| Vintage Pulp | Mar 1 2019 |
That was amazing when you started moaning, “Jack, Jack,” right at the end. My name's Robert, by the way.
Above, a George Erickson cover for The Strangers, by William E. Wilson, copyright 1955. The book concerns a man, his dissatisfied wife, and the love triangle that results, which sounds like solid sleaze, but this is actually literary fiction from a serious author. Wilson became known as an anti-racism voice during his day. His first novel, Crescent City, is focused on the Ku Klux Klan, and one of his noted works is the autobiographical essay, “Long, Hot Summer in Indiana,” set during 1924, when the Klan was ascendant. The Stranger wasn't rapturously received, but we think Wilson is a good writer, so we may check out Crescent City. If we do, we'll report back.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 25 2019 |
Stanwyck rips holes in yet another man's life.
The File on Thelma Jordon is another one of those movies in which a man fools around on a perfectly wonderful wife, and in so doing screws up his perfectly satisfactory existence. The fool in question is played by Wendell Corey, who you may recognize as James Stewart's police buddy from Rear Window. Here he's a district prosecutor. His marriage to nice girl Joan Tetzel is problematic for reasons that seem pretty trivial as far as we're concerned, but whatever—it's film noir, and if the script says he's bummed, okay. His wandering gaze soon partakes of veteran bad woman Barbara Stanwyck, and from that point forward he just can't keep his lips to himself. When Stanwyck's frail aunt turns up ventilated, wily Wendell finds himself in a serious pickle, both personally and professionally.
There's not much you can criticize in The File on Thelma Jordon. Stanwyck is a great actress, particularly in moments of high tension or panic, of which there's an abundance. The sequence where she and Corey frantically try to reorganize an incriminating crime scene before anyone else arrives is a tour de force, seven minutes of masterful staging, acting, directing, and cinematography. And that's just the halfway point. The web hasn't even begun to tighten yet. Before long Corey will find himself—as in all the best noirs—in a situation so absurdly awful that there seems to be no possibility of escape. And all because he wasn't happy with his perfectly wonderful wife, and perfectly satisfactory existence. These guys just never learn.
I should be happy with you, my lovely wife, but this is a film noir, so I'm not.
Eyes, nose, lips—yup, everything looks fine. Why do I want to cheat on you so badly?
Hi, I'm Thelma. It's okay to look at me—we'll be making the eight-limbed mattress monster™ soon anyway.
What do you mean you found a gun? What's a gun?
Why, I know nothing at all about the recent thefts of tablecloths from local Italian restaurants. Do you like my new skirt?
Can we go inside now? The center console is bruising my crack.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I've gotten my dick in the wringer but good.
| Hollywoodland | Dec 8 2018 |
And you think America is polarized today.
The iconic polar bear rug. What can you say about them? Well, it's not a good look nowadays, but back then people thought these sorts of decorations were quite chic. When did that end? Possibly shortly after the three-hundredth Playboy model posed on one, or when many people began to see trophy hunting as the obsession of vain and unsavory millionaires. One of those two. Personally, we blame Hefner. In the shot above Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay take polar bear style to its pinnacle. Just look at that room. Besides the bear they have a copper ceiling, satin curtains, and a white shag rug. It's a pimp's wet dream and all of it must have cost a fortune. We like to imagine what the look on Jayne's face would have been if anyone walked in with a brimming glass of red wine. We bet she'd have turned whiter than the bear.
We have more photos in the same vein below. If you need help identifying the stars, their names are in our keywords in order of appearance. Looking at the entire collection, we tend to wonder if there were three or four bears that ended up in all the photos. You know, like bears owned by certain photography studios or prop departments. Just saying, a couple of them look suspiciously similar. But on the other hand, how different from each other do bears really look? You'll notice that the poor creatures were generally posed to look fierce. But by contrast Inger Stevens' bear, just below, strikes us as a bit reflective and melancholy, which is understandable. Elizabeth Montgomery, meanwhile, gets extra points for wearing her bear. We have twenty-plus images below, including another shot of Mansfield, sans Hargitay.
We have more photos in the same vein below. If you need help identifying the stars, their names are in our keywords in order of appearance. Looking at the entire collection, we tend to wonder if there were three or four bears that ended up in all the photos. You know, like bears owned by certain photography studios or prop departments. Just saying, a couple of them look suspiciously similar. But on the other hand, how different from each other do bears really look? You'll notice that the poor creatures were generally posed to look fierce. But by contrast Inger Stevens' bear, just below, strikes us as a bit reflective and melancholy, which is understandable. Elizabeth Montgomery, meanwhile, gets extra points for wearing her bear. We have twenty-plus images below, including another shot of Mansfield, sans Hargitay.
Jayne MansfieldMickey HargitayInger StevensAnn MillerAnn SheridanNichelle NicholsCarol BakerClaudia DellVirginia BrucePat KirkwoodLupe VelezElizabeth MontgomeryLizabeth ScottEvelyn NesbittDorothy SebastianJean HarlowMarilyn MonroeSophia LorenVeronica LakeRita HayworthDiana DorsOlga BaclanovaJoan Collins
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 11 2018 |
Rene Bond and friends make a Blanket statement about Southern California beach life.
