The Woman from Tangier started unravelling about the time the studio signed off on the budget.
Above is a poster in six-sheet format for the adventure The Woman from Tangier, along with a nice, mystery-laden promo from Italian artist Anselmo Ballester. We talked briefly about this movie a while back, but didn’t have a copy to watch. Now we do, and we checked it out last night. It stars Stephen Dunne as an insurance investigator looking into the death of a ship’s purser gunned down trying to abscond with the boat’s earnings—fifty-thousand pounds. As viewers we see in the first minutes of the film that this tale is false, and is actually a frame-up and murder staged by the ship’s captain.
Adele Jergens co-stars as a dancer named—we’re not making this up—Nylon, who had been trying to flee Tangier for Gibraltar but is now stuck in port while Dunne’s investigation plays out. When the captain’s criminal partner, who is a murderer too, uses the unwitting Nylon to hide from the cops, she’s soon caught between the two killers and deemed a loose end. She holds the key to Dunne’s investigation, but will she go to him for help? Or run to the police? Or maybe the U.S. embassy?
To us it didn’t matter because The Woman from Tangier is a throwaway thriller too b-level to offer much fun. We’re always drawn to movies and books sets outside the U.S., particularly in exotic lands. And having been to Tangier, we hoped for at least a little authentic Moroccan flavor, but it was too much to ask from a cheapie potboiler shot by Columbia Pictures entirely in Los Angeles featuring the lightweight Dunne and his mustache in the lead role. In its favor, The Woman from Tangier is short. Sixty-six minutes. So it certainly won’t cost much of your life should you decide to queue it up. It premiered today in 1948.
We talked about the landmark Japanese roman porno drama Jitsuroku Abe Sada, known in English as A Woman Called Sada Abe, and shared an Italian poster for it, along with the standard Japanese promo. Nikkatsu Studios also commissioned the special piece above, of which you see the front and rear, painted by an artist unknown to us. This is really nice work. It used to be available for purchase on a specialty website, but sold a while back, though other nice posters remain available.
The movie, conversely, is not nice at all. It’s about real life yuujo, or prostitute, Sada Abe, who in 1939 strangled her lover, carved her name on his body, castrated him, and kept his severed organ. The crime, for which she served four years in prison, was a national sensation. In interviews Sada said she’d never experienced similar urges before, but her victim unleashed unusual feelings in her. Later, as Japanese movie studios began to explore subjects like erotic asphyxiation and bondage, films based on the crime were inevitable. Jitsuroku Abe Sada premiered today in 1975.
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.
You two can call yourselves what you want, but to me, prostitute is an ugly word. I consider myself a social worker.
We’ve seen a fair amount of poster art from John Solie. This effort looks a little different for him, a bit less polished maybe. It’s a striking piece anyway, set at the intersection of Love Street and John Street, made for the urban drama Street Girls, which premiered today in 1976 and starred Carol Case. The first thing to note about this film is that it was co-scripted by eventual multiple Oscar winner Barry Levinson. He was influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, clearly, but Street Girls‘ closest cinematic relative actually came three years later in Paul Schrader’s 1979 thriller Hardcore. The vibe is identical, and the plot, about a smalltown father trying to save his sexually exploited daughter, is similar. What isn’t similar are important elements such as budget, technical values, and acting.
Street Girls is about the aformentioned forlorn father, but most of the plot early on focuses on the daughter, played by Case, who’s dancing at a strip dive called the Step Down a Go-Go, is sexually involved with one of the other women, and has been been targeted by bad guy Paul Pompian for conversion to drug addiction and prostitution. Dad mostly blunders oaflike around the city—in this case Eugene, Oregon—but eventually runs into the right people to help him find his litle girl, if only he can convince them. If that happens it’s possible Case won’t be turned out, but it’s a fraught race against a determined pimp.
Street Girls is an example of what it means to be a novice in Hollywood. No matter the nature of a production you must commit to doing your best, or your career will be short. Case gives about as committed a performance as you’ll see. It doesn’t work completely, though we suspect more time could have drawn out a better result. But that’s always the rub—time derives from budget, as does the ability to make quality hires across the board before the cameras even roll. It’s nice that Levinson rose to be a superstar director, but it isn’t neccessarily that he was the only one here with talent. He would have benefitted from other factors, including pure luck. Watching this, we thought it would have been nice if mainstream success had found Case too. Instead, Street Girls was her only film.
Remember the for better or worse part of the vows? This is the worse.
