Femmes Fatales

September 13 2024

JUST HER LUCK

Never tempt fate when your acting career might ride on it.

We’re kind of into the famed golf trickster and b-movie actress Jeanne Carmen, so we’ve featured her a few times. Here she is once more, in a promo image riffing on the theme of bad luck. She does everything she can to court disaster: she’s under a ladder, with an open umbrella indoors, near a broken mirror, and a black cat (which she later ate). But we don’t think she brought bad luck on herself—she was already there, in terms of her acting career. She began in b-movies and basically stayed there, along the way making some real dogs (which she later ate). But you’ve got to love a woman who could drive a golf ball with a left-to-right fade. If we assume she posed for this photo the same year there was a Friday the 13th, which makes sense, then we can pinpoint it as from 1957. See another Carmen here.

Jeanne Carmen

Vintage Pulp

March 10 2022

YOUTH IN REVOLT

If you can't tame them join them.

We’ve been meaning to get to Untamed Youth for a long time because we know it’s considered one of the cheesier movies from its era. And who can resist a quality cheese? Since it premiered today in 1957, we decided to give it a screening, and it turns out the film’s reuptation is deserved. It stars Mamie Van Doren and Lori Nelson as beautiful sisters railroaded into a hicktown jail. In court, the county judge, who seems as though she’d possibly be lenient, instead sentences the sisters to thirty days of hard outdoor work on a farm. We quickly learn this is a free labor racket engineered by a wealthy rancher who pursued and married the judge, then put the idea in her head. Call it a case of private enterprise exercising undue influence over the judiciary to enable advantageous economic ends. You know—business as usual in America.

But none of that is important. What matters is that Untamed Youth is indeed one of the best bad movies we’ve seen. Interwoven into the plot is the theme of hipster rebellion, embodied by proto-rock music. For this reason dance parties break out at any and every moment, complete with choreography, air guitar, and bad lip synching even Milli Vanilli would be ashamed to call their own. Van Doren, with her swinging pelvis and wacky dance hands, is more like a mime than a Mame. Golf prodigy Jeanne Carmen plays the standard mean girl—whose fire goes out after one solid punch in the face from Nelson. And Eddie Cochran sings and dances through a couple of numbers, one of which, “Cotton Picker,” goes on waaay too long. The movie is so bad that Mystery Science Theater 3000 put it through the wringer back in 1990.

What makes the movie special is the dialogue, which contains too many accidental laugh lines to count. Our favorite is when John Russell, as the evil Mr. Tropp, is mentally slavering over the money he’s going to make with his forced labor, and goes, “Don’t you see honey? After this harvest I’ll be rich. And next season, I’ll be wealthy!” We also got a kick out of Pinky, the camp cook played by Wally Brown, who stops the music to make an announcement, then tells the kids it’s okay to start dancing again with this jaw-dropper: “Intermission over! Back to your African antics!” Yup—these old movies often have anachronistic clunkers like that. This one is a disaster, but Van Doren, Nelson, and others shake, rattle, and roll their way through it, and you can tell they had fun. We had fun watching it, and we suspect you will too.

Untamed Youth, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mamie Van Doren, Lori Nelson, Jeanne Carmen, John Russell, Eddie Cochran, Wally Brown, Yvonne Brown, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

September 14 2021

CLOSING ARGUMENT

They fought the law and the law won.

Indeed guns don’t argue. Rarely have truer words screamed from a movie poster, and we’ve come across few titles more fitting for a crime film. What you get here is a narrated docudrama about how U.S. federal agents began to carry guns, and use them. In the past they hadn’t been authorized to do so, but faring poorly against machine gun-toting gangsters like Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde changed that. Pretty soon we see g-men picking off criminals like tin ducks in a shooting gallery, and the narrator drones lines such as, “Like flies to a sticky bun the curious clustered at the sound of the excitement.” Mmm… sticky buns.

The movie was edited together from three episodes of the moralizing 1952 television series Gangbusters and released on the national b-circuit in September 1957. It’s as slapdash as it sounds, cheap as single-ply toilet paper, clumsily scripted, and hilariously acted by the likes of Jeanne Carmen, Myron Healey, and Lash La Rue. We recommend giving it a pass unless you want to subject it to the Mystery Science Theatre treatment—i.e. watch it with booze and smart-ass friends. But even if the movie purely sucks, we had to show you this poster. It’s quite a nice item. We have a zoom on selling point Jeanne Carmen below. Guns Don’t Argue premiered in the U.S. this month in 1957.