It still sort of amazes us how many American porn movies made it all the way to Japan. Since pubic hair was illegal to show there back then, as was, needless to say, penetrative sex, the films would have been censored to local standards, making them a bit like cable softcore, but highly disjointed and very short. Yet the public must have craved these hacked up movies anyway because we have scores of Japanese posters for them. We hope to get around to sharing the entire group one day, but today we're focused on just this one—a promo for 1975's Beach Blanket Bango. While the title borrows from the classic teenybopper flick Beach Blanket Bingo, the movie is actually a sequel of sorts to a 1974 smut film called High School Fantasies, with most of the same cast members, though in different roles.
Rene Bond is the star attraction in this Southern California 1960s style sex romp but she doesn't star on the poster. She's there, though. That's her in the right background in an Annette Funicello style wig. For some reason the position of honor on the poster is given to Cindy Taylor, who plays a bit role. But the poster is attractive anyway. It's yet another example of how seriously Japanese film distributors took their erotica. Posters for porn were fully as interesting and well designed as those for mainstream movies. But nice as it is, since Bond doesn't get a proper showing, we've given her one below. Beach Blanket Bango opened in Japan today in 1975.
Rene Bond is the star attraction in this Southern California 1960s style sex romp but she doesn't star on the poster. She's there, though. That's her in the right background in an Annette Funicello style wig. For some reason the position of honor on the poster is given to Cindy Taylor, who plays a bit role. But the poster is attractive anyway. It's yet another example of how seriously Japanese film distributors took their erotica. Posters for porn were fully as interesting and well designed as those for mainstream movies. But nice as it is, since Bond doesn't get a proper showing, we've given her one below. Beach Blanket Bango opened in Japan today in 1975.
JapanBeach Blanket BangoBeach Blanket BingoRene BondCindy TaylorNicolle Riddellposter artcinemanudityxxx
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 25 2018 |
Listen, lady! There's two of us and only one goat on this island! We're going to have to come to an agreement!
No, this cover for William Fuller's 1954 thriller Goat Island is not a duplicate of yesterday's. It's a similar piece painted by the great same artist—George Gross. On both fronts you have the dark-haired femme fatale, the open white shirt, the seated position, the nearby tree, the shack in the distance, and a general backwoods mood. If you must copy, copy yourself. In terms of content the book falls into the category of South Florida detective yarns, a sub-genre scores of writers have found profitable over the decades. It's the second book featuring Fuller's franchise detective Brad Dolan. In 1957 Ace Books republished it with the art redone by John Vernon, which you see below. Yes, they're different. Look closely. Vernon's signature appears at the extreme bottom right, whereas Gross's is absent at top. Duplicating covers was common during the mid-century paperback era but we've rarely seen an artist as accomplished as Vernon given the task. Both covers are good, but Gross gets the nod of quality for only copying himself.
| Intl. Notebook | Aug 26 2018 |
The past comes alive in vintage pop culture mag.
You have to admit—Pulp Intl. is one of the great time burning websites around. We're going to incinerate yet more of it today. Above is a cover from Look magazine, a chief competitor of the iconic Life. At the time this August 1937 issue appeared Look was headquartered far from the publishing hotbeds on the coasts, choosing to set up shop in Des Moines, Iowa. The editors claim 1.25 million in newsstands sales every issue. We don't know if that's true, but it was a high quality magazine, and this is a high quality example.
Inside you get Benito Mussolini, a ranking of Hollywood box office earning power, a special murder mystery for readers to solve, several pages of Gary Cooper, and a small photo feature on a German town that baptized every visitor, which is an interesting historical curiosity considering that in a devoutly religious country Hitler was successfully fanning the flames of hate against Jews. But “others” never seem to be included in any religion's definition of people deserving good treatment.
Elsewhere inside you get Mexican painter Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo. Kahlo is referred to by Look editors merely as Rivera's third wife, “seeing to it that he is fed every few hours.” That may have been true, but today she's known throughout the world, recognized as an artist in her own right, which is a reminder that re-examining the past with an emphasis on those who were overlooked—a process some call “revisionism”—is a useful tool for getting things right. Numerous scans below.
IowaDes MoinesLook MagazineBenito MussoliniDiego RiveraFrida KahloGary CooperMarlene DietrichJoan BlondellDick Powell
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 23 2018 |
Man, I've really got the munchies. Kinda wanna murder a bunch of people too.
Measured by pennies per word William Irish's, aka Cornell Woolrich's 1941 drug scare classic Marihuana is one of the most expensive paperbacks you'll ever come across. The Dell edition you see here with iconic cover art by Bill Fleming could cost you over $100 for its sixty-four pages. It's the story of King Turner, who goes slumming in Hell's Kitchen and smokes a joint that sets him off on a murderous rampage. Best passage:
“You don't reason with a hooded cobra or a hydrophobic dog or a time bomb. You can't.”
