vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
This cover for Delano Dixel’s Medio millón came from Buenos Aires based Ediciones Taurias in 1958 as part of its Reservada series. As we’ve noted before, for marketing purposes foreign publishers often wanted an English sounding name on their books, but the actual author would of course want acknowledgment of some sort, so he or she would be credited as having produced a translation. In this case, it’s by José María Lliró. The art on this, which we think is excellent, is by an unknown.
This Italian promo poster was made for Il dottor Jekyll, which is of course better known as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and features Spencer Tracy in a bravura performance in what is a really good movie. It premiered in Italy today in 1948. You can read our detailed thoughts and see a nice Finnish poster here.
Update: We got an email about this one from GWR:
Big fan of your blog, I read it almost everyday. One quibble with today’s post if you don’t mind a bit of pedantry. That Jekyll and Hyde poster is for an Argentine film called El extraño caso del hombre y la bestia. From 1951, directed by and starring Mario Soffici.
Oops. We committed the dreaded IRE™—internet replication error. Clearly, the poster doesn’t list Tracy as the star, but it was on an auction site with the wrong info. What can we say? We get in a rush sometimes, what with our jobs, and girlfriends, and social lives. We’ll leave our error here anyway as proof that even we’re human. The poster we meant to share is below.
Above: the cover and numerous interior pages from an issue of Australia’s Man magazine published this month in 1959. The art is incomparable. The scans only hint at its excellence. Most of the illustrations take up a full page, and are vibrant on high quality paper stock. In our holdings are numerous copies of this publication, which means it will return in all its glory before long.
If you look around online you’ll read that this photo of Scottish actress Maureen Swanson holding a port or sherry glass was made to promote a show called, “Scotland Yard accepts the challenge.” But we’d never heard of it, and could find no references to it anywhere. Further research revealed that the original vendors of this image were based in Argentina, and down there a show called Scotland Yard acepta el desafío existed, and that phrase translates as above. But television shows and movies don’t always cross borders with their titles translated literally. Scotland Yard acepta el desafío was made in Britain, where it was The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. “Scotland Yard accepts the challenge” never existed. It might be easier for the various vendors to sell this image if they get the title right. In any case, it’s from 1962.
Today in 1965 the low budget drama Scream of the Butterfly premiered for U.S. audiences. The poster is simple but provocative, which is a fitting assessment of the movie as well. Its central development is a murder that occurs when a couple marries, only for the wife to embark on an affair five days after the wedding, and later be run down by a car. Viewers learn this as a district attorney and his assistant district attorney disagree over the best way to conduct a murder prosecution. The boss wants it done quietly, while the assistant wants a showy trial that generates plenty of publicity, thus the possible opportunity for self-promotion. They both vie against a confident public defender who believes he has an ironclad temporary insanity defense. The three spend the film in the D.A.’s office arguing their respective points of view, while the murder’s circumstances are related via episodic flashbacks.
Argentinian dancer Nélida Lobato stars as the highly sexed victim, her husband is portrayed by William Turner, and the legal eagles are Nick Novarro, Richard Beebe, and Robert Miller. None of this crew can act but the movie is watchable anyway because it possesses an interesting earnestness, exemplified by its tragic soundtrack and artsy tight framing meant to project high melodrama. Also, notably, Lobato shows everything that could be legally shown on a screen in 1965, so the movie has a bit of significance on that front. But on the whole, it’s too poorly put together to be called an actual success, even with its undeniably clever twist ending. At one point, bit player Alan J. Smith laments, “This is like a bad play,” as if he’s making a nostra culpa to the audience. Scream of the Butterfly isn’t like a bad play. It’s like a high-minded but ultimately mediocre play.
We hadn’t thought about it before, but this cover made us realize that the fake mechanical breakdown as a pretext for making a pass at a woman has come up more than a few times in the books we’ve read. We even read one where a guy pulled it using his yacht. Can you imagine considering that a legit move? We’ve never had any moves, apart from saying hello. It’s worked out fine. Interestingly, when PSGP was on his third date with PI-1, it was her old beater of a car that broke down. And here they are, still together.
Anyway, this cover is from Argentina based Ediciones Malinca for its Spanish translation of Touch of Death by Charles Williams, published as part of the company’s Colección Cobalto in 1957. This beautiful piece of art, which we found on Flickr, is signed Tauler. That would be Carlos Tauler, prolific in his day, but now obscure. We’ll show you more of his work later. In Spanish, by the way, “red” actually means “grid” or “web” or maybe “network,” so what you have here is a web or network of death. It was a very good book.
We often describe posters in glowing terms but this effort for the Argentinian sexploitation drama La tentación desnuda is a legit stunner. The movie, which starred international sex symbol Isabel Sarli, premiered today in 1966, and in that year we can’t imagine where this provocative promo was displayed. If anywhere.
At first we thought it was a recently made fan creation, but we changed our minds. The fold lines look real, and while those can be created in Photoshop, fan art is almost always too lazy for such touches. Sarli’s breasts don’t look quite like in real life because the designer painted on a pair of weird cherry nipples, but we’ve seen that happen with posters before. Otherwise the art matches perfectly a promo shot made by photographer Olga Masa for the movie, but at a much higher resolution.
La tentación desnuda delivers in melodramatic but engrossing style exactly what the title suggests, and shows yet again why Sarli was such a massive star. Plotwise she falls off a boat, drags herself from the water, and wanders blindly to hermit Armando Bo’s riverside shack, where she’s given shelter and food. Bo harvests sugar cane and hangs out playing his harp, trying to find, “freedom, to be absolutely free,” and to “live spiritually, near the river, the trees, the birds,” but Sarli laughingly upsets his singular existence in a big way by questioning his beliefs and showing lots of skin. She sticks around when Bo promises to demonstrate the merits of his ascetic lifestyle, but other men who live and work on the river have different ideas for Sarli—and they don’t involve holistic simplicity.
