Vintage Pulp

November 25 2024

DEVIL’S FOOD

The Prince of Darkness sets his sights on Elke Sommer. And who can blame him?

Above is a poster for El Diablo se lleva los muertos, which was known in English as Lisa and the Devil—sort of. Most sources say this was originally an Italian movie, though there’s no Italian poster. It premiered at the Cannes Film Fesitval in 1973, and in January 1974 showed at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, which was a French fest that during its existence between 1973 and 1993 was focused on horror. But there’s no French poster. The movie’s first general release was in Spain today in 1974, so the Spanish poster is what you see above. It was painted by Francisco Fernández Zarza-Pérez, who signed it “Jano.”

In the end, the movie was never released in Italy in its original form. Several months after it tanked with the French, The Exorcist exploded onto global screens and the sudden cultural interest in possession presented the seeming opportunity for El Diablo se lleva los muertos to be spiced up with more vivid content—i.e. scenes of exorcism and nudity—and re-released. This happened, and the result was titled Lisa and the Devil, but director Mario Bava had his name removed, which is never a good sign. That’s where the “sort of” comes in. Lisa and the Devil is a hybrid film. We didn’t watch that version. Ours was the original.

So, what happens in the original? Not much. While on holiday in Toledo, Spain, Elke Sommer sees a fresco of the Devil, then later, in a weird shop of old books and mannequins, encounters Telly Savalas, who looks unnervingly like the painting. Circumstances lead to her and a few other stranded travelers spending the night in a creepy old mansion owned by Alida Valli, whose servant is none other than Savalas. Pretty soon a series of inexplicable events occur, ranging from Elke discovering her identical resemblance to a former occupant of the house, to gruesome deaths—including one in which a guy gets run over by a vintage car, backed over, run over, backed over, run over, and maybe backed over again. We lost count. Somehow this is all related to Sommer being a target for Satanic possession.

Sommer was never in an outstandingly good movie as far as we’ve seen yet. This one must have really disheartened her. Hopes started high all around because Bava was an auteur of sorts who’d been given free reign to make anything he wished, but proved that most directors can’t be trusted with that level of control. Some people love this film, but objectively, it’s a slog. We drifted off a few times, then someone would press the horn on that killer car—OOOOGAH!—and we were awake again. In our view El Diablo se lleva los muertos is for lovers of gothic or haunted house horror only. Or you can try the U.S. version and get more gore. We won’t be doing that. But our faith in Elke remains unshaken.

Update: It’s July 2025 now, and we actually did watch the spiced up version, though we said we wouldn’t. There’s an argument to be made that it’s a better movie. It’s certainly less boring. Then again, gratuitous nudity never bores us, especially when it comes in a package as hot as Carmen Silva. See below:

Femmes Fatales

January 6 2024

WAVE ACTION

Elke snags seashells by the seashore.

German star Elke Sommer shows her beach bum in this shot made during a photo session in Haiti in 1978, and first published in the the U.S. magazine Eros. Sommer is another of those performers who was huge during her time, but doesn’t have what today most film buffs consider many quality efforts among her nearly one hundred movies. A Shot in the Dark and The Prize are probably the best remembered from her mainstream output, while cult fans tend to gravitate toward Lisa and the Devil, The Wrecking Crew, and of course Deadlier Than the Male, which we’ve seen and written about more than once (feel free to click its keywords just below). We’re going to explore a few more of those hundred movies of hers, so maybe we’ll uncover a treasure the way Sommer has uncovered the giant conch shell she’s hanging onto.

Germany, Haiti, Eros Magazine, A Shot in the Dark, The Prize, Lisa and the Devil, The Wrecking Crew, Deadlier Than the Male, Elke Sommer, nudity

Vintage Pulp

November 24 2023

VENICE CARNIVAL

Cold War spies make waves in the City of Canals.

The Venetian Affair, which premiered today in 1966, has a rather interesting promo poster. It was painted by U.S. artist Frank McCarthy, who was big in paperback covers early in his career, moved into high-budget movie promos such as James Bond posters, and finally made a mark in realist fine art. We love this piece from him. There’s a lot going on. If you check out his effort for You Only Live Twice here you’ll see how dense and chaotic his work could be, same as above, where he has people falling off the bridge, off the gondola, and guns being brandished everywhere. In addition, his likenesses of the movie’s stars are good. He was a major talent.

