Welcome back, friends, to the show that never ends.
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.
Overindulge and you'll start to feel a little queasy.
Above you see more art from Italian illustrator Averado Ciriello, whose effort here was for the cult farce Candy, known in Italy as Candy e il suo pazzo mondo—“Candy and her crazy world.” The cast of this, first of all, is tremendous. In addition to Aulin, featured are Richard Burton, Charles Aznavour, Marlon Brando, James Coburn, John Huston, Ringo Starr, Walter Matthau, Elsa Martinelli, Sugar Ray Robinson, Anita Pallenberg, Florinda Bolkan, Marilù Tolo, and Nicoletta Machiavelli. That’s unreal.
The film is a sort of coming of age tale that spirals off into various weird realities, with Aulin becoming a passenger on a military plane, getting a front row seat in an operating theatre attended by the black tie set, and other imaginings from screenwriter Buck Henry, based on Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s 1958 source novel. That sounds like it has potential, but the movie goes wide of the mark, with Aulin’s voice seemingly dubbed, Walter Matthau as a military crank wearily channelling Buck Turgidson, Ringo Starr playing a Mexican, accent and all, and Brando as a bindi laden guru who travels the land inside a semi-trailer layered with shells and broken mirror glass.
These characters are all supposed to be part of a satire about female sexuality and men, but its deeper meaning has been lost across the decades, and its humor is deflated by stagy overacting that stopped working for film audiences probably the very year the film was released. For such a movie to remain worthwhile it has to remain relevant, but its take on male-female relations has aged poorly. A man doesn’t have to be outwardly weird to be predatory. We’ve all learned that by now, hopefully.
The movie is long, too—a full two hours before Aulin finally trods through the final highly symbolic set piece and possibly into a realm of cosmic mysticism. Candy is one those films that supporters will say is over the heads of detractors, but not according to Hoffenberg—he considered his own co-creation half joke and half junk. Those qualities certainly filtered into the film. Candy premiered this week in the U.S. in 1968 and finally reached Italy today in 1970.
Sinatra and company swarm Las Vegas and try to escape with the cheese.
Above: an alternate poster for Colpo Grosso, aka Ocean’s Eleven, to stand alongside the version we showed you last year. This, like the previous effort, was painted by Averado Ciriello. We talked about the movie and, long story short, it doesn’t live up to the legend of its stars, but in the end you can’t really knock the Rat Pack. They were ahead of their time.
Expectation and reality don't meet in Rat Pack classic.
This is a tasty poster for Colpo grosso, and at first glance you’d expect the movie to be a dark thriller, giallo, or film noir. But then you notice the cast list at top—Martin, Sinatra, Davis, Jr.—and it probably dawns on you that this must be Ocean’s Eleven. The poster was painted by Averado Ciriello and we have no idea why he went so dark with what is basically a comedy, but it’s great work. Actually, it’s better than the movie. For Sinatra-philes, Rat Pack lovers, or people who haven’t yet seen Ocean’s Eleven, that statement may seem sacriligious, so we won’t try to back it up with our words—we’ll just note that reviews of the day called it lazy and too long, and currently it has less than a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, despite being a cultural touchstone of a film, it isn’t that good, with its main problem being that it’s plain boring in parts. However…
The movie has tremendous value. A lot of contemporaneous reviews hated it because of its insouciant attitude toward the heist. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther said it was “nonchalant and flippant towards crime,” and also described it as amoral. “Young people,” he wrote, “are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.” So it’s clear that Ocean’s Eleven flagrantly defied the strictures of the Hays Code censorship regime, which was weakening but still intact. The Code stated that in no film should the sympathy of the audience be “thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin,” yet audiences loved Sinatra and his party bros, and their laissez faire attitude was a needed course correction after decades of creative suppression. It’s a shame then, that Ocean’s Eleven isn’t just a bit better.
You moved like they do. I've never seen anyone move that fast.
Usually when we share a foreign poster for a film it’s because the foreign version is markedly better. The original poster for Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong-produced martial arts thriller Tang shan da xiong is actually pretty nice, but the Matrix-like motion capture attempt on this Italian version is just too cool to ignore. In Italy the film was titled Il furore della Cina colpisce ancora, or “China’s fury strikes again,” and the art is by Averado Ciriello. It’s an inspired effort, which he almost equals on version two, at bottom. There are also two Japanese posters at this link, and it’s here that we mention that the movie was titled in English The Big Boss and Fists (not Fist) of Fury.
Bruce Lee movies are not to be watched for their acting or complex plots, and the dialogue in this one is laugh-out-loud bad. The film is a morality play about Lee, an expert fighter, having promised his wise old uncle never to fight again because “violence is never the answer.” Of course he’s immediately dropped into a pit of evil when his new job in an ice factory turns out to be a front for drug smuggling. His intervention in the racket comes exactly too late to help his cousin, who’s murdered by the villains, but when he finally fights, it’s with lightning quickness and almost mystical ability, as he lethally wades through hoards of baddies and cripples the smuggling enterprise single-handedly, or double-fistedly. Maybe violence is the answer after all.
But it isn’t quite that easy. These traffickers didn’t reach the top of the heap for nothing. Their continued commitment to violence demands that Lee either walk away or willingly descend into the same cycle. As always there’s a final showdown with a crafty old karate master who pushes Lee to his limits. His moral progression from purity through temptation, corruption, shame, revenge, and consequences is cheesy but it’s also very entertaining, and one thing is clear. He never needed digital help to dazzle the eye. He’d demonstrate his gifts in three more movies, then be gone, at the age of thirty-two, with his final film—his biggest hit Enter the Dragon—released posthumously. Tang shan da xiong premiered in Hong Kong in 1971 and reached Italy today in 1973.
While serving time in prison for his role in a failed coup, Adolf Hitler dictaes and publishes volume 1 of his manifesto Mein Kampf (in English My Struggle or My Battle), the book that outlines his theories of racial purity, his belief in a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and his plans to lead Germany to militarily acquire more land at the expense of Russia via eastward expansion.
1955—Disneyland Begins Operations
The amusement park Disneyland opens in Orange County, California for 6,000 invitation-only guests, before opening to the general public the following day.
1959—Holiday Dies Broke
Legendary singer Billie Holiday, who possessed one of the most unique voices in the history of jazz, dies in the hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She had lost her earnings to swindlers over the years, and upon her death her bank account contains seventy cents.
1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56
New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.
1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey
American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.
1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes
Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: “We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.”
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.