If the plot seems very similar to 1953’s La red you’d be right. Femmes fatales bringing chaos to edenic enclaves was a popular theme in Latin American cinema. This iteration, for the year it was released, is very daring, yet another example of what was going on outside the censored environment within the U.S., where motion picture themes were constrained by the Production Code. Meanwhile, in militarily ruled Argentina, Sarli was going fully nude—a few times, in the case of this film. We guess Juan Carlos Onganía and company liked a litle skin. Even dictators get boners.
Sarli may embody tentación, but she doesn’t try to tempt the men around her, aside from Bo, who’s the only one she wants. But her preferences mean nothing. Soon everyone is fighting over her, hauling her around like hand luggage on a commuter flight. She’s even worth torturing and killing over, as things develop. Men, right? But they’ll pay for their hubris. And because Biblical metaphor is strong with this film, there’s even a bit of mysticism involved. Maybe that’s why the dictatorship tolerated it—that type likes hamhanded religious tropes even more than boners. Well, we’ll tolerate Sarli anytime too. You’ll be seeing her again.
Fuego is a movie from Argentina but we were so taken with this Japanese poster that we decided on it over the original promo art. The colors laid atop the black and white background are nice. As for the movie, which originally premiered in 1969 and reached Japan today in 1971, it’s a bizarre sexploitation flick about Isabel Sarli and her servant Alba Mujica, who carry on a lustful lesbian affair while Sarli is simultaneously pursued by local alpha male Armando Bo. The triangle is complicated by the fact that Sarli has a little problem: she wants sex so much she doesn’t care where, when, or from whom she gets it. The movie’s theme song tells the story:
Fuego en tu boca,
Fuego en tu cuerpo,
Fuego en tu sangre,
En tus entrañas,
Que queman mi alma,
Mi amor.
Fire in your mouth,
Fire in your body,
Fire in your blood,
In your guts (eww), or alternatively, bowels (eew)
That burns my soul,
My love.
It’s a good thing Sarli has fire in her blood, because she makes love in the snow. No blanket under her or anything. She’s so overheated she goes around her provincial Patagonian town randomly flashing men. She’s so inflamed she even squirms and moans when she sleeps. “I don’t know if I’m fickle or wicked,” she muses. Her problem is neither. It’s really that she’s hostage to a cheeseball sexploitation script. She tells her suitor Bo she’ll be unfaithful if they marry, but he doesn’t care. “I want to be good,” Sarli says. Mission unaccomplished. As her doctor explains, her condition is caused by sexual neurosis. “A neurosis that is particularly manifested in the genitals.”
Okay then. It’s unsurprising that the quack doctor next takes a comprehensive feel around Sarli’s vagina. But no cure is to be found, there or anywhere, and her condition continues to consume her. Bo (who wrote and directed, as well as did most of the boob kissing) presents her narratively as an almost cursed figure, a kind of tragic sex goddess of the Andes. But even so, the movie is no more than a bad South American soap opera. Or really, even a classical opera—it needs only an aria to complete its ascent up majestic Mount Melodrama. Sarli is a legendary sex symbol in South America and she shows why, over and over, but in the final analysis we can’t recommend Fuego. However, we doubt we’ll ever forget it.
John Steinbeck’s Un americano en Nueva York y en Paris was published in 1957 by Ediciones Mariel, which was based in Buenos Aires. First published in 1956 in France as Un Américain à New York et à Paris, this is a collection of articles that Steinbeck wrote for Le Figaro when he was living in Paris. Because they originally appeared in French for a French publication many went unpublished in English for decades. In fact we can’t be sure all the essays are available in English even today, though one would like to assume so. In any case, that’s why this book caught our eye—because it surprised us that the entire collection of essays was available in Argentina, but not the U.S., almost immediately after they appeared in France.
Steinbeck was a serious writer, and thus was considered a serious persona, but the Le Figaro essays gave him a chance to show readers his wit and humor. Some of his observations read so contemporarily they could be from a year ago, particularly his musings over a restaurant owner who received a Michelin star, then spent every waking moment plotting, hoping, suffering to get another. He hopes to have his chance when the Michelin critic schedules another visit. The fact that the chef’s official taster is Steinbeck’s cat Apollo just adds more absurdity to the tale, as the genius who wrote Of Mice and Men veers into the silliness of cats and menus.
The parts of Un americano en Nueva York y en Paris not about France consist of articles concerning New York, culture, and politics. One of those latter entries, from 1954, is about Joseph McCarthy, who was in full witch hunt mode at the time. Much of the literati were loudly opposed to the proto-fascist senator, but Steinbeck took a different tack, writing that democracies occasionally need a challenge from demagogues in order to evolve, because such dark episodes remind people what democratic ideals really are—i.e. everyone gets to participate, not just self-appointed gatekeepers and purity-testers afraid of change or losing power. The tent of democracy always gets bigger, not smaller. It can’t do the latter and qualify as a democracy.
The cover art on this was painted by J.C. Cotignola, whose work appeared on various Argentine and Brazilian publications, but who isn’t well known today. Bang up job though. To us the title of the collection somewhat echoes George Orwell’s acclaimed Down and Out in Paris and London, another book about knocking around in a couple of big cities. The difference is Orwell was so poor he almost starved to death—he literally ate moldy bread out of garbage cans to survive. Steinbeck was the toast of Paris when he was there. Given a choice, we’d skip the mold and go straight to the toast. Preferably with a layer of rillette de porc on top. Even Apollo the cat would approve of that.
The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.
American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.
Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.
American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.
American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.
A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.
