the Russian Empire to London. Police reports from the time of the murder describe him as a serial masturbator, and indeed the Kosminski DNA sample from the shawl is thought to be semen, meaning that in the few minutes after the killing he both mutilated the corpse and ejaculated over it. Presumably more details will emerge in the coming days, but the announcement of Kosminski as the killer, if true, has to rank as one of crime history’s most significant, and may bring to a close one of its most baffling murder cases.

Update: That didn't take long. Various scientists and DNA experts say the genetic analysis done on the shawl was botched due to error of nomenclature. Instead of an extremely rare genetic match, DNA extracted from Eddowes' shawl actually matches that of most people of European descent. So forget everything we wrote above.

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Next Page
History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
September 26
1934—Queen Mary Launched
The RMS Queen Mary, three-and-a-half years in the making, launches from Clydebank, Scotland. The steamship enters passenger service in May 1936 and sails the North Atlantic Ocean until 1967. Today she is a museum and tourist attraction anchored in Long Beach, U.S.A.
1983—Nuclear Holocaust Averted
Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, whose job involves detection of enemy missiles, is warned by Soviet computers that the United States has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. Petrov deviates from procedure, and, instead of informing superiors, decides the detection is a glitch. When the computer warns of four more inbound missiles he decides, under much greater pressure this time, that the detections are also false. Soviet doctrine at the time dictates an immediate and full retaliatory strike, so Petrov's decision to leave his superiors out of the loop very possibly prevents humanity's obliteration. Petrov's actions remain a secret until 1988, but ultimately he is honored at the United Nations.
September 25
2002—Mystery Space Object Crashes in Russia
In an occurrence known as the Vitim Event, an object crashes to the Earth in Siberia and explodes with a force estimated at 4 to 5 kilotons by Russian scientists. An expedition to the site finds the landscape leveled and the soil contaminated by high levels of radioactivity. It is thought that the object was a comet nucleus with a diameter of 50 to 100 meters.
September 24
1992—Sci Fi Channel Launches
In the U.S., the cable network USA debuts the Sci Fi Channel, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal programming. After a slow start, it built its audience and is now a top ten ranked network for male viewers aged 18–54, and women aged 25–54.
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