The first observation you might make while watching The Venetian Affair is that it would be impossible to make a similar movie in that city today. Nearly four million tourists visited Venice in 2022, making nearly every street—and certainly every site of special historical note—like the mass exodus from a just-completed football game. With that level of humanity about, closing parts of the city or main squares—while maybe possible—would not be practical or economical.

But The Venetian Affair was made back when quiet streets and dark corners existed. Old world architecture always makes for a good spy movie backdrop. That’s exactly what you get in this adventure about a mind control drug being used to foment conflict between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Robert Vaughn stars as a former CIA agent who was fired after he married Elke Sommer, who was suspected of being a double agent. Vaughn never found out whether that was true because he and Sommer were torn apart by turbulent events. But when a bomb blows up a Venice political conference and Sommer is thought to be involved, the CIA drags Vaughn back into its clutches to find Sommer, as well as the crucial clue that might explain the bombing.

Vaughn is a cool and composed actor, any movie with Sommer is one we’ll watch, and co-stars Felicia Farr, Luciana Paluzzi, Ed Asner, and the venerable Boris Karloff are all enticements, but we can’t say The Venetian Affair is a scintillating example of a Cold War spy flick. It’s such a fertile sub-genre, one that produced some of the best movies of 1950s through 1970s. Even against the beautiful Venice backdrop it mostly falls flat due to a screenplay that never hits any highs. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. Though it lacks highs, it also lack any serious lows. You can spend your time worse ways. Plus—Sommer. What more do you need?

Italy, U.S.S.R., Soviet Union, Venice, Cold War, The Venetian Affair, Robert Vaughn, Elke Sommer, Felicia Farr, Karlheinz Böhmm, Karl Bohm, Luciana Paluzzi, Boris Karloff, Edward Asner, Frank McCarthy, poster art, cinema, movie review, communism

Vintage Pulp

July 12 2023

PLUS TWO

Sommer and Koscina add up to one great day.

We’ve looked at the output of Italian illustrator Jean Mascii a few times. Above you see his work again, this time on a poster for the James Bond-style adventure Plus féroces que les mâles, which first showed in France today in 1967 but had its global premiere months earlier in England as Deadlier Than the Male. Over four decades, working from the early ’50s until the late ’80s, Mascii painted almost 1,500 movie posters, hundreds of book covers, and a copious amount of print advertising. You can click his keywords at bottom to see a few more posters we’ve shared on our site, or click here to take the express lane to one of his very best.

The “deadlier” in Deadlier Than the Male refers to co-stars Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, two of the more beautiful products of the mid-century era, who play assassins. We’ve shared posters for the film from Japan—twice—and the former Yugoslavia. Returning to it yet again is mainly an excuse to share some of the many production photos we’ve found—to go along with this one, this one, and this one. Today we’re restricting ourselves to only Sommer and Koscina’s bikini shots, because the skin and smiles say summertime to us. There are drawbacks to movie stardom, so we hear, but some days surely must be just fine.

France, Italy, Plus féroces que les mâles, Deadlier Than the Male, Jean Mascii, Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, poster art, cinema

Vintage Pulp

April 27 2023

EXTREME HEAT

Is there really such a thing as too much?

Elke Sommer front and center on a vintage poster claiming she’s “almost too hot”? Sign us up. Sweet Ecstasy was originally made in France as Douce Violence—“sweet violence”—and fits loosely into a cycle of films characterized as nouvelle vague, or the French new wave. Director Max Pécas, however wasn’t a new wave director. He was better known for his work at the forefront of the cinéma Z style, also known as the nanar sub-genre, films loosely equivalent, we gather, to eroticized b-movies, meaning sex and stupidity. Pécas is also remembered for a trilogy of 1970s Saint-Tropez erotic comedies. But for Douce Violence he’s an art director, trying to make a significant statement in the same broad category as La dolce vita or À bout de souffle, aka Breathless.

