Vintage Pulp

November 10 2024

A DARKER SHADE OF PALE

Woman on the verge of a matrimonial breakdown.

We’re not sure a title like White Woman would fly today, but it certainly grabbed our attention, as did the cast. Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard? That has to be good, right? Lombard plays a widow in Malaya (now Malaysia) whose husband’s suicide has made her persona non grata. For money she sings in a “native” café, which is a scandal in white circles. Laughton offers her a way to reclaim lost status through marriage, an offer she cynically accepts only to discover after moving to Laughton’s jungle riverboat that he’s a human monster right out of darkest Joseph Conrad. But the plantation’s overseer Kent Taylor looks pretty good to her, and the attraction is mutual. Ultimately, the story is about their efforts to escape Laughton’s clutches.

White Woman brings the usual cringe moments endemic to vintage movies set in the tropics, and there’s sexual presumption toward Lombard that might make smoke issue from the ears of some viewers, but as always, these are problems you have to expect. What you don’t expect is clunky staging, and dialogue that occasionally grinds inexplicably to a halt. But we’re going to recommend the movie anyway because of Laughton. He’s unreal in this. His character is cruel and manipulative, murderous and hubristic, while also an effeminate dandy. We wonder if the filmmakers were trying to imply that he’s closeted, thus mean to Lombard because of her womanhood. We’ll never know the answer. In any case, there’s a lot to the role and Laughton hams up his portrayal of pure evil shamelessly, and sometimes hilariously.

White Woman is a pre-Code production, so it’s more vivid than most movies from the mid-thirties onward. In many cases the pre-Code lack of censorship led to daring sexual content, and indeed Lombard wears tops with plunging necklines and is seemingly braless in one sequence, but it’s gore that the filmmakers lean into here. In one instance a Malay tribesman lobs a human head through a window. However, the image that will really stay with you comes at the end. It must have horrified filmgoers at the time. It even shocked us a little. We won’t tell you what it is, though. Take a leap of faith and watch White Woman. It could never qualify as a good movie, but easily fits the bill as one you should experience and discuss. It premiered today in 1933.

Malaysia, Malaya, Paramount Pictures, White Woman, Carole Lombard, Charles Laughton, Charles Bickford, Kent Taylor, Percy Kilbride, Charles Middleton, poster art, cinema, movie review

Intl. Notebook

November 20 2022

24 HOURS NON-STOP

In show business the camera never sleeps.

Night and Day, for which you see the cover of an issue—its very first issue, actually—that was published this month in 1948, billed itself as America’s Picture Magazine of Entertainment. It was launched in New York City by Alho Publishing, and as you’ll see it came out of the gate swinging for the fences with its visual content, from its bisected cover featuring burlesque dancer Lili St. Cyr and actress Ramsey Ames, to its tongue-in-cheek feature on the twenty-seven types of kisses, to its approving look at George White’s Scandals revue at Hollywood’s Florentine Gardens. Interesting side note on Scandals—Wikipedia says it ended in 1939. Well, obviously not quite. Elsewhere Night and Day touches on college hazing, professional football, and the Greenwich Village art scene. In total, it’s a gold mine for vintage photos.

Our favorite offering in the magazine is its quiz on Hollywood stars and their stand-ins. You just have to take a good look at twenty performers, and try to determine which twenty random people are their stand-ins. To score well on such a quiz you’d have to be either the biggest Hollywood head in history or someone who has the opposite of face blindness, whatever that would be. Face unforgettability, maybe. Even though we don’t expect many people to try the quiz, we worked hard to put it into internet-usable form. In the magazine the photos were five-across on the page, which made them too small for the column width of our website. So we rearranged them to be two-across, and thus enlarged, they’re clear, though you have to do a lot of scrolling. Nevertheless, it’s there if you want, along with fifty other panels to eat your time with marvelous efficiency. Please enjoy.

The Hollywood movie star stand-in quiz begins below. First you get twenty famous actors and actresses:

And below are their twenty stand-ins. If you get more than half of these right you’re a human face recognition algorithm. Quit your day job immediately and report to the FBI.

Below are the answers.

Vintage Pulp

June 7 2020

HASSLES IN THE SAND

The beach is always fun and games until someone gets burned.

