It took her quite a bit of time to get through the entire thing.
This promo image features French actress Etchika Choureau, née Jeaninne Verret, among whose films were 1957’s I colpevoli and 1958’s Darby’s Rangers. She eventually managed seventeen roles before retiring in 1966. At that point she had become tabloid fodder thanks to her affair with Morocco’s Prince Moulay Hassan, who later became King Hassan II. The two were unable to marry due to religious and cultural strictures, but remained lifelong friends. Choureau featured in a relatively small number of films, but she lived an unrelatively lengthy number of years, dying in 2022 at age ninety-two. We should all be so lucky. The above shot was first published in a 1957 issue of Esquire.
A change of culture is always good. It's also a reminder of how similar we all are.
We made it to Marrakech and back. As always we kept our eyes open for pulp style material, but came up empty. The place is kind of pulp in itself, though, even without paperbacks and magazines to collect. We did see one thing—above is a restyled Casablanca poster hung in a nightspot we visited at which we saw a wild Moroccan jazz performance, with scantily clad Senegalese tribal drummers and dancers added for spice. It was insanely raucous and outrageously good.
The poster reminded us of all the vintage movies set fully or partly in Morocco. We’re talking, aside from the aforementioned, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vincent Price’s The House of 1,000 Dolls, Morocco, Moon over Morocco, Outpost in Morocco, Road to Morocco, A Night in Casablanca,Our Man in Casablanca, Our Man in Marrakech, La môme vert de gris, Port Afrique, Tangier, The Woman from Tangier, Mission à Tanger, Billete para Tánger, (mid-century filmmakers really liked Tangier), Trapped in Tangiers, Casablanca nid d’espions, and many more.
These movies aren’t all good, and only a few were actually shot in Morocco, but they channel the unique vibe of the country just the same. Books we’ve talked about that pass through there include The Shocking Secret by Holly Roth, Seven Lies South by William P. McGivern, The Last Match by David Dodge, and—again—many more.
It was nice to return to Marrakech. Every once in a while you need to get away from Western culture. It’ll help you appreciate the amazing variety of people in the world, who, even so, are similar to you despite their different religions, dress, and interests. We feel refreshed and ready for the heat and fun of summer.
We’re taking a short intermission to revisit Marrakech. PI-1 is going this time, which after what happened previously is a miracle. When we say “what,” we mean it to be plural, because a lot of things happened, as it always does when we travel. There was the wizard who saved us when we were lost at 4 am in the impossible maze of Marrakech medina. There was the cinematically decadent all night party with gin tonics and showgirls. There was the theft of our cash by immigration officials. But it was the knife incident in particular that—what’s the word we want to use here?—annoyed PI-1. She doesn’t want what happened to the guy in the previous post to happen to us. We felt that Morocco was fine in terms of physical safety, actually, but you can’t help running into gangsters here and there. Random chance. So PI-1 is a bit scared of Morocco, but the chance to buy handmade furniture, accessories, and a rug or two for the new house seems to have conquered that fear. Back in five days or so. Below are a few shots from our last visit to the Red City.
She could tell them the secret but it would be a bad Korea move.
Holly Roth, who also wrote as P.J. Merrill and K.G. Ballard, originally published The Shocking Secret as The Content Assignment in 1954. This Dell edition came in 1955 with William Rose cover art. The story, set beginning in 1948, deals with John Terrant, a British reporter in Berlin whose American love Ellen Content is a CIA agent who disappears during a mission. Nearly two years later her name turns up in a newspaper story that says she’s a dancer in New York City. So Terrant crosses the pond to track her down but ends up in the middle of the Cold War, with bad commies and the whole nine.
Roth infuses her tale with an Englishman in New York fish-out-of-water quality, which is occasionally amusing and adds interest, but in the end the entire enterprise comes across lightweight—which is to say it lacks menace and the proper amount of intellectual heft needed for a book about the political/ideological clash of the era. And another issue, though an admittedly nit-picky one, is that the surprise of the title, which we mostly gave away in our subhead, isn’t all that shocking. Dell never should have renamed the book.
Moving on to Roth herself, she’s one of those writers whose life had an eerie parallel with her fiction. Her 1962 novel Too Many Doctors is about a woman who falls off a ship and loses her memory. In 1964 Roth disappeared from her husband’s yacht one stormy night off the coast of Morocco and was never seen again. Officially, her death was an accident. If we get ambitious maybe we’ll read Too Many Doctors. While we can’t recommend The Shocking Secret, we wouldn’t be surprised if several of her other books are better. Her reputation would seem to suggest it.
Thanks to the memorabilia market you can buy a new identity without breaking the law.