To that end, what you get here is a group of idle twenty-somethings for whom entitled boredom is the order of the day, as they rip around the French Riviera near and within Cannes, seeking thrills and not caring about the future. When Olivier (Christian Pezey) finds himself drawn into this clan of troublemakers living on their parents’ money, their leader Maddy (Pierre Brice) enlists his own girlfriend to be the soft edge of the wedge in a scheme to corrupt the newcomer. It’s for Olivier’s own good, you see, because he’s too bourgeois.

The girlfriend is Sommer, playing a character also named Elke, and she’s in vamp mode here, which means cat-eyed make-up and cumulonimbus hair, as she taunts and teases poor Olivier in her efforts to make him into a fellow disaffected youth. Is she too hot? No. Elke is always just hot enough. She and her pals go water-skiing (really Elke in some of the shots), swimming, boating, driving, and most of all, partying. They question convention, conformity, society, mortality, and all the rest. Like other movies of this type, there isn’t much plot. Also as in similar films, an event galvanizes and changes the group—or seems as though it might.

The main attraction in the film is Elke, and she delivers what early ’60s audiences wanted—an envelope pushing performance amidst a growing wave of censorship-destroying movies. Like Bardot and others, Sommer shows a lot of skin, and almost—almost—goes topless. Though it’s supposed to be gauche to say so about a woman these days (but we don’t care, because sex is why we’re all here, and it’s ultimately all that matters, despite modern attempts to obfuscate it, hide it, police it, and shame it), Elke’s very stimulating. And she doesn’t even look her best here, due to the crazy make-up and hair.

As a final note, we suspect the movie was censored in the U.S. to remove some revealing bikini scenes, some shots of Elke’s asscrack, a bare breast caress by a male character, and (probably) some or all of a sweaty, open-shirted dance by a black character. The poster certainly was censored—no doubt about that. The word “ecstasy” was placed to cover the word “violence.” You can just see it if you squint. So the movie’s title was set to be literally translated, but that was deemed too much for Americans—or at least some Americans (southerners, we suppose). Douce Violence opened in France and Belgium in early 1962, and reached the U.S. today the same year.

France, Cannes, Douce Violence, Sweet Ecstasy, Violent Ecstasy, Elke Sommer, Pierre Brice, Agnès Spaak, Christian Pezey, Vittoria Prada, Max Pécas, poster art, cinema, movie review

Hollywoodland

February 6 2023

THE LIVING IS EASY

Sommer photos paint a portrait of relaxation.

These photos show German actress Elke Sommer painting in the yard of her Los Angeles home. They’re obviously staged, because we don’t think she’d choose a hard tile surface to sit on while doing her work, but the shots are nice. We don’t have a date on them, but if we had to guess we’d say they’re from the late 1960s. Sommer began painting when she was young, and continued throughout her film career and afterward. She once told an interviewer, “I am really closest to me being myself with paint. I paint anyplace. When I am at home I paint outside, in the nude, for up to eight hours at a stretch. I paint with acrylics, so when I’m finished I just jump in the pool.” In 1984 Sommer published a book titled Painting with Elke Sommer, and had a television show of the same title during the 1980s, on which she wore clothes, sadly. So, what does Elke paint? See an example below.

Germany, Los Angeles, Elke Sommer

Intl. Notebook

October 14 2022

THE MELL GAZE

Voulez vous Rendez-Vous avec moi ce soir?

We have a new Canadian tabloid for you, an issue of Le Rendez-Vous published today in 1968 with a cover shot of Austrian star Marisa Mell, and in the centerfold a brilliant photo of German actress Elke Sommer we’re pretty sure has never been seen online before. We had to scan that in four pieces and merge the quadrants, which is time consuming, but in this case worth it, because—as you know if you visit the site often—we think Sommer is one of the all-time vintage goddesses. And speaking from a graphic design perspective, we think we did a pretty good job of assembling her, if we may say so. Fellow German actress Babsi Zimmermann also makes an appearance, and we thought we’d never see her again, but 1968 seems to have been a very visible year for her—particularly in Canadian tabloids.

