CHAMBERS’ DOOR

It's nice and warm inside.


This is obviously Marilyn Chambers fronting a poster for her x-rated extravaganza Behind the Green Door, which opened in the U.S. this month in 1972. We shared a Japanese poster for this a long while ago, as well as a another Japanese promo advertising this as a double bill with The Resurrection of Eve. Today we figured we might as well show you the original American promo too.

Why do we coming back to Chambers? Probably her connection to horror films via the David Cronenberg classic Rabid has something to do with it. Not many actors have straddled porn and maintream cinema. Chambers is top of the heap on that score. And she died young at age fifty-six, so that always brings about examinations of a star’s legacy. And finally, it’s always interesting to see what path porn stars take when they move on. Chambers’ path took her to Southern California, where she died in a mobile home in Santa Clarita, a long way from the bright lights of New York City where she first became a star.

We had never watched Behind the Green Door, but we remedied that a few days ago, and for those who don’t already know we can tell you the movie is a sexual awakening story, with Chambers the star of a live sex show about “the ravishment of a woman who has been abducted,a woman whose initial fear and anxiety has mellowed into curious expectation.” She appears in two vignettes of escalating explicitness, as masked onlookers observe à la Eyes Wide Shut. That’s the entire plot.

Chambers looks very good in this movie. We can imagine what it must have been like for cinemagoers to see a woman in this raunchy role who was fully beautiful enough to be a Hollywood star. The party lifestyle she lived began to make almost immediate physical changes, but for a moment, here in the summer of 1972, she was really a goddess. We have a nice image of her below as evidence of that assertion.

Femme Fatale Image

ABOUT

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1971—Mariner Orbits Mars

The NASA space probe Mariner 9 becomes the first spacecraft to orbit another planet successfully when it begins circling Mars. Among the images it transmits back to Earth are photos of Olympus Mons, a volcano three times taller than Mount Everest and so wide at its base that, due to curvature of the planet, its peak would be below the horizon to a person standing on its outer slope.

1912—Missing Explorer Robert Scott Found

British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”

1933—Nessie Spotted for First Time

Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster while walking back from church along the shore of the Loch near the town of Foyers. Only one photo came out, but of all the images of the monster, this one is considered the most authentic.

1969—My Lai Massacre Revealed

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred in Vietnam more than a year-and-a-half earlier but been covered up by military officials. That day, U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including women, the elderly, and infants. The event devastated America’s image internationally and galvanized the U.S. anti-war effort. For Hersh’s efforts he received a Pulitzer Prize.

1918—The Great War Ends

Germany signs an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside of Compiègne in France, ending The Great War, later to be called World War I. About ten million people died, and many millions more were wounded. The conflict officially stops at 11:00 a.m., and today the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is annually honored in some European nations with two minutes of silence.

1924—Dion O'Banion Gunned Down

Dion O’Banion, leader of Chicago’s North Side Gang is assassinated in his flower shop by members of rival Johnny Torrio’s gang, sparking the bloody five-year war between the North Side Gang and the Chicago Outfit that culminates in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

1940—Walt Disney Becomes Informer

Walt Disney begins serving as an informer for the Los Angeles office of the FBI, with instructions to report on Hollywood subversives. He eventually testifies before HUAC, where he fingers several people as Communist agitators. He also accuses the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front.

A collection of red paperback covers from Dutch publisher De Vrije Pers.
Uncredited art for Hans Lugar's Line-Up! for Scion American publishing.
Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.

VINTAGE ADVERTISING

Things you'd love to buy but can't anymore

Vintage Ad Image

Around the web