These two photo-illustrated posters were made for the drama Cause for Alarm!, and it shows star Loretta Young in wide-eyed panic mode, a state in which she spends most of the film as the wife of a man who’s decided she and his doctor are teaming up to kill him with a progressive overdose of heart medicine. It’s pure paranoia. The guy is losing is mind. But he’s written an incriminating letter to the district attorney that details the imaginary plot. When Young’s husband keels over dead after taunting her about the letter that the mailman has just carried away minutes earlier, she realizes the law might believe him and tries to undo what he’s done. This has the effect of making her look like a guilty woman even though she isn’t. It’s a classic case of crossed up circumstances, though these days it plays somewhat differently than originally meant, with a layer of unintended commentary about the stultifying lives of mid-century suburban housewives. While it’s reasonably diverting as a psychological drama we wouldn’t say it’s top notch. But it’s certainly worth a look. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1951.
Italian filmmakers manage to produce an archetypal example of the male gaze.
This super poster was made to promote the Italian film La donna nel mondo, known in English as Women of the World, made by schlockmeisters Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi with leftover footage from their 1962 gross-out documentary Mondo Cane. This effort discusses women—full stop. It looks at different types of women all around the world, from Israeli soldiers to New Guinean tribeswomen to Cannes Film Festival movie star wannabes to Japanese amas, with occasional digressions into whether they’re hot and/or bedworthy.
It’s narrated by Peter Ustinov, who in his urbane and continental accent drops nuggets like this: “What are the deep rooted emotions that remove [these lesbians] from the company of men, yet at the same time cause them to emulate the masculine appearance with such pathetic results? Even though these emotions are covered up by a blasé attitude, one is still aware of their underlying sadness.” Ouch.
If we were to speculate, we’d say it’s possible that living in a repressed early-1960s society that treats you as persona non grata could cause some sadness, but in the here-and-now our lesbian friends don’t seem to have an underlying sadness about anything except not having enough time to do all the cool shit they dream up. There’s still plenty of second class treatment, but being able to exist above ground really makes a difference in one’s life. Ustinov’s narration is snobbish through most of the film, so it’s less purely anti-lgbt than anti-everything that isn’t middle ground and whitebread. You have to expect it for the period.
The movie goes on to feature drag performers, everyday cross-dressers, manages to work in insults toward trans star Coccinelle, and even briefly squeezes in a cameo from actress Belinda Lee. The title is “women of the world” and indeed, the filmmakers leave few corners of the globe unexplored. We suppose on some level that really does make it educational, if voyeuristic, so in the end we have to pronounce it worth a glance. At the very least you’ll get a primer on square-peg mid-century social attitudes. La donna nel mondo premiered in Italy in January 1963, and in Japan today the same year.
Jane Fonda takes a trip through outer and inner space.
We’ve shared plenty of promo material from the watershed 1968 cult landmark Barbarella. Why wouldn’t we? It’s one of the most visually beautiful sci-fi movies ever made. In order to be complete in our coverage we needed to include two of its very best promo posters—this pair painted by Kája Saudek for its run the former Czechslovakia, where it opened today in 1971. Saudek was a legend in the world of comics, so he was a natural choice to put together posters for a film that itself grew from a comic character created in 1962 by French illustrator Jean-Claude Forest. You’ve heard us say it before but we’ll say it again anyway—you don’t see movie posters like this anymore. After all, why pay a brilliant artist when you can underpay a graphic designer and rake off the savings for the shareholders? Profit seeking always eventually cannibalizes the industries it first nurtures.
There isn’t a person reading this website who doesn’t already know what Barbarella is, at least anecdotally. Jane Fonda stars as the titular character, a five-star double-rated astronavagatrix, who’s physically superior (duh), if perhaps overly credulous. The film’s far distant, fur-lined, unsubtly phallic future is brought to life with outrageous costumes, acid-drenched visual effects, small scale models, and fantastic sets sometimes built at huge scale. Fonda occupies the center of all this dazzle as a government agent charged with locating a missing scientist named Durand Durand before he teaches the inhabitants of the galaxy’s Tau Ceti region the workings of a weapon he invented—the positronic ray. The universe is at peace. At least, the center of it is. But the positronic ray and all it represents could spread “archaic insecurity, selfish competition, and war.”
The gag that runs through the movie is that, superior though Barbarella may be, she hasn’t experienced the more corporeal pleasures of life. In other words, she’s never had any dick. Some contrarians think—or at least pretend to think—that Barbarella being sexually inexperienced indicates anti-woman attitudes. But she isn’t sexually inexperienced. She’s hyperexperienced in a form of sex that is super-advanced—i.e. completely psychic. Other forms of sex are considered where she
comes from to be primitive, therefore worthless, if not even taboo. But not out in Tau Ceti. The physical pleasures out in the galactic boonies throw Barbarella for a loop, but the subtext isn’t about women or feminism, but merely the idea that the future must be sleek, clean, and controlled. Barbarella’s non-coital status, then subsequent embrace of sex in all its sticky joy is an anti-corporate, anti-repression, anti-assimilation message.