In typical cheapie scandal sheet style, Le Rendez-Vous is filled with ridiculous material on subjects ranging from crime to medicine. You’ll see a photo below of a human brain. The text there says, unsurprisingly, “Finally the secret of immortality… We can keep the brain alive separated from a dead body!” A Doctor Jacobsen claims brain transplants will become as popular as heart transplants. Okay, but heart transplants aren’t popular—they’re necessary. Big difference. However, if brain transplants were ever to become routine, we’d take one. Sure why not? It would be the ultimate mind altering experience, and we’ve never been against those. Twenty-plus scans below.

Canada, Le Rendez-Vous, Marisa Mell, Elke Sommer, Babsi Zimmermann, Barbara Zimmermann, Maria Bucella, Rosa Gerlach, Conny Rusk, Jeanette Antoine, tabloid

Intl. Notebook

September 14 2022

BEAUTY AND TALENT

Cancans de Paris is always uncanny.

Above: a few pages from the French burlesque publication Cancans de Paris, the seventh time we’ve taken a look at this mag, with this example dating from September 1965. As always there are mainstream celebrities mixed in with the peelers, including Carroll Baker, Brigitte Bardot, Elke Sommer, Kim Novak, Sean Connery, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and French born ballerina Ludmilla Tchérina. At the top of panel two there’s also a minor Raymond Brenot illustration. See some major ones here, and just click the Cancans keywords below if you want to see more issues.

France, Paris, Cancans de Paris, Carroll Baker, Peter Sellers, Brigitte Bardot, Elke Sommer, Kim Novak, Ludmilla Tchérina, Sean Connery, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Raymond Brenot, Carols, burlesque

Femmes Fatales

April 22 2022

SOMETHING’S GARTER GIVE

Where Elke is concerned a cigar is never just a cigar.

You know the famous quote attributed to Sigmund Freud, right? He’s sometimes criticized for having seen phallic symbols and sexual subtext where they didn’t exist, but apparently he once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But not in this case. In 1967’s Deadlier Than the Male, Elke Sommer’s cigar is an explosive she uses to assassinate someone, blowing his airplane out of the sky as she parachutes safely to the ground. It’s a cheeseball movie, but her turn as the ultimate femme fatale makes it worth watching. You can read more about it here, and see plenty more Elke here, there, and eve ryw here.

Germany, Deadlier Than the Male, Elke Sommer

Vintage Pulp

December 16 2021

SOMMER IN AUSTRALIA

Hi, this is Elke calling from Down Under. Can I speak to my agent? There's been a trademark infringement.

As usual the Aussie publishing company Horwitz has used a film star on one of its book covers—this time German goddess Elke Sommer on the front of 1959’s Terror Comes Creeping. She was a favorite of theirs—we’ve seen her on four covers, including this one, and we’ve speculated that they’re all unlicensed, for reasons discussed here.

This one stars Carter Brown’s, aka Alan G. Yates’s franchise sleuth Danny Boyd, who’s hired by a woman named Martha Hazelton who thinks her father is killing off his children—with her next in line—in order to avoid losing his dead wife’s inheritance. The father, when confronted by Boyd, says that insanity runs in the family and his daughter is paranoid and probably nuts. It certainly seems that way when Boyd meets his client’s loopy, danger obsessed little sister, but of course matters soon begin to look far more complicated than they seemed at first.

On one level it’s amazing Carter Brown sold something like 120,000,000 books, because his work is not special. But on the other hand it’s fast, sometimes funny, and hits the right notes for detective novels. So maybe his success isn’t so strange after all. We’ll probably read another, because we have a few.

Australia, Germany, Horwitz Publications, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, Elke Sommer, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 13

1933—Eugenics Becomes Official German Policy

Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage.

July 13

1955—Ruth Ellis Executed

Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.

July 13

1966—Richard Speck Rampage

Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night.

July 12

1971—Corona Sent to Prison

Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.

July 11

1960—To Kill a Mockingbird Appears

Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.

July 11

1962—Nuke Test on Xmas Island

As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.

July 10

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.

Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE