vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Tolle Texasgirls would translate as “great Texas girls,” but the movie that was promoted by this poster was originally made in the U.S. as Outlaw Women. The art here is by Heinz Bonné, and nice work it is. The film is a harmless popcorn muncher about an Old West town run by tough women and coveted by scheming men, worth a laugh if you’re of a certain mood. Which is to say it’s chauvinistic but good natured, like your kind but dumb uncle. You can read more here.
Ingmar Zeisberg gets the drop on an enemy in this photo made to promote her three episode mini-series Wie ein Blitz in 1970. Zeisberg and her co-star Peter Eschberg play Americans who plot a murder and cover-up, but when they return to dispose of the body they’ve temporarily hidden it’s disappeared. We’ve seen this device used plenty, and we’re extremely curious how it fares in the German imagination. We’ll dig around for it and see if we can find a copy of the show.
Above: an image of German actress Marlies Drager, sometimes spelled Dräger with umlauts, made for the 1968 movie Dynamit in grüner Seide, aka Death and Diamonds. We shared another promo image from the film a while back, and speaking of back, we also shared a photo of her risking back pain for a great image here.
This image featuring German actress Hildegard Knef is cropped from a promo shot made for her 1952 anti-commie spy thriller Diplomatic Courier. She was in several crime movies, including Night without Sleep and Nachts auf den Straßen, aka The Mistress, and interestingly, she starred in a West German television version of the classic film noir Laura in 1962. It’s not better than the original, but the major plot twist occurs with “All Blues” by Miles Davis playing on the stereo, so that’s pretty cool.
Lilli Palmer handles what looks like Colt .45 automatic or prop version thereof in this promo image made in 1946 for her film Cloak and Dagger, in which she starred with Gary Cooper. Palmer was born in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1914 as Lillie Marie Peiser, and under her new name racked up more than one hundred acting credits all the way until 1986, appearing in everything from the film noir Body and Soul to the goofball television series The Love Boat. As for what she’s about harvest, it’s fascists—in Cloak and Dagger she plays a member of the Italian resistance against the Nazis.
This photo shows German actress Sabine Sesselmann and was made to promote her 1961 crime flick Information Received, which she headlined. It was one of her only Hollywood productions, and came from an original idea by Berkely Mather. Other Sesselmann films include Die Tür mit den 7 Schlössern, aka The Door with Seven Locks, Ein Sarg aus Hongkong, aka Coffin from Hong Kong, and Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen, aka The Devil’s Daffodil. We think this is a top femme fatale shot, one of the more menacing ones we’ve run across. We’ll see if we can likewise run across one of her films.
This 1956 Panther-Buch edition from Walter Lehning Verlag of Harry Whittington’s Jäger oder Gejagter? is a reissue of a book first published in the U.S. as One Got Away. That appeared in 1946, with different art, as one side of an Ace Double, and Cleve F. Adams’ Shady Lady on the flipside. The cover art here, which is by Harry Barton, also first appeared on an Ace Double. It was originally used for Leslie Edgley’s 1953 thriller Fear No More, with Mel Colton’s Never Kill a Cop on the other side. We already shared the Barton side of that double in this collection, but when we saw this West German book it seemed like an opportunity to note once again that the artists may not have been paid for these overseas editions, whether straight re-utilizations of the pieces, or replicas by other artists. Bob from Menspulpmags explained a bit about that phenomenon some years ago. We also have Barton’s original art without text below.
Australian author Morris L. West’s novel Kundu has been reprinted many times, which is often (though not always) an indicator of quality. We’ve seen editions from HarperCollins, Panther, Bantam, Ulverscroft, Allen & Unwin, Granada, White Lion, and Mayflower, and those are just the English editions. But he first published it in 1956 as the Dell paperback you see here with nice Victor Kalin art.
Between the covers West tells the story of a diverse group of colonials in the highlands of New Guinea, amongst them a priest, a district police officer, a “witch doctor,” a German farmer named Kurt Sonderfeld, and his wife Gerda. There are many unusual undercurrents among these people, not least the hate-hate relationship between the Sonderfelds, who openly cheat and can barely stand each other’s company.
