URBAN HEAT EFFECT

Anyone for barbecue? 1970s disaster epic charbroils entire city.

City on Fire is a good old fashioned ’70s disaster movie, and we have to tell you, it’s been ages since we’ve seen one. We’re talking rentals at Blockbuster ages. We never had a chance to see one in a cinema, but we have to wonder if a big room with a booming Sensurround system is what City on Fire needs to make it enjoyable, because on our television the movie didn’t get the job done.

Everything starts when three kids accidentally set a blaze while trying to smoke cigarettes, but the real firestorm ignites when a disgruntled oil refinery employee gets sacked, decides as revenge to sabotage the works. He twists some valves and whatnot, causing flammables to run through the city sewers. The stuff combusts and the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

The cast of this flick is outstanding. Leslie Nielsen is the mayor, Henry Fonda a fire chief, Ava Gardner an on-air news personality, Barry Newman an emergency room physician, and Shelley Winters a nurse. Their perspectives continually alternate as the city-eating fire runs rampant. To pull off the incendiary visuals the filmmakers use models of skyscrapers, rear projection, and practical fire stunts of types that died with the advent of computer graphics.

While we appreciated the work that went into the movie, and some of the cinematography was spectacular, we were largely unmoved. Maybe it needed Hindenburg correspondent Herbert Morrison to narrate: “Oh, the humanity!” However, we were very moved by the poster art, which is another top effort by John Solie. City on Fire was made in Canada and, after opening in Europe, premiered in the Great White North today in 1979.

Whatever Lola wants Lola gets—except a decent script and a sufficient budget.

A low rent poster usually indicates a low rent movie. The poster you see here for Lola Falana’s crime drama Lady Cocoa, which premiered today in 1975, is obviously underwhelming. Sometimes, though, digging into the dusty archive of cheap cinema yields forgotten gems. But not in this instance. You know you’re in trouble with Lady Cocoa right from the opening theme, which is a sort of mash-up between a disco song and, “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Literally, that’s the chorus. We’ve come across some terrible theme songs (who can forget the indelible strains of “Flare-Up”?—but this one might take the booby prize.

Falana plays a Reno gangster’s girlfriend who’s spent eighteen months in prison for reasons that are obscure, possibly because she’s insanely annoying. She’s released into protective custody when she finally decides to testify against her man. She doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of her decision, but there’s a reason for that—she has no intention of testifying. She just wants out of the joint for a while. She has total confidence her boyfriend will intuit this, but she’s wrong—kingpins don’t become kingpins through trust. He sends assassins to perforate her, and the movie becomes a standard witness protection actioner. While this basic plot has been done many times, it has rarely been done with dialogue so poor.

Gene Washington: “I remember when I got it in Nam.”

Falana: “Nam?”

Gene Washington: “Yeah. Vietnam.”

Let’s fix that exchange of dialogue for them:

Gene Washington: “I remember when I got it in Nam.”

Falana: “It?”

Gene Washington: “Yeah. Syphilitic meningitis.”

See? Much better. Poor Lola never had a chance in this one. But there are a few items of note. Falana, who’s really cute even playing a grating harpy, spends a lot of the movie in a towel and flashes a backside that’ll leave a permanent impression. Late in the program she and co-star Gene Washington share a real-deal hot tango of a tongue kiss, which is something you rarely see actors do. And one of the assassins is played by Joe Greene, as in Mean Joe Greene, as in the Pittsburgh Steelers. If he’d sacked the producers before they had a chance to make the movie, Hollywood would have given him an honorary Oscar. No such luck.

Despite your ample sexual charms I’m irrationally annoyed I have to bodyguard you.

Still hate me?

Abso-goddamned-lutely.

You sure?

I can’t even budge I’m so filled with loathing.

What if I let you slowly rub this lotion all over me, we enjoy some leisurely oral sex, then fuck like beasts?

Then again, I’m only human.

Computer scientists go back to drawing board after first self-aware robot is arrested for sexual harassment.

This rare promo poster is signed by Italian illustrator Giuliano Nistri, who we think only produced the background, considering it’s obviously a production image. The movie is Saturn 3, a sort of forgotten British sci-fi adventure from the early 1980s. How to describe it. A little bit Star Wars, a little bit Alien, and a little bit 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably how it was pitched to the studios. The actual result was a little more like b-movies such as Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars. But it starred Kirk Douglas, helped launch Harvey Keitel, and had Farrah Fawcett, seen here being brutally suspended by the movie’s deranged AI robot.

The immediate post-Star Wars period was a time when even well known performers had to look twice at cheeseball sci-fi scripts. No actor wanted to miss out on the next cultural phenomenon. That’s the only way to explain Douglas’s involvement. Sadly for him, Saturn 3 came up about 887 million miles short of achieving any lasting impact. Other than a convincingly scary robot, Douglas’s naked ass, and Fawcett wearing a series of negligees and other scanty items, it didn’t offer much of note. At least back then. But these days, the AI that copies its programmer’s worst traits seems plenty relevant. After its U.S. premiere in February 1980, Saturn 3 made a controlled burn into Italy today the same year.