FBI, Gangbusters, Guns Don't Argue, Jeanne Carmen, Lash La Rue, Myron Healey, Richard Crane, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, poster art, cinema, television, movie review

Femmes Fatales

November 23 2020

MACHINE GUN JEANNE

This little baby doesn't fire bullets. It fires sequins. Ready to look fabulous?

B-movie queen Jeanne Carmen brandishes a prop machine gun in 1957 in this promo image made the film Guns Don’t Argue. Carmen looks handy with a gun, but her true weapon of choice was a golf club. She was a famous trick shot artist. She was also a master baster.

Guns Don't Argue, Jeanne Carmen

Intl. Notebook

March 23 2019

COMING IN HOT

Jeanne Carmen shows off her golf form. Her playing partners get fairway wood.

These items show Jeanne Carmen, model and b-movie actress, fronting The Reluctant Golf Pupil and Par Golf in 8 Steps, albums of golf instruction by Joe Novak punctuated with comic interjections from Reginald Owen. Though these seem like different albums, they’re the same, just issued a year apart. Inside both you get liner notes written (allegedly) by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, who were known to spend time on the links.

Carmen spent time on the fairways as well. She was nationally known as a trick-shot golfer, a skill she had picked up starting a decade earlier. She toured the U.S. pulling stunts such as using rubber shafted clubs and nailing drives off tees clenched between the teeth of supine (and terrified) male volunteers. So while these images appear often online, we’ve rarely seen it noted that Carmen was an appropriate choice for a cover star.

There’s more to her story, including chapters involving gangster Johnny Roselli, friendships with the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe, and hook-ups with Elvis Presley and (of course) Frank Sinatra. We may get back to her later. In the meantime, if you want to see a really nice swing check out Ana Berthe Lethe on the course here.

Jeanne Carmen, Reginald Owen, Joe Novak, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope

Intl. Notebook

March 22 2018

MONSTROUS BEHAVIOR

Clearly they have consent issues.

Monsters may be horrible but you can’t fault their taste. To borrow a line from one of their number, they’re automatically attracted to beautiful. It’s like a magnet. We wonder if it’s possible their need is an unconscious manifestation of the id of male Hollywood screenwriters. Or were the writers deliberately making commentaries about male power, nuclear paranoia, and environmental degradation? Well, those are questions for smarter people than us. We take monsters at face value. Maybe that’s not what we mean—some don’t even have proper faces. What we mean is we judge them as individuals. Most monsters are direct, like Pongo, above, trying to impress Maris Wrixon in the 1945 movie White Pongo, while some, on the other claw, are more circumspect. But the language barrier usually sabotages their delicate efforts. “I know an independently owned café that serves a killer macchiato,” comes out as a series of glottal grunts. “I loved La La Land too and I think the naysayers are mainly joyless jazz purists,” comes out as a sustained sodden hiss. Even if these vocalizations could give a true indication of the inner depths of a monster’s personality, women generally wouldn’t give them a shot anyway, because despite what they say, looks really do matter. What’s a monster to do?

This Island Earth, with Faith Domergue.

The Time Machine, with Yvette Mimieux.

Creature from the Black Lagoon, with Julie Adams.

The Alligator People, with Beverly Garland.

The Man from Planet X, with Margaret Field.

Robot Monster, with Claudia Barrett.

The Beach Girls and the Monster, with Sue Casey.

The Monster of Piedras Blancas, with Jeanne Carmen.

The Day of the Triffids, with Janette Scott.

It! the Terror from Beyond Space, with Shirley Patterson.

I Walked with a Zombie, with Christine Gordon.

From Hell It Came.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf, with Dawn Richard.

It Conquered the World, with Beverly Garland again crushing a monster’s hopes for love and fulfillment.

El retorno del Hombre Lobo, aka Night of the Werewolf.

Empire of the Ants, with Joan Collins.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space, with Gloria Talbott.

The Wolf Man, with Evelyn Ankers.

Maris Wrixon, Evelyn Ankers, Gloria Talbott, Joan Collins, Beverly Garland, Dawn Richard, Christine Gordon, Shirley Patterson, Janette Scott, Jeanne Carmen, Sue Casey, Claudia Barrett, Beverly Garland, Margaret Field, Yvette Mimieux, Julie Adams, Faith Domergue, cinema, sci-fi

Hollywoodland

July 16 2015

CONFIDENCE GAMES

Liberace experiences tabloid wrath at its most merciless.

It was in this July 1957 issue of Confidential that journalist “Horton Streete’ infamously outed cover star Liberace in the most vicious and dehumanizing way with an article entitled “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy’.” We’ve talked about it before. Streete willfully attempted to damage the singer’s career by spinning a shocking tale of how he attacked a young, male press agent. The article refers to Liberace as Fatso, Pudgy, Dimples, and other, less flattering monikers.