That is frickin' hilarious. In case you're wondering, hydrophobia is rabies. Well, one thing is correct—you can't reason with people who are stoned. But instead of trying to stop them from hurting someone, you try to tell them strawberry jelly on Saltines is a bad solution for the munchies. Marihuana makes its point of view abundantly clear: weed bad, and don't be shocked when your life goes down the commode. You've been warned.
| Vintage Pulp | May 23 2018 |
I'm not usually a quitter! But right now! I'm considering! Going back! To delivering pizzas!
And speaking of trains, above you see the cover of Lawrence G. Blochman's novel of foreign intrigue Bombay Mail, a murder mystery set in India and staged on a Calcutta to Bombay mail train. The lead character isn't actually a postal worker, but rather an investigator, Leonidas Prike of the British C.I.D., also known as the Criminal Investigation Department. This was Blochman's debut, originally appearing in hardback in 1934, which was the same year another celebrated trainbound mystery—Murder on the Orient Express—was published.
About that copyright date, by the way. Nearly every place you look will have Bombay Mail listed as arriving in 1934, but it may have appeared, at least in limited form, in 1933. We deduced this because the movie Bombay Mail, which was based on the novel, premiered in the U.S. in January 1934. We have a hard time imagining a debut novelist selling his book to movies before it hit the stores, so 1933 might be the actual publication date. One thing we're sure about, though, is this Dell mapback edition arrived in 1943, and the art is by Robert Stanley.
| Vintage Pulp | May 22 2018 |
My colleagues would be shocked if they knew the perverse pleasure I take in not washing my hands.
Does he go naked under his smock? Does he prefer Merlot over Syrah? What exactly is the doctor hiding? His secret is—spoiler alert!—he isn't really a doctor. Gerbrand was a year from finishing medical school when World War II swept him up and he found himself serving as a Wehrmacht medic, first in battle, and later in concentration camps. That's a serious secret. We were thinking about other terrible secrets doctors could have. If we were being treated by Gerbrand, here are five more things we'd hate to discover.
He took the Hippocratic Oath with his fingers crossed.
He gets a bizarre sexual thrill from giving injections.
No matter what time your appointment is he has his receptionist let you in an hour later.
He gets a bizarre sexual thrill from giving injections.
No matter what time your appointment is he has his receptionist let you in an hour later.
During chest surgery he squeezes patients' hearts and makes quacking noises.
He knows exactly where Hitler's other ball is.
Anyway, during the war Gerbrand learns everything a real doctor would, and then some. When peace comes he lands a job as a surgeon in West Germany, becomes known and respected, and has romantic liaisons with upper crusty women. But his secret will come out and when it does he'll be in trouble bigtime. We won't tell you how it turns out, because that would require a second spoiler alert, and one per write-up is our limit. The book was originally published in 1955 as Without Sanction, and this retitled Dell paperback came in 1959 with cover art by James Hill.
He knows exactly where Hitler's other ball is.
Anyway, during the war Gerbrand learns everything a real doctor would, and then some. When peace comes he lands a job as a surgeon in West Germany, becomes known and respected, and has romantic liaisons with upper crusty women. But his secret will come out and when it does he'll be in trouble bigtime. We won't tell you how it turns out, because that would require a second spoiler alert, and one per write-up is our limit. The book was originally published in 1955 as Without Sanction, and this retitled Dell paperback came in 1959 with cover art by James Hill.
| Vintage Pulp | May 15 2018 |
The New York City fashion scene turns out to be murder.
This cover for by George Harmon Coxe's Fashioned for Murder was painted by Fred Scotwood, and we love it. The point-of-view is a reflection in a camera lens, and check out the detail of the focal length numbers above the title text:
Nice touch. This book is one that was mailed to us from the United States by a friend, so thanks to Alex for that. In the story, a model poses with an elaborate set of costume jewelery she's been told is worthless, but comes to believe the gems are real after a stranger robs her of them, and an acquaintance returns them just before dying at her feet—shot twice in the back. She enlists the aid of a photographer who's smitten with her, and the two try to unravel the mystery. There's a very funny line about one of the supporting characters: From the first she had been one of the best reporters the Bulletin ever had, never asking favors because of her sex and never making excuses when things went wrong.
Was there a time when women in professional settings asked favors because of their sex? We thought they barely got hired at all. The line reveals a prevalent mid-century myth that women (and minorities) rarely deserved what they achieved. Today all but the most stubborn people understand that the opposite was true—women and minorities had to be supernaturally good to get anything resembling a fair shake.
Admittedly, the main female character in Fashioned for Murder, whose name is Linda Courtney, does need help solving the mystery of the possibly-real gems, but anyone would—there's a killer (or killers) on the loose and that's nothing to tackle alone. Her photographer friend is very happy to help, though he's a bit of a twerp, in our opinion. But with a cool setting in the NYC fashion industry and some deft writing, Coxe has crafted a nice thriller, one that's well worth your time.
 |
 |
