| Femmes Fatales | Apr 13 2021 |
Should she stay or go? The chair may be the factor that tips her one way or the other.
This rare poster of U.S. actress Candice Bergen was printed and distributed in 1972 by a company called Nats Co-operated Reproduction. The shot was made in 1968 by famed photographer Terry O'Neill. There are other photos from the session. A couple even feature the same weathered beach chair that looks set to snap at any moment like something made from chopsticks, but as far as we know only Nats Co-operated used a color shot of Bergen in this particular pose. We've seen a black and white on Getty Images, but never one in color until this treasure. The beach, incidentally, immediately looked to us like our occasional stomping grounds the Balearic Islands, and sure enough, when we checked it turned out Bergen sat for this when she was filming The Magus in Mallorca. Another shot from the session appears below.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 17 2021 |
Red eyes at night, Merle take warning.
Above, a great Spanish poster for the Andre de Toth thriller Aguas turbias, better known as Dark Waters, with Merle Oberon as a woman living in a bayou mansion inhabited by dodgy relatives who may want to kill her. The film premiered in the U.S. in 1944 and reached Spain this month in 1946. The poster is similar to the U.S. version, but the predominant color was changed to a bright red-orange, including—weirdly—Oberon's eyes. In our opinion the poster is actually creepier than the movie. You can read about it here.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 15 2020 |
They always faint from shock. Then I read them my poetry and they realize they've misjudged me.
The lagoon is lovely, dark, and deep, but I have miles to go before I creep. Frost, in case you didn't know. This is a poster for the Creature from the Black Lagoon from Spain, where it was called La mujer y el monstruo, and premiered today in 1954. See more creature stuff here, here, and here. And something related here.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 22 2020 |
It's a marriage that goes from bad to worse.
Ever since the term “gaslighting” became an accepted part of the American lexicon we've been meaning to watch the original version of Gaslight. Finding this Spanish promo poster spurred us to finally screen the film. There are those who think any old black and white mystery or thriller is a film noir, which is why you'll occasionally see Gaslight referred to as part of that genre. But it's actually a melodrama falling into an unofficial category of mid-century films we like to call, “Don't Trust Your Husband.” Other entries in the genre include Rebecca, Dial M for Murder, and Sorry, Wrong Number. Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight tells the story of Bella, a woman living in early 1900s London who, because small items in her house are constantly missing or misplaced, thinks she's losing her mind. But it's her creepy spouse Paul who's orchestrating all of this. He intends to have her declared insane, which is part of a larger scheme having to do with—of course—money.
On one level Gaslight is a drama about paranoia and the betrayal of marital trust. On another it's an unintentionally humorous examination of Edwardian values. Humorous because we doubt most women—either when the film was first released or today—would have been successfully manipulated in this way. If it were the Pulp Intl. girlfriends they'd both be like, “Do you think I'm stupid? Stop moving shit around the house.” But poor Bella is little more than a possession during the time in which she lives, and lacking the agency to question her husband she mostly swoons. But help eventually arrives from an unlikely quarter. Gaslight was remade in 1944 with Ingrid Bergman, and the original compares poorly to that excellent version, but it's still a quality film well worth viewing. It premiered in the UK in June 1940, and in Barcelona, Spain as Luz de gas today in 1942.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 26 2020 |
We're on top of the world and the view is fine.
We're back online. Did you ever doubt us? Truth is, this was not a seamless move. Problems cropped up in almost every area. Internet acquisition was very tough. Our workloads (again, we actually do have jobs) have piled up to dangerous levels. Travel problems linger, which is to say we haven't yet determined how to get the indispensable Pulp Intl. girlfriends here. And don't even bring up the health thing—one of us caught something before leaving, but had a negative virus test just days before traveling. Whatever that thing is has not gone away fully, so hopefully there aren't a lot of false negatives with these nasal swabs they give you. We'll work it all out somehow. Advice: don't move during a pandemic, and especially don't do it during a dangerous surge in virus cases. But we had to. Just look at our new view. That's worth any amount of discomfort and inconvenience.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 17 2020 |
Pulp Intl. takes a long day's journey into the night of Spain.
It's intermission time. But wait—didn't we just have an intermission? Indeed we did, but this next one can't be avoided, because we're moving. We mean physically, not online. This is going to be a long, tricky journey that delivers us to our new home—Cádiz, Spain, which you see above, and below, night and day. Once we arrive there we'll have to contend with getting internet set up. The provider (who we've only spoken to by phone) has been comically overconfident, but we're experienced in these matters, and we know—even if they don't—that they'll botch it somehow or other.
