Intl. Notebook

October 4 2018

PERFECT QUEMISTRY

The women they talked about then.

It took us a while but we finally find out where the covers of O Seculo Ilustrado we’ve been sharing came from. They originate at a Wordpress blog called Ilustração Portugueza. It hasn’t been active since January 2017, so it looks like we missed our chance to send them some traffic, but at least the images remain up for now. The above cover hit newsstands today in 1947 and features a triptych of Vera Zorina, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Lucille Ball labeled as “Tres mulheres de quem se fala,” which means “Three women we’re talking about.” They were so good we’re still talking about a couple of them. If you want to see the other covers we posted just click the magazine’s keywords below.

Portugal, O Seculo Ilustrado, Vera Zorina, Yvonne DeCarlo, Lucille Ball

Vintage Pulp

January 23 2016

TIGHT SPOT

No place to run, no place to hide.

Today the Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco will be screening The Dark Corner, a movie that starts fast and keeps up a breakneck pace throughout, telling the story of small-time detective who is tormented and eventually framed by an unknown enemy. The script, which is credited to five writers, is filled with entertaining jargon, and treats viewers to one of the better quotes from the film noir canon when Mark Stevens references the title with, “I feel all dead inside. I’m backed up in a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me.”

Lucille Ball, top-billed, is pitch perfect as Stevens’ secretary, love interest, and driving force, and William Bendix, who made a career out of tough-and-volatile, nails his role even more solidly than usual here. You also get good work from Clifton Webb and femme fatale Cathy Downs. Atypically violent, and brilliantly wrapped in shadows and cut by black silhouettes by director Henry Hathaway and director of photography Joseph MacDonald, The Dark Corner is what watching film noir is all about. Favorite line: after a character is pushed thirty-one floors to his death a witness on the street gestures at a high window and remarks to a policeman, “Brother, he came out of there like a hot rivet. You know it’s a funny thing, I never yet seen one of those guys bounce.” A must-see.

The Dark Corner, Henry Hathaway, Lucille Ball, Mark Stevens, William Bendix, Cathy Downs, Clifton Webb, Joseph MacDonald, film noir, poster art, cinema, movie review

Femmes Fatales

December 31 2013

BALLIN’ LIKE A PRO

Hah hah—if you tell one more person they should have a New Year's Ball I'll kill you.

We read an old book recently and the word “ball” was actually in there as a sexual verb. So Lucille Ball, who you see at right, probably had to deal with some pretty crass jokes in her day. But in this 1934 shot in which she’s sharing a cheers with Billie Seward she hasn’t a care in the world. And why would she? Each New Year—then and now—brings new hopes. Champagne wishes, everyone.

Lucille Ball, Billie Seward, cinema

Hollywoodland

June 19 2013

CIRO HOUR

Everybody who was anybody was there.

This photo made today in 1954 shows American singer/actress Abbe Lane posing outside Ciro’s nightclub in West Hollywood, California. Lane had begun in show business as a child actress, but became world famous after she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and began fronting his group as a singer. Although this is a famous photo, one you can find elsewhere on the internet, we thought it was worth posting anyway, not just because of Lane, but because supper clubs like Ciro’s really don’t exist anymore. Ciro’s, which by the way was unrelated to the many famous Ciro’s that existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, from its opening in 1940 to its closing in 1957 was a favorite spot of screen personalities, singers, producers, and writers, a place where the night’s meet-ups and trysts were reported in the next day’s gossip columns. Below you see Lane and Cugat, Charlie Chaplin with Paulette Goddard, Lane onstage fronting Cugat’s rumba band, Cary Grant with Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball with Desi Arnaz, Jr., and others.

California, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Abbe Lane, Xavier Cugat, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Cary Grant, Betsy Drake, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz Jr., James Dean, Ursula Andress, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, cinema

Hollywoodland

March 6 2012

HAIRY SITUATION

Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do.

