Vintage Pulp

August 16 2019

THE DEAN MARTIN SHOW

With special guests the Slaymates of the year.

Today we have some beautiful rarities, a set of door panel posters made for the 1968 Dean Martin spy movie spoof The Wrecking Crew. Martin played the wise-cracking and woman-loving Matt Helm, a character created by novelist Donald Hamilton. There have been a lot of loveable drunks in cinema, but Martin certainly was one of the most popular. Boozy Matt Helm was a perfect role for him, and the first film became the launching point for a series that stretched to four entries.

The Wrecking Crew was the last film, coming after 1966’s The Silencers and Murderer’s Row, and 1967’s The Ambushers. The movies were populated by a group of women known as Slaygirls, and the actresses on the posters below are posing as members of that deadly cadre. They are, top to bottom, Sharon Tate, Elke Sommer, Nancy Kwan, Tina Louise, and a fifth woman no other website seems able to identify, but who we’re pretty sure is Kenya Coburn.

These posters are 51 x 152 centimeters in size, or 20 x 60 for you folks who measure in inches, and they caught our eye mainly because of Tate. There’s been renewed interest in her, including portrayals in two 2019 films—The Haunting of Sharon Tate and Quentin Tarantino’s new effort Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Her poster is definitely one of the nicest pieces of Tate memorabilia we’ve seen.

We glanced at The Silencers a while back and found it just a little too dumb to consider slogging through the series, but maybe we’ll have another go at it. We’re sort of newly interested in Tate too, and since The Wrecking Crew was her next-to-last screen role, we want to have a look. Allegedly, Dean Martin quit this highly successful franchise because it felt wrong to go on with it after the Tate–LaBianca murders in August 1969. From what we’ve read about the era, Martin was far from the only person who felt as if that event changed everything. These days Tate’s death makes anything she’s in seem ironic and portentous, even, we suspect, a piece of fluff like The Wrecking Crew.

The Wrecking Crew, The Silencers, Murderer's Row, The Ambushers, Dean Martin, Elke Sommer, Tina Louise, Nancy Kwan, Sharon Tate, Kenya Coburn, Donald Hamilton, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca, Charles Manson, poster art, cinema

Vintage Pulp

May 20 2019

CALL IT A WRAP

I want to rob the Egyptian Museum as bad as anyone, but I don't think a mummy disguise is the answer!

Above, an alternate cover for Donald Hamilton’s Night Walker, from Dell Publications. We already showed you a 1964 edition from Fawcett Publications. This is the 1954 first edition paperback, with a cover painted by Carl Bobertz. The male character, by the way, is in disguise, but not as a mummy. Just want to make sure you don’t go stampeding to get the book expecting anthropological intrigue. You can read what we wrote about it here.

Dell Publications, Donald Hamilton, Carl Bobertz, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

March 5 2019

ASSASSINS HAVE SORRY EYES

Maybe all those stars are why none of the killers can seem to nail this chump.

Donald Hamilton’s 1965 novel Assassins Have Starry Eyes was originally published in 1956 as Assignment: Murder. This could have been better. The lead character here, Dr. James Gregory, is a tough-guy physicist who sits so much he “wears his pants shiny,” yet has no problem physically outmatching adversaries in various deadly situations. We’ll buy it, since the author asks it, but there’s another issue with Dr. Gregory—he’s a dick, all the more so as the narrative wears on.

Some sharp edges are to be expected, since people are trying to kill him—possibly due to his involvement in a government project tasked with creating an atomic super weapon—but he’s snide and superior even in his interior dialogues and reminiscences. He especially hates peace protestors because they simply don’t understand the need for world-threatening super weapons. Bah! Morons!

Books with difficult men are often fun, but it’s clear Hamilton thinks he’s writing Dr. Gregory not as an anti-hero, but as a no-nonsense everyman. The guy was impossible for us to like. We finished Assassins Have Starry Eyes mainly to see if he got his brains blown out. As for Hamilton, his writing is fine, so maybe he’ll do better with a different character (like Matt Helm, who he’s remembered for creating). We’ll try one down the line.

Fawcett Publications, Donald Hamilton, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 17 2018

DEAD OF NIGHT

I go out walkin'... after midnight... out in the moonlight...

Crime writers all face the same task of dumping their heroes into hot water in new and interesting ways. In Night Walker Donald Hamilton shoves his protagonist into a bizarre situation and it all begins with him merely hitchhiking after dark. The next thing he knows he’s hurt, housebound, and forced to assume a dead man’s identity. If he doesn’t continue the charade serious consequences could result, with prison being the least of them. But of course, as in any decent thriller, there’s always the promise of great rewards, in this case the dead man’s beautiful wife Elizabeth, or possibly the dead man’s young mistress Bonita. There’s a funny line of dialogue in this one when a character refuses a cigarette:

“Don’t take it out on Philip Morris. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

Ah, the 1950s, when men were men and cigarettes weren’t coffin nails. And another staple of 1950s genre fiction is commie hysteria, also a major component of this book. But that’s fine—every literary era has its archetypal villains. The book’s fatal flaw is that the latter portion contains long monologues of the bad guy explaining his evil plot, due to the fact that Hamilton hasn’t constructed the narrative for the hero to suss it out for himself. Tedious doesn’t even begin to describe this sort of writing. Overall Night Walker is middling work from Hamilton, passable in the first half, but a bit taxing in the second. Good thing this 1964 edition from Fawcett’s Gold Medal was cheap. And the cover art is nice. It’s by Harry Bennett.

Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Donald Hamilton, Harry Bennett, cover art, literature, communism

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

December 4

1918—Wilson Goes to Europe

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.

December 4

1921—Arbuckle Manslaughter Trial Ends

In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.

December 3

1964—Mass Student Arrests in U.S.

In California, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on university property.

December 3

1968—U.S. Unemployment Hits Low

Unemployment figures are released revealing that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.3 percent, the lowest rate for almost fifteen years. Going forward all the way to the current day, the figure never reaches this low level again.

December 2

1954—Joseph McCarthy Disciplined by Senate

In the United States, after standing idly by during years of communist witch hunts in Hollywood and beyond, the U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for conduct bringing the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. The vote ruined McCarthy’s career.

December 1

1955—Rosa Parks Sparks Bus Boycott

In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city’s African-American population were the bulk of the system’s ridership.