We're looking forward to this move. Cadiz is an intimate, active place, with an excellent nightlife and a world famous carnival, which we hope to enjoy if the killer virus is somehow vanquished. But even if that takes a long time or forever, Cadiz is still a nice city to walk around in, a visually inspiring place with numerous old buildings, a maze of streets, and at least a hundred outdoor terrace bars. This outdoor lifestyle is what attracted us—if the virus lingers and we can never go indoors again, we'll still be in good shape.
We know what you're thinking. Isn't undertaking a major move during a pandemic imprudent? Well, we're impulsive like that, and hope to pull it off without contracting anything. Assuming all goes according to plan, we'll be back online with new inspiration, new material, and—crucially—a new scanner to help us get back into the swing of posting old tabloids. Figure seven to ten days, end-to-end. Wish us luck. Meantime, we have some fun posts to help build the anticipation for our glorious return. Look below the photo.
Assorted covers of Luchadores de Espacio.
Desperate embraces on vintage book covers.
Our amazingly extensive tabloid index.
Voyeuristic paperback cover art.
Everything we've ever posted about Japanese pinku icon Reiko Ike (warning: nakedness).
A whole lotta love from the vintage French nudie mag Folies de Paris et de Hollywood (warning: nakedness).
Everything we've ever posted related to sci-fi (warning: nakedness—just kidding).
Femmes fatales in red.
Have suitcase, will travel.
Some of the most beautiful magazine covers we've ever seen.
Film noir, in all its variations.
Laura Gemser, in all her glory.
The unique art of French illustrator Jef de Wulf.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 9 2020 |
Welch tries to Fathom the spy game in cheeseball ’60s thriller.
This great poster was painted by French artist Vanni Tealdi for the 1967 spy adventure Une super-girl nommée Fathom, originally made as Fathom. The film was based on an unpublished novel by Larry Forrester, and is set in Spain in various beautiful locations around the Costa del Sol, including Nerja, which we discussed not long ago. Sixties icon Raquel Welch plays a member of a skydiving troupe recruited by Headquarters Allied Defenses Espionage and Security—HADES—to locate the fire dragon, which is supposedly a trigger for a nuclear bomb. Mostly the mission involves Welch using her smile and showing off her supernaturel physique, which is the real nuclear bomb, packed with kilotons of destructive power.
She finds herself caught in a web of lies and soon doesn't know who's the good guy, whether the fire dragon is really a nuclear trigger, and whether she shouldn't just run away and catch up with the rest of her troupe. It's all quite lighthearted, and considering what Welch is given to work with scriptwise, she manages not to sabotage herself or the film. However, she was not that great of an actress at this point, so your primary motive for watching this would be to enjoy the scenery—certainly of Welch, but also of Spain. Those two reasons will get you through the film's ninety-nine minutes. Une super-girl nommée Fathom has no known French release date, but it premiered in the U.S. today in 1967, and would have made it to France later the same summer.
SpainFranceUne super-girl nommée FathomFathomRaquel WelchAnthony FranciosaVanni Tealdiposter artcinemamovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 28 2020 |
Laura Gemser is a nun that likes to have fun.
Laura Gemser made more than fifty films, most of them of the erotic variety, which means we'll probably never run out of material on her to share. Above you see a Spanish poster for the her nunsploitation flick Sor Emanuelle, which was originally released in Italy as Suor Emaunelle. We already talked about the movie, but we wanted to share this unusual promo. We've never gotten the nun thing, we suppose because we aren't Catholic, or even religious for that matter, but for some reason these movies represent a full sub-genre of ’70s cinema. That being the case, it was only a matter of time before Gemser got into the habit.
She starred in this with Swiss actress Mónica Zanchi, who's billed as Mónika Zanchi. The two would pair up again a year later in Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, another spectacularly bad sexploitation epic. In addition to the poster, we also—just because we can—wanted to share a couple of magazine images of Gemser and Zanchi, and those are just below. They're super naked. You've been warned. But these are beautiful shots. After its Italian opening in 1977 Sor Emanuelle premiered in Spain today in 1978. Check out our original write-up on the film here.