What a coincidence. We were just talking about Joan Bennett a couple of days ago. You remember the story. Her husband tried to shoot her lover in the balls. Or unit. Or really anywhere in the vicinity of his reproductive organs. And he succeeded in hitting the vicinity, but missed all the crucial plumbing. It was a Hollywood love triangle that ended in blood and violence. Woman on the Beach stars Bennett, Robert Ryan, and Charles Bickford, and is also a love triangle that causes violence. The plot concerns a Coast Guard officer who becomes infatuated with a married woman. The woman’s husband is an artist who lost his sight in an accident, but the Coast Guard officer becomes convinced the artist isn’t really blind, but rather is using it as an excuse to hang onto his wife. Under the careful direction of French auteur Jean Renoir, Woman on the Beach makes for a decent ninety minutes of entertainment. We don’t consider it a film noir, by the way, as some crowdsourced sites and blogs suggest. It just doesn’t meet the requirements, in our view. AFI.com agrees, and calls it drama. It premiered in New York City today in 1947.

California, Malibu, Woman on the Beach, Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, Jean Renoir, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

December 5 2016

DIVINE MADNESS

Why settle for an angel when a devil is so much more fun?

It’s amazing the jams men in film noir get themselves into. Imagine you really like a woman but she wants financial security you can’t offer. Would you try to satisfy her by marrying a completely different woman—a trusting nice girl type—with the plan of getting into her bank account, getting the marriage annulled, and walking with the cash? Of course not. You’d know a plan like that would come apart at the seams. But men in film noir don’t. In Fallen Angel Dana Andrews craves sexpot Linda Darnell, and while we can certainly see a man losing his bearings over a stunner like her, the idea of her being worth destroying another woman’s life is farfetched, especially when that woman is pretty and sweet. But in the capable hands of Andrews and Darnell, with Alice Faye and Charles Bickford co-starring and Otto Preminger in the director’s chair, the plot actually works. And that’s the beauty of film noir—the problems are often so convoluted you can’t imagine how someone could get into them, let alone get out, yet often they do. On the other hand, often they don’t. Fallen Angel premiered in the U.S. today in 1945.

Fallen Angel, Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Otto Preminger, Charles Bickford, poster art, cinema, film noir, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

March 25

1957—Ginsberg Poem Seized by Customs

On the basis of alleged obscenity, United States Customs officials seize 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” that had been shipped from a London printer. The poem contained mention of illegal drugs and explicitly referred to sexual practices. A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem’s domestic publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf, and Ferlinghetti won the case when a judge decided that the poem was of redeeming social importance.

March 25

1975—King Faisal Is Assassinated

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia dies after his nephew Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed shoots him during a royal audience. As King Faisal bent forward to kiss his nephew the Prince pulled out a pistol and shot him under the chin and through the ear. King Faisal died in the hospital after surgery. The prince is later beheaded in the public square in Riyadh.

March 24

1981—Ronnie Biggs Rescued After Kidnapping

Fugitive thief Ronnie Biggs, a British citizen who was a member of the gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery, is rescued by police in Barbados after being kidnapped. Biggs had been abducted a week earlier from a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by members of a British security firm. Upon release he was returned to Brazil and continued to be a fugitive from British justice.

March 23

2011—Elizabeth Taylor Dies

American actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose career began at age 12 when she starred in National Velvet, and who would eventually be nominated for five Academy Awards as best actress and win for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, dies of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles. During her life she had been hospitalized more than 70 times.

March 22

1963—Profumo Denies Affair

In England, the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, denies any impropriety with showgirl Christine Keeler and threatens to sue anyone repeating the allegations. The accusations involve not just infidelity, but the possibility acquaintances of Keeler might be trying to ply Profumo for nuclear secrets. In June, Profumo finally resigns from the government after confessing his sexual involvement with Keeler and admitting he lied to parliament.

March 22

1978—Karl Wallenda Falls to His Death

World famous German daredevil and high-wire walker Karl Wallenda, founder of the acrobatic troupe The Flying Wallendas, falls to his death attempting to walk on a cable strung between the two towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Wallenda is seventy-three years old at the time, but it is a 30 mph wind, rather than age, that is generally blamed for sending him from the wire.

March 22

2006—Swedish Spy Stig Wennerstrom Dies

Swedish air force colonel Stig Wennerström, who had been convicted in the 1970s of passing Swedish, U.S. and NATO secrets to the Soviet Union over the course of fifteen years, dies in an old age home at the age of ninety-nine. The Wennerström affair, as some called it, was at the time one of the biggest scandals of the Cold War.