Everybody's gotta die sometime.

This photo-illustrated poster was made for the 1948 suspense thriller Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which demands to be watched if for no other reason than its lyrical title. The awesome Edward G. Robinson plays a phony psychic who’s thrown for a loop when he unexpectedly starts to have real visions—or seems to. Has he merely refined his scam, or can he really see the future? He tells Gail Russell she’s fated to die in mere days but claims he wants to help her avoid her destiny. She believes the prediction, but her beau and a handful of cops keep trying to pin various crimes on Robinson as Russell’s clock dwindles to zero hour. The base ingredients here—the good cast, experienced director John Farrow, a source novel by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich, aka George Hopley—were probably pre-destined to produce something worthwhile. We’d say the novel is better, but as adaptations go Night Has a Thousand Eyes mostly works. We sense that… Wait! It’s becoming clear… It’s you! With a bowl of popcorn and a beer! Watching the movie!

It's not that there's no way out. It's that not enough people want to leave.

Movies that take on the subject of race generally aren’t popular. No Way Out, for which you see a promo poster above, was a prestige production but was only the 87th highest grossing film of its year (both Twelve Years a Slave and Green Book were in the same range for their years). Somewhere in the eighties isn’t terrible, but No Way Out still lagged behind such immortal efforts as Yellow Cab Man, Wabash Avenue, and Bright Leaf.

The plot sets up almost immediately: a pair of robbers are shot, captured by police, and conducted in handcuffs to a hospital for medical attention. Sidney Poitier is the doctor they draw. One of the robbers, Richard Widmark, is a virulent racist. He’s so hateful that he keeps trying to convince his suffering brother not to cooperate with Poitier. The problem is his brother has more than just a gunshot wound, though only Poitier can see it.

When baby bro dies due to complications from a previously undiagnosed longterm illness, Widmark is devastated, but always the opportunist, he turns the tables at that point. Poitier can’t prove he didn’t kill the brother through malpractice unless there’s an autopsy, and Widmark won’t agree to one. What develops is a battle of wills—Poitier’s quiet dignity, polite exterior, and superhuman patience that normal people simply don’t have (he’d play this role over and over) against Widmark’s frothing and irrational hatred.

There’s a lot to unpack here. No Way Out goes after racism with a power jab and a flying spin kick. It’s unsubtle. That makes sense because racism is unsubtle, you might say. No—there are blatant strains, but largely, it is subtle. For example, after decades of backward movement U.S. schools are as segregated right now as they were in 1968, and U.S. neighborhoods are highly segregated too. How did that happen? Easy. The processes of racism have been folded inside the mechanisms of the market and the dynamics of individual choice. Gentrification is just one example of a subsequent result.

After No Way Out was released today in 1950 it took another fourteen years—an entire generation as most people measure them—before the U.S. passed the Civil Rights Act. But the legislation has been constantly chipped at or even had sections outright struck down, contributing to the aforementioned segregation, and all sorts of other damage. The laws stood just long enough for the belief that things were better to become culturally entrenched, then they were decimated. Now people hold obsolete beliefs about equality, and have a hard time seeing that many things are getting worse.

This is why movies about race usually don’t age well. Yes, it’s partly due to outdated sentiments, language, characterizations, and story arcs, but it’s also because they presume improvement in problems that, as it turned out, never went away, but were merely reconstituted in ways that can be invisible to people today, and which vintage movies were never designed to elucidate. No Way Out is to racism as Romeo and Juliet is to love. It’s big and bold and scores some points, but it mostly comes across as obvious. Don’t get us wrong—it’s a damn good movie. But it’s also no longer relevant to the issue it examines.

Ambition proves to be fatal in Billy Wilder's classic drama.

This poster was made for the classic drama Sunset Boulevard, a true trailblazer of a film, the story of how a desperately broke writer becomes the kept man of a faded screen star—the immortal silent film queen Norma Desmond. The role of Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who at first seems eccentrically lost in her own glorious past, but eventually reveals herself as deranged and dangerous. It’s a difficult, bizarro role, highly stylized, requiring utter conviction and complete faith in script and direction. While the movie is considered a film noir, it’s also a mix of melodrama, black comedy, Hollywood satire, and suspense. With all these ingredients the entire production could have fallen in like a house of cards, and probably would have four times out of five, but director Billy Wilder, along with Swanson, William Holden, and Erich von Stroheim, give everything they have. Swanson’s acting is operatically over-the-top, deliberately so, even cringefully so, but she crafts an all-time screen role. No matter how bonkers she gets, you never stop pitying her, and that’s the key. Sunset Boulevard, a film that walks the highest wire of believability without losing its balance, is a mandatory watch. It premiered today in 1950.

Chaos comes shirtless, hairy, and hella dangerous in White Lightning.

