Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

HIGHWAY ROBBERY

Life in the fast lane surely make you lose your mind.

This poster and the one at bottom were made for the Jules Dassin directed crime drama Thieves’ Highway, starring Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, and Valentina Cortese. It had a special premiere in Los Angeles in September 1949, and went into nationwide release today the same year. It was based on the unpublished novel The Red of My Blood by A. I. Bezzerides, who saw the book optioned by Twentieth Century Fox and was asked to instead make a screenplay of it. Bezzerides also wrote the screenplays for Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground, and They Drive by Night. The last of those was based on his (published this time) novel of the same name, a tale with a similar setting as Thieves’ Highway.

What is that setting? Thieves’ Highway explores the world of trucking and goods transport. In the story, Conte returns from working at sea to find that his father has lost his legs in a truck accident arranged by crooked San Francisco produce marketer Cobb in order to steal a payment. Conte decides that wrongs must be righted, and sets up an apple hauling deal meant to get him close to Cobb. He goes through hell to get that fruit to market, and once he arrives, well, balancing the cosmic scales in vintage dramas doesn’t usually work out as cleanly as its planners hope.

Conte is morally disadvantaged from the beginning. He has senses of honor and fair play, which don’t bode well for him in the cutthroat realm into which he’s descended. Because he’s an everyman, at its core Thieves’ Highway is more than a crime drama—it’s a broad but subtle capitalism critique. Its subtext suggests that hypercompetitiveness ultimately ends badly for everyone involved. When the rules are made by predators at the top, most people are simply consumed, while the closer others get to a seat at the banquet table the more of their humanity they lose.

Thieves’ Highway covers other themes too. Valentina Cortese embodies the fallen woman archetype. With her meager circumstances and Milanese accent, her character hints at the struggles of immigrants in new lands, and of impoverished women everywhere. She’s reduced to hustling men and doing paid favors for Cobb. In fact, it’s a favor for Cobb that brings her into contact with Conte. He’s just another mark to her at first, if one with a cute cleft chin, but when the two throw together she learns that life need not be lived transactionally. With its interesting similarities to Le salaire de la peur, On the Waterfront, and They Drive By Night, and anchored by a frankly brilliant Cortese, Thieves’ Highway is worth a careful watch and a post-screening think.

San Francisco, Twentieth Century Fox, Thieves' Highway, Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground, They Drive by Night, Le salaire de la peur, On the Waterfront, Richard Conte, Valentina Cortesa, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Lawrence, Jules Dassin, A. I. Bezzerides, poster art, cinema, movie review

KILLING YOU SOFTLY

Spillane's classic thriller brings death sealed with a kiss.

This is a beautiful paperback edition of Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly. We talked about the book way back in 2013. Shorter version: You really think we can tell you something that hasn’t already been written about this classic? Kiss Me, Deadly originally appeared in 1952. This version came in 1958 from London based Arthur Barker Limited, no. 42 in its Dragon series, with uncredited cover art. Barker is a pretty obscure publisher that launched in 1938 and was gone by 1969, so this paperback is rare, though less expensive than you’d suspect. Barker also produced a hardback of Kiss Me, Deadly in 1953 that likewise has interesting cover art and a surprisingly low price tag. We’ll show you that later.

Britain, Arthur Barker Limited, Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly, cover art, literature

RAILWAY TO HEAVEN

Los Angeles and the invention of Flight.

The above photos show the historic funicular railway Angels Flight, which opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1901 in the Bunker Hill area, with tracks running from Hill Street up a steep incline to Olive Street. There are only a few vintage funicular railways left in the U.S. Angels Flight—along with the impressive Monongahela Incline and the Duquesne Incline, both located in Pittsburgh—is among the most famous.

But it didn’t operate without interruption. It closed in 1969 when Bunker Hill was redeveloped—in reality a destruction of an entire historic working class neighborhood—and reopened a block south in 1996. The railway’s historical significance is architectural, but also cinematic. It appears in quite a few vintage films, most notably in Hollow Triumph, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Act of Violence, Criss Cross, M, and Kiss Me Deadly.

The area near Angels Flight is set for a new redevelopment, as adjacent Angels Knoll, one of the last pieces of greenery in downtown Los Angeles, is to be bulldozed for another of the supposedly-mixed-use-but-really-millionaires-only skyscraper complexes that are popping up all over the world as a way for one percenters to park their money.

Angels Flight will survive this new construction, at least for now, though it will be dwarfed by a forty story glass highrise mere feet to its south. Well, L.A. has rarely let the environment or historical significance stand in the way of making money, and when you look at it that way, the fact that Angels Flight survives at all to this day may be proof of a higher power.

Los Angeles, Angels Flight, Hollow Triumph, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Act of Violence, Criss Cross, Kiss Me Deadly

IF YOU WERE A HAMMER

You'd Hammer in the stomach, you'd Hammer in the jaw, you'd Hammer all over the body.

Does anyone not know what’s in the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly? We imagine almost everyone does, but we won’t tell. We’ll give you two hints, though: it isn’t the same thing that’s in the case in the novel; and the change the filmmakers made places the film on a progression along the line of such what’s-in-the-case thrillers as Pulp Fiction (where you never see) and Ronin (where you never find out). Ralph Meeker stars as Mickey Spillane’s harder than hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, and Maxine Cooper plays his his assistant/friend-with-benefits (she was only his assistant in the novel) Velda Wickman.