Here’s a rule you can count on—when a journalist or on-air personality constantly refers to someone by other than his or her name or title, it’s a hit piece. Liberace was horrified and sued Confidential. California Attorney General Pat Brown had already managed to win an indictment of the magazine two months earlier. Owner Robert Harrison was about to spend his entire summer in court. He took these legal threats to heart and publicly promised to stop publishing stories about the private lives of Hollywood stars.

Up until then Confidential had been as reckless as a magazine could be. This issue accuses Gary Crosby of punching a woman in the face, and Eartha Kitt of trapping her friend’s boyfriend in her penthouse. An extraordinary story about boxer Jake LaMotta suggests the he got a bum

rap in his morals trial. LaMotta was serving time for bedding a 14-year-old. Prosecutors had convinced a jury that the incident with LaMotta was a primary cause of the girl later becoming a prostitute. Confidential rides to the rescue, claiming that the girl’s father had already deflowered her, therefore LaMotta could not have had any influence on the girl’s fate. How’s that for a principled stand?

These early issues of Confidential are a cesspool of journalistic ethics, no doubt, but they’re also a visual treat. Using black, red, blue, and yellow, plus the white of the pages themselves, the designers put together a bold and gaudy package that would influence every other tabloid on the market. The layouts on Kitt, Liberace, Alan Dale, and Lex Barker are among the most eye-catching we’ve seen from the period. Elsewhere you get Anthony Quinn, and a host of other stars. We have a bunch of scans below. Remember, you can always see more from Confidential and other tabs by visiting our tabloid index at this link.

California, Confidential, Robert Harrison, Anthony Quinn, Liberace, Lex Barker, Gary Crosby, Jake LaMotta, Pat Brown, Alan Dale, Camille LaLonde, Jeanne Carmen, Broderick Crawford, Frances Langford, trial, tabloid

Intl. Notebook

December 8 2009

THE SWEDE HEREAFTER

The two guys Top Secret tried to portray as enemies actually kinda liked each other.

As usual, there is an array of interesting teasers on the cover of Top Secret. The squaw in question at left is Jeanne Carmen, who was a famous blonde pin-up, but who was naturally brunette, and had played the role of a Native American girl named Yellow Moon in the cheesy western War Drums. So that’s the source of the squaw reference. Whether Elvis actually stole her from Sinatra, we can’t say. It’s possible any woman in Hollywood would have to be stolen from Sinatra, the guy got around so much. And as if to prove the point, he would later have a fling with the cover star here, Sabrina, aka Norma Sykes. We talked about their tryst in this post from earlier this year.

Anyway, the bit that really caught our attention was not the alleged Elvis-Carmen-Sinatra triangle, but the story about Ingo Johansson being doped. Ingemar “Ingo” Johansson was a world champion boxer who had won the heavyweight crown from Floyd Patterson a year earlier. In the March 1960 rematch, Patterson put Johansson’s lights out with a blow so vicious that Johansson was left twitching on the canvas. It was a definitive victory, just as Johansson’s earlier win over Patterson had been, but in 1960 white-black boxing matches were overtly racially divisive, and so Top Secret took advantage by suggesting that perhaps Patterson’s camp managed to slip the Swede a mickey. That question was answered in the March 1961 third match between the two, when Patterson again knocked Johansson out.

After their careers were over, Johansson and Patterson became good friends and even flew to visit each other in their native countries every year. Top Secret could well have done a story on that, but of course harmony doesn’t sell magazines. So while in the U.S. civil rights strife raged through the rest of the sixties and into the seventies, two guys who once made a living beating the living shit out of each other quietly proved that, given a chance to see each other’s similarities rather than differences, people tend to get along just fine.

Sweden, Top Secret, Ingo Johansson, Elvis Presley, Jeanne Carmen, Frank Sinatra, Sabrina, Norma Sykes, tabloid

Femmes Fatales

September 14 2009

BASTING AWAY

I can't wait until everyone sees how plump and juicy these are.

Above is a fun promo photo of American actress Jeanne Carmen, circa late ’50s, that makes us hungry and probably is working the same magic on you. Carmen was an interesting personality who earned the moniker “The Queen of the B Movies” by appearing in such fare as Untamed Youth, Monster of the Piedras Blancas, and The Devil’s Hand, and was famous as a golf trick shot artist. We kid you not.

Untamed Youth, Monster of the Piedras Blancas, The Devil’s Hand, Jeanne Carmen

ABOUT

EMAIL

LEGAL

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 15

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

February 14

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.