Burt Reynolds occupied a unique place in the pantheon of Hollywood stars, playing numerous smarmy good ole boys on the wrong side of the law. He had touched upon such roles earlier than in White Lightning, but this film, which premiered today in 1973, was the beginning of him basically cornering that market. It was the debut of his iconic character Gator McCluskey, hell hot driver and moonshiner nonpareil, who finagles a release from prison to help the FBI take down the crooked sherrif of Bogan County, Arkansas. The sherrif, played by Ned Beatty, has killed Gator’s younger brother for no other reason than that he was an anti-war protestor, prompting Gator to deal himself to the Feds to get revenge.

White Lightning has the same gritty feel you find in so many ’70s dramas, with its low saturation film stock and grainy look. Narratively it’s gritty too, with numerous portryals considered polarizing today. It presents Arkansans largely as clueless hicks, with opportunistic scofflaws mixed in. It’s anti-government and anti-diversity. Jennifer Billingsly is a two-timing nympho who waxes nostalgic about deflowering a nine year-old boy. And Beatty is a real beaut, railing against school integration, the NAACP, the ACLU, hippies, and the right of blacks to vote. He’s dumb as hell, but animal-clever.

Burt struts his way along the path to bloody vengeance and shows why he became such a huge star. His portrayal of McCluskey mixes swagger with an elemental kindness, a steely resolve with a core of easy humor. It isn’t all in the script. He was simply a natural. Today White Lightning would upset certain rural viewers, most progressive viewers, viewers of numerous ethnicities, and women, yet as an artifact of its era it’s hard to beat. It’s also unique in Reynolds’ ouevre. The 1976 sequel Gator, as well as later rum-running adventure flicks like Smokey and the Bandit, would lean heavily into comedy, to their detriment. Of the grouping, only White Lightning can be considered legitmately good. But anything with Reynolds—and we mean anything—is worth watching.

All he needs is a good firm push.

Edge of Doom, for which you see a nice promo poster above, was based on a novel by Leo Brady. We showed you the cover art for that not long ago. AFI.com categorizes this as a drama, not a film noir, though most sites label it the latter. The story begins with a noir staple—the framing narration, as two priests, one young and faltering, is told by the other, older and stalwart, how he was brought closer to God through his interaction with a man accused of murder. Dana Andrews plays the experienced priest, while Farley Granger plays the troubled subject of Andrews’ voiceover.

Granger’s issues begin when his dear old ma dies and he needs money to bury her in style. He goes to his ma’s rectory, but the priest there had previously refused to bury Granger’s dear old pa in consecrated ground. Granger asks the priest for a nice funeral for his dear old ma, but the priest refuses to promise anything but a pine box and a fare-thee-well, so Granger flies into a rage and ends up bludgeoning the pompous old skinflint into the hereafter. The murder ushers Andrews into the scenario—he’s next in line at the rectory, so he’ll inherit the dead priest’s job. That soon brings him into contact with Granger, and the rest is easy to figure.

Granger plays nervous and unstable here quite well. He’d later perfect the disturbed young man role with Strangers on a Train. Andrews does far less—he plays his priest as low key and ready with an aphorism, which is where most actors went with that type of role back then. Within those parameters, he’s fine. As to whether Edge of Doom is a film noir, it lacks most of the non-visual requirements—notably the hard-boiled cynic we all love so much. However, the noir visuals are so incessant that it’s impossible not to include this movie in the grouping, in our opinion. Edge of Doom premiered in the U.S. today in 1950.

When in Rome fiddle like Roman emperors do.

This beautiful poster was made for the Japanese run of the Italian movie O.K. Nerone, known in Japan as O.K. ネロ, and in English as O.K. Nero. Plotwise, two madcap Yanks sort of project themselves back to the time of the Roman emperor Nero. Incidentally, historians say he probably didn’t fiddle while Rome burned. The movie sounds interesting, and with Silvana Pampanini and burlesque dancer Jackie Frost in the cast it was tempting, but it’s listed as a comedy, and vintage Italian comedies are usually excruciating, so we didn’t watch it. But we love the art and decided to share it. It’s uncredited, and unseen online before today. O.K. Nerone premiered in Italy in 1951 and in Japan today in 1954. 

These were the days of her life.

It’s been several years since we last shared an issue of the Spanish celebrity publication Colleción Idolos del Cine, but we still have a few sitting around. These magazines, which were miniature in size and only thirty-pages on average, were always devoted to a single star. The above example dates from 1958 and features U.S. actress Dawn Adams, who by that point had featured in such films as The Robe and House of Intrigue. She had also starred on television in such shows as Sherlock Holmes and The Third Man. The next year, 1959, would be big for her. She’d appear in eight films, including the hit Brigitte Bardot vehicle Voulez-vous danser avec moi? Inside Idolos, readers see Adams’ travels around Europe, meet her husband Don Vittorio Emanuele Massimo the Prince of Roccasecca, and learn about her upcoming films. Not bad for the palatable price of three pesetas. We have fourteen scans below. The previous Idolos we’ve posted, with Maria Schell and Pier Angeli, are here and here.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Huey Long Assassinated

Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.

1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan

Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.

1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time

Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.

1974—Ford Pardons Nixon

U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.

1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated

Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados.
Ten covers from the popular French thriller series Les aventures de Zodiaque.
Sam Peffer cover art for Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard, originally published in 1941.

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