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

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 16

1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56

New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.

July 15

1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey

American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

July 15

1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes

Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.

July 14

1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company’s paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs.

July 13

1933—Eugenics Becomes Official German Policy

Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage.

July 13

1955—Ruth Ellis Executed

Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.

July 13

1966—Richard Speck Rampage

Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night.

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