Here’s a rare promo shot from the 1933 pre-Hays Code musical Roman Scandals, an interesting film about a guy from West Rome, Oklahoma who has a vivid dream that he lives in ancient Rome. If you can deal with the sight of Eddie Cantor cavorting in blackface, it’s probably worth a rental. The movie was produced by the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and starred Sam Goldwyn’s dance troupe the Goldwyn Girls, whose most famous ex-member is Lucille Ball. And in fact, that’s Lucille Ball above, on the right, though it may be hard to believe. Trust us, though. The Hays Code, by the way, was actually enacted in 1930 but ignored until 1934, which is why cinema historians consider Roman Scandals to be a pre-Code production. The Code was finally ditched in 1968, but unfortunately in favor of the almost equally arbitrary MPAA rating system. Below, just for the fun of it, we’ve posted the back of the photo because with its writing and tape marks it strikes us as a pretty nice piece of abstract art. And at bottom we’ve posted a much clearer shot of Miss Ball.

Rome, Samuel Goldwyn Company, Hays Code, Roman Scandals, Goldwyn Girls, Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Samuel Goldwyn, cinema

Vintage Pulp

August 3 2011

FULL THROTTLE

When she’s angry she’s a real pain in the neck.

Above, a great cover from Chaz Rubino for Official Detective Stories, August 1936. We’d tell you more about Rubino, but this is the only piece we’ve seen by him, and there’s no info on the internet at all. As for the magazine, Official Detective Stories ran for several decades beginning in the 1930s, and during the 1950s Desilu Productions—i.e. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball—even used the magazine as the basis for a television series, but the show didn’t catch on and ran for a mere forty episodes. The magazine lasted longer—into the 1990s. Visit our entire true crime magazine collection here.

Official Detective Stories, Desilu Productions, Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Chaz Rubino, magazine art, true crime magazine

Vintage Pulp

May 27 2011

BEATING UP THE BEARD

The communist that couldn’t shoot straight.

Sexual slander is a time-honored propaganda technique, and today we have two examples, both aimed at Fidel Castro. Confidential, at top, suggests that Castro raped a teenaged girl, while Whisper goes a slightly different route and tells readers he’s afraid of women. Both offer up a version of Castro as less than a man, and during that time of communist hysteria it would have been quite pleasing for people to believe. The really clever element of fabrications like these is that if anyone had called bullshit on the writers it would have been seen as a de facto defense of Castro politically, and thus called into question their patriotism. We would suggest that the same dynamic holds true today.

But just how influential were these magazines? By 1957 Confidential was the biggest selling newsstand publication of any type in the U.S. Its circulation had reached 4 million per issue, but Confidential editors claimed—and there is reason to believe they were right—that every purchased issue of the magazine was actually read by an additional ten people. Confidential’s circulation had declined somewhat by 1960, but it was still a powerhouse, and Whisper wasn’t doing terribly either (though it’s circulation too had been declining for a few years). These two issues, from May 1960 and May 1962, span a period when Castromania had reached a fever pitch—at least until the Cuban Missile Crisis came along. We have other tabloid covers with amusing Castro stories here and here, and we’ll compile an aggregate post of others a little later.

Cuba, Confidential, Whisper, Fidel Castro, Warren Beatty, Hildegarde Knef, Adam Clayton Powell, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, tabloid

Vintage Pulp

May 26 2011

CLOUD ON THE HORIZON

From out of a clear blue sky.

Above is an unusual war-themed cover of The National Police Gazette from May 1953. In addition to stoking up a little Soviet fear with an A-bomb photo illustration, editors play the Hitler card, telling us at upper right that Der Führer is still alive. They made this claim scores of times after the end of World War II, and it never seemed to get old (we documented that phenomenon here). And since the U.S. was embroiled in a proxy war against China in Korea when this issue appeared, that conflict gets a mention too, in the banner at the bottom of the cover. All in all it’s three enemies for the price of one—and a small insight into the nuclear fears that shaped the post-war generation. Do you ever wonder what fears shape us that they’ll study in the future? We could take a guess, but then we might get real scared, so let’s not think about it.

Korea, China, Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, Police Gazette, World War II, Adolf Hitler, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, nazis, nukes, tabloid

ABOUT

EMAIL

LEGAL

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

April 19

1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail

American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West’s considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy.

April 19

1971—Manson Sentenced to Death

In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed.

April 18

1923—Yankee Stadium Opens

In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008.

April 17

1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched

A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.

April 16

1943—First LSD Trip Takes Place

Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, while working at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, accidentally absorbs lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and thus discovers its psychedelic properties. He had first synthesized the substance five years earlier but hadn’t been aware of its effects. He goes on to write scores of articles and books about his creation.