Vintage Pulp

June 21 2016

TAKING A PEEK

French musical comedy looks at the follies, foibles and failures of a terminally chaotic burlesque production.

This beautiful and rare Japanese poster was made to promote the French burlesque comedy Ah! Les belles bacchantes!, which was known in English by the titles Peek-a-Boo, The Beautiful Priestesses of Bacchus, and Femmes de Paris. We managed to locate a copy and basically you get a comedy about a cop who decides to look into reports of sexual dancing at a local cabaret. The movie stars Louis de Funès as the cop, Colette Brosset as an aspiring dancer, and Les Bluebell Girls du Lido. The image on the poster features one of those Bluebell Girls personifying La nuit, or the Night, and as impressive as she looks on paper, you should see her in the movie. Other dancers portray the Sun, the Moon, and so forth. We’d go so far as to say that sequence alone was worth the time spent watching Ah! Les belles bacchantes. But is it actually a good movie? Sure—if you like ventriloquists, leopards, pratfalls, brawls, and sputtering doubletakes. In other words, it’s very silly, and very likeable. It opened in France in 1954 and reached Japan today in 1955.

Japan, France, Femmes de Paris, The Beautiful Priestesses of Bacchus, Louis de Funès, Robert Dhéry, Colette Brosset, Raymond Bussières, Les Bluebell Girls du Lido, poster art, cinema, burlesque, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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.

July 9

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

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