SpainItalySwitzerlandSor EmanuelleSuro EmanuelleSister EmanuelleLaura GemserMónica ZanchiMónika Zanchinudityposter artcinemasexploitationnunsnudity
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 18 2020 |
Welch makes world's most unwieldy laundry technique look like a good idea.
This piece of art has two things going for it—it was painted by Italian genius Enzo Nistri, and his painting is of Raquel Welch. We know—we had you already at Enzo. Consider Welch a bonus. El Verdugo is Spanish for “the executioner,” and this is a Spanish poster, despite the artist being Italian. The film is better known as 100 Rifles, a 1969 western about a revolutionary who knocks off a bank to fund the purchase of guns. It's counterculture all the way—Burt Reynolds plays a half-Native American named Yaqui Joe, Jim Brown co-stars as a lawman sent to recover the cash, Welch is also supposed to be Indian, and the subtext of revolution was meant to mirror the social unrest in the U.S. We wrote about it in detail here.
Welch takes a shower in the middle of the film, and you see below we have some promo images of that. A clothed shower? It's silly. Welch did not do nudity*, so the filmmakers should have simply left the scene out. Within the script the shower is an ambush so she can get some Mexican soldiers' guards down then ventilate them, but just set up the ambush a different way. Don't know about you, but if we came across someone showering clothed, whatever the circumstances, we'd immediately start looking over our shoulders because it's strange. That said, the photos are fun. They show what a huge sex symbol Welch was. Douse her with water and men got hot and bothered seeing hardly any skin at all. El Verdugo opened in Spain today in 1969.
*Regarding Welch nude scenes, there's a nude photo of a woman who resembles Welch and is believed by some to have been taken on a movie set. It's plausible in the sense that back then actors got naked for scenes that were nude in scripts but not meant to be shown nude or fully nude onscreen—such as here and here—but we doubt Welch did it.
| Mondo Bizarro | Jun 23 2020 |
Another valuable Spanish painting is ruined by someone who's all thumbs and no skills.
Spanish art restorers are in the news for the wrong reasons again. You may remember the infamous Ecce Homo disfigurement—the early 20th century fresco by Elías García Martínez that was ruined by amateur restorer Cecilia Giménez. The restoration, which took place in the town of Borja, was so botched that many Spaniards stopped referring to the painting as Ecce Homo—“Behold Man”—in favor of Ecce Mono—“Behold Monkey.” We've posted its Christ figure, angelic before, and afflicted after, below. We think the name change fits, though we think the after Christ also looks a bit like Leatherface.
The Ecce Homo fiasco soon grew to exemplify the divergent incentives of the modern world. The painting was destroyed. Its destruction turned the painting and the town of Borja into a tourist attraction. The restorer now claims she's proud of her work because of the money that tourists 
bring which can be used for good causes. The fact that these calamity tourists are posing with the painting only because it looks like Giménez restored it using a brush held between her ass cheeks is now immaterial. Only money matters. The money made has absolved her of responsibility for ruining the art.
bring which can be used for good causes. The fact that these calamity tourists are posing with the painting only because it looks like Giménez restored it using a brush held between her ass cheeks is now immaterial. Only money matters. The money made has absolved her of responsibility for ruining the art.The latest incident involves a more-than-century-old copy of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's baroque painting La Inmaculada del Escorial, which you see at top. An art collector in Valencia hired a furniture restorer to clean the painting, but the face of the Virgin Mary was damaged. The collector then hired an art restorer to repair the damage, was forced to hire a second to fix the damage done by the first, and, well, see below. Now look up top again. Now look below.
Yeah, that actually happened. We can't figure out how the second restorer made the painting look even less like the original than the first restorer. Did they not understand why they had been hired? These paintings aren't pulp art, but their destruction is like something from a comical crime novel. Not surprisingly, some Spaniards also consider these blunders criminal, and are now calling for regulation of the art restoration sector, and who can blame them?
Spanish art experts say botched restorations are more common than people know. We searched around and found a couple more, also hilariously awful (see the sculpture of St. George from the town of Estella, below). Generally, these incidents only become public when they're reported to the press or on social media, which isn't the norm, considering the embarrassment involved. But we can't help wondering if, going forward, ancient artworks will be deliberately ruined as a ploy to generate calamity tourism. We wouldn't put it past people. Maybe Behold Monkey should be renamed again, to Behold Money. Maybe Jesus has shown the way—to financial salvation.
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