That relationship comes into focus once West reveals that Sonderfeld is really escaped Sturmbannführer Gottfried Reinach, who operated a Polish concentration camp where he plucked beautiful Gerda from the masses headed for the crematoria, made her his mistress, and brought her along when, under a false identity, he escaped the collapsing Reich and eventually settled in New Guinea. Because she knows the truth, Gerda can never be free, and Nazi hunters aren’t kind to mistresses anyway.
Gerda is Sonderfeld’s only danger. Otherwise his fake identity is ironclad. He even had a concentration camp number tattooed onto his arm. But safety breeds hubris. He harbors dreams of power and domination over the vast valley in which he resides. In order to achieve that he must control the tribal medicine men, and that’s where the book generates its intrigue. West blends interpersonal strife, tribal magic (i.e. the belief therein), and subterfuge into an unlikely colonialist potboiler. The book was reportedly written in a flash, but there’s occasional eloquence to the prose, such as in this passage about a supporting character lost early in the narrative:
They marked the grave with a big square stone and left him there—lonely in death as he had been in life—loveless, barren of achievement, crowned with dust, naked in the naked earth of the oldest island on the planet.
As in all colonialist novels, locals do not fare well with white characters, but there are degrees. Sonderfeld, being a Nazi, has some harsh ideas about New Guineans, while the priest is more paternal. They’re opposite in makeup. Sonderfeld is smart and loves to show it, but he’s also impulsive. The priest is unassuming and always thinking of the long term. Sonderfeld is an atheist; the priest has deep religious conviction. He emerges as Sonderfeld’s main resister, and main protector of the tribes.
We don’t feel Sonderfeld’s contemptuous atheism is a natural fit for that character—after all, the Nazis were predominantly, vastly, overwhelmingly Christian, so the more interesting opposition with the priest would have been not atheist against believer, but a loving Christianity against a violent one. It’s a split that existed in Germany then, and exists in the U.S. today. But other than that, and one or two other facile confabulations, we have to call Kundu a good book.
This photo shows German actress Eva-Maria Hagen and was made for her television movie Tod im Preis inbegriffen, which would translate as “all in the price.” She accumulated more than a hundred other acting credits, on both the big and small screen, nearly all in Germany. She also gets credit for this: she was the mother of singer Nina Hagen, which is a pretty big deal for those of you into New Wave and/or punk music. The photo dates from 1968.
This beautiful shot of German/Czech actress Barbara Bouchet first appeared on the cover of the Japanese film magazine Movie Information/Movie Pictorial, and was made to promote the U.S. television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which ran from 1964 to 1968. Bouchet was in a single episode in 1965, but had a flourishing film career, mostly in Europe, throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. If you want to see this shot in its original context, it’s in this collection of covers.
American sci-fi/horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft dies of intestinal cancer in Providence, Rhode Island at age 46. Lovecraft died nearly destitute, but would become the most influential horror writer of all time. His imaginary universe of malign gods and degenerate cults was influenced by his explicitly racist views, but his detailed and procedural style of writing, which usually pitted men of science or academia against indescribable monsters, remains as effective today as ever.
French pulp artist Michel Gourdon, who was the less famous brother of Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, dies in Coudray, France aged eighty-five. He is known mainly for the covers he painted for the imprint Flueve Noir, but worked for many companies and produced nearly 3,500 book fronts during his career.
In the U.S. a Dallas jury finds nightclub owner and organized crime fringe-dweller Jack Ruby guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby had shot Oswald with a handgun at Dallas Police Headquarters in full view of multiple witnesses and photographers. Allegations that he committed the crime to prevent Oswald from exposing a conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have never been proven.
In Tennessee, the case of Scopes vs. the State of Tennessee, involving the prosecution of a school teacher for instructing his students in evolution, ends with a conviction of the teacher and establishment of a new law definitively prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The opposing lawyers in the case, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, both earn lasting fame for their participation in what was a contentious and sensational trial.
Franklin D. Roosevelt uses the medium of radio to address the people of the United States for the first time as President, in a tradition that would become known as his “fireside chats”. These chats were enormously successful from a participation standpoint, with multi-millions tuning in to listen. In total Roosevelt would make thirty broadcasts over the course of eleven years.