Plotwise the first couple of reels follow the novel pretty closely, with Hammer almost running over a woman on the Pacific Coast Highway, letting her into his car, and quickly finding she’s being pursued by villains of the worst kind. She and Hammer are captured, the woman is tortured, then the two are placed unconscious back in Hammer’s prized Jaguar and pushed over a cliff. But the murder attempt only snuffs one of them—Hammer is left alive to seek answers and vengeance. With the help of his slinky sidekick he sets about turning the town upside down.

We wanted to watch Kiss Me Deadly again after reading the novel for the first time several years ago, but didn’t get back to it until spurred to do so by Noir City, which is showing the film tonight on a double bill with Killer’s Kiss. It’s a pretty streamlined adaptation in parts, courtesy of A. I. Bezzerides. Spillane hated the movie, and we imagine he was particularly critical of some of the choices Bezzerides made. But the production is helmed by Robert Aldrich, who shows general flair along with impressive creativity in getting shots that were fresh for the time.

Best exchange of dialogue in this one:

“According to our information he calls himself a private investigator.”

“His specialty is divorce cases.”

“He’s a bedroom dick.”

Yeah, we’re juvenile. Kiss Me Deadly is aimless in the beginning, and is marred by a silly Greek stereotype used for discordant comic relief, but picks up greatly in the second half and hurtles toward an explosive conclusion. The final product would have been merely decent had the movie stayed on the same course as the book, but Bezzerides wrenched the second half into a hard left turn, and his final commentary—an inspired change—saves the movie, in our opinion. It’s preposterous, what Bezzerides does, but it works. So in the end Kiss Me Deadly earns its place on the list of twenty or so best entries in the film noir genre.

Kiss Me Deadly, Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Gaby Rodgers, Mickey Spillane, Robert Aldrich, A. I. Bezzerides, poster art, cinema, film noir, movie review

BEAST IN HUMAN SKIN

Mike Hammer lets his inner predator come out.

Mickey Spillane’s iconic private dick Mike Hammer is a lethal weapon and he wants everyone to know it. He constantly tells others and the reader how tough he is, how willing he is to kill, how afraid others are of him, and why they’re right to be afraid. At some point that changed in crime novels and these days the toughest characters almost never boast about their abilities, or it’s done in a leftfield way, such as in Lee Child’s novels, in which Jack Reacher sometimes explains clinically how he’s going to get the better of somebody. But Hammer just comes out with it: “I’m mean, I’m tough, I’m better than you, I have a code you can’t possibly understand, and I’m going to kill you and everyone who tries to help you.”

This is never more true than in 1952’s Kiss Me, Deadly, which revolves around Hammer accidentally becoming the patsy in a murder plot and seeking revenge, not only for the murdered woman (who’s Swedish and has the awesome name Berga Torn), but also because anyone who would dare try to put him on the spot, and anyone who would wreck his custom built car, simply deserves to die. Spillane is great. This is still genre fiction, so it’s never perfect, but the writing is visceral and the tightness of the plotting is unbeatable. When Hammer gets violent it’s serious business. He rips a guys eyes out. He rips another guy’s jaw loose. The man is a hammer alright, only his first name should be Jack.

Film buffs should note that Kiss Me, Deadly diverges significantly from the 1955 film version. There’s no suitcase of— Well, if you haven’t seen the movie we won’t tell you what there’s no suitcase of, but those who’ve seen it will know what we were going to say. Here the MacGuffin is drugs with a street value of two million dollars. Kiss Me, Deadly is fast, clever, unexpected, and quite a pleasure to read. It’s basically preposterous, of course, the male antipode to the romance novel, with Hammer fulfilling male desires to be tough, unbeatable, irresistible, but still basically a good guy. We don’t care if it’s male wish fulfillment. It’s a ton of fun.

New York City, Kiss Me Deadly, Mickey Spillane, James Meese, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1949—First Emmy Awards Are Presented

At the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles, California, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents the first Emmy Awards. The name Emmy was chosen as a feminization of “immy”, a nickname used for the image orthicon tubes that were common in early television cameras.

1971—Manson Family Found Guilty

Charles Manson and three female members of his “family” are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which Manson orchestrated in hopes of bringing about Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise between blacks and whites.

1961—Plane Carrying Nuclear Bombs Crashes

A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.

1912—International Opium Convention Signed

The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.

1946—CIA Forerunner Created

U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.

1957—George Metesky Is Arrested

The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.

  • FEATUREd PULP

KISS AND TELL STORIES

We can't really say, but there are probably thousands of kisses on mid-century paperback covers. Here's a small collection of some good ones.

INCLEMENT WEATHER

Two Spanish covers from Ediciones G.P. for Peter Cheyney's Huracan en las Bahamas, better known as Dark Bahama.

DON GIOVANNI

Giovanni Benvenuti was one of Italy's most prolific paperback cover artists. His unique style is on display in multiple collections within our website.

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