But as an enduring cult classic promoting unashamed attitudes about sex, Barbarella is ripe for revisionism and deliberate misrepresentation. Ultimately, it’s not a movie that holds up long to big-brained academic analysis because it’s no more than a contradictory fun-filled romp made by horny filmmaker Roger Vadim. There are unavoidable pro-feminist tropes, but also unavoidable anti-feminist clichés. It’s unavoidably steeped in the liberation ethos of the era, but also portrays the sort of non-diverse fantasy world fascists adore. Digging deep into Barbarella is like parsing the lyrics of a ’70s disco song. It was probably never meant to be anything but fun. It’s a voyage through deep space with a simple premise allowing Fonda to tease the audience with flashes of skin. That’s more than adequate.
We hear there’s a new version in development, but we don’t have hopes for anything good. Yes, we were wrong about Blade Runner‘s sequel, but that was the only time. The sexual insouciance of the late 1960s that gave us Barbarella is gone. Journalist Kim Newman insightfully remarked that the film was the product of a generation “that thought sex was, above all, fun.” So what can result from a generation for whom sex is dangerous, not only because of more disease than in the past but because of government enforced consequences? With the original Barbarella‘s glowing sex positivity dissipated only cynicism can remain. But we’ll give the filmmakers credit for guts. It’s a bold move to remake a movie that helped define the term cult classic.
Above you see Russian painter Boris Grinsson’s French promo poster for the international heist flick Un hold-up extraordinaire, better known as Gambit. Grinsson worked in France for most of his career. The movie, which premiered there today in 1967, starred Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine as uneasy partners trying to rob a one-percenter of a priceless statue. Despite such a promising above-the-line pairing the movie could have been better. You can read what we thought about it here, and you can see more Grinsson by clicking his keywords.
It's well known that those who keep learning into adulthood lead more fulfilling lives.
It’s been a long while since we’ve visited with Yuki Kazamatsuri. Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago, known in English as Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon, the fourth entry in the Female Teacher series, is a pretty basic roman porno movie, with Kazamatsuri playing a teacher with a difficult past called upon to help highly sexed, extremely beautiful, and emotionally problematic student Ayako Ôta get back onto the straight and narrow. All good, but when Kazamatsuri begins to suspect that Ôta’s itinerant father is a rapist from her own past, things get weird. With Kazamatsuri’s kinky problems she probably isn’t the person to offer a stable example to Ôta, but that’s kind of the point here. Let she who does not have degrading sex throw the first stone. We can’t say Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago is good, but its stars certainly are. It premiered in Japan today in 1981.
Sex, misfortune, and murder all rendezvous in Le Rendez-Vous.
Today we have an issue of the French Canadian tabloid Le Rendez-Vous published today in 1969 with cover star Rosa Dolmai, who’s also known as Rosa Domaille, but is probably most famous as Eve Eden. Under all three names she carved out a career as a glamour model, appearing in scores of publications ranging from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood to Gala. Occasionally she posed explicitly, which positions her well ahead of most of her peers in that regard. She also made at least one nudie loop, and branched out and landed small parts in twenty-seven films from 1961 to 1968. She’s been featured here on Pulp Intl. several times, including in the adventure magazine Adam and the tabloid Minuit, and last spring memorably appeared—branching out again, in a way—as a blonde up a tree. You can see that here.
There’s interesting material beyond the Dolmai cover. If you read French there’s good gossip under the bowler hat logo in “Pour hommes seulment.” Then the editors do it again under the header “Panora-Monde,” because one good round of gossip deserves another. Meanwhile, Frenchwoman Theresa St. John declares that sex is her religion, and to make the point crystal clear Le Rendez-Vous presents her with nuns in the background. It’s not as weird as it seems—vintage cinema has taught us that nuns are the horniest species of penguin. Musician and actress Rina Berti, who released one album and appeared in the 1974 sex comedy C’est jeune et ça sait tout!, puts in an appearance, nude behind a guitar. And the beautiful Christiane Schmidtmer, who we’ve featured in Le Rendez-Vous‘ sister publication Midnight and who appeared in the women-in-prison movie The Big Doll House, gets the centerspread.
Le Rendez-Vous also leans heavily into gore. Who knew Canada could be so violent? Maybe it really should be part of the United States. Then a closer reading reveals that in order to fill its blood quotient, Le Rendez-Vous features mostly crimes from other countries. There’s a two page spread, “de la vie l’americaine”—American life. Elsewhere an Indiana man shotguns his wife, and in Boston a fifteen-year-old boy cuts off his fingers and mails them to his girlfriend. The Brits get a spotlight dance too, as a woman is raped and killed on a London street. So in the end there’s not enough violence in Canada to fill an issue of one of its leading tabloids. It can’t join the U.S. after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