Okay, film buffs—can you identify the movie from which the above frame is taken? We’re betting a good percentage of you knew it even before you read the question. It’s Casablanca, and we’re sharing the image because it shows one of the prop passports used in the film. The most important of those passports belonged to Czech resistance figure Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Heinreid. Props of that type are big items for movie memorabilia collectors, and few collectibles are more popular than those from Casablanca.
Below you see the cover and some interior pages of one of the actual prop Lazslo passports made for the movie, complete with Heinreid’s photo and various official-looking visa stamps. There’s disagreement on the spelling of Laszlo’s name—the prop says Laslo, on AFI.com it’s Lazlo, and on IMDB it’s Laszlo. The movie was made before end credits were a thing, so you can’t find out there. A script would settle it. Maybe that’ll be auctioned next.
Anyway, this passport was auctioned a while back, and incredibly—or perhaps not—went for $12,500. You know our rule. Actually it’s two rules: Never pay more for something than a flight to Paris costs; and never pay a lot for anything that can be used to swat a fly. Of course, if you’ve seen the movie you know the dox of crucial importance are really the letters of transit everyone desperately wants. We’ve added one of Victor Laszlo’s feuilles de déplacement (which says Laszlo) at bottom. It was auctioned too, but the passport went for more.
This French poster for the British made film Port Afrique was painted in a style that made us certain it was the work of Constantin Belinsky. But nope—it’s signed by André Bertrand, and it’s a very nice piece. As the art indicates, the movie is a North African adventure, a vehicle for Italian rising star Pier Angeli, and it can be described with one word—exotic. The filmmakers turned the E dial up to 11, location shooting in Tangier to create a fictional city of Port Afrique that’s part Berber, part French, and part Spanish. Casablanca comparisons are inevitable, but solely in terms of exteriors Port Afrique is greatly superior. There’s simply nothing like the real thing. The movie is also shot in color, which adds to its appeal, even if it detracts a bit from its noirish ambitions.
As in Casablanca, much of the action in Port Afrique revolves around a bar, in this case Le Badinage, which seemingly can afford to have more performers than customers. The bar’s beautiful chanteuse—there’s always a beautiful chanteuse—is played by the elfish Angeli, who’s stuck in town without a passport and suffering under the attentions of the proprietor Nino. The threat in his overtures is unspoken but clear—no punani, no passport. Into this situation arrives a wounded American pilot with the unlikely name Rip Reardon, played by future b-movie stalwart Phil Carey. After his onscreen run he would find himself in soap opera purgatory as Asa Buchanan on One Life To Live, but here he gets his chance to help anchor a big drama. Shortly after Rip arrives his wife turns up dead. The cops call it a suicide, but Rip decides to take the investigation into his own hands, with all the usual twists and turns.
Port Afrique has a lot of problems. The script is clunky and improbable, the motivations of its characters murky, and the chemistry between its stars lukewarm. Carey ended up on soap operas for a reason, clearly on display here. He has little range, and none of the heft needed for his role. As for Angeli, she never became the superstar her advocates intended, and again, you can see why. She’s better than Carey for sure, yet she still lacks the fire her role needs. But here’s the thing—we think, for serious film buffs, the movie is worth watching anyway. It looks amazing, from the cinematography to the production design, and its goal of being a Technicolor noir is worth examination and discussion. But casual film fans may want to steer clear. After premiering in the U.S. in 1956 Port Afrique reached France today in 1957.
I know these regional airports lack the usual amenities, but a shuttle to the terminal sure would be nice.
We’ve mentioned before that we like to read books about places we’ve been, but we had no idea the 1960 thriller Seven Lies South was set in Spain and Morocco. We impulse-bought this 1962 Crest edition after seeing William P. McGivern’s name and taking in the striking Harry Bennett cover art featuring a woman, an aircraft, two bedouins, and their camels. McGivern wrote the excellent 1961 juvenile delinquent thriller Savage Streets, so that was all we needed to know. We found out in the first page that the setting, as the story opened, was Malaga, Spain, and went, “Oh, okay—even better.”
The book stars Mike Beecher, a former bomber pilot, now in his late thirties and doing a belated Lost Generation bit—idleness, parties, a rotating cast of acquaintances, and a lot of solitary reflection in a foreign land. His Sun Also Rises-style fatalism is a little tedious, in our view. After all, he was never wounded in the sex organs like Jake Barnes, and if one’s naughty bits function, there’s always reason to smile. In any case, one day he meets a beautiful young woman named Laura Meadows, who embodies his dissatisfaction:
She symbolized everything that was unobtainable, beyond his reach; the rosy and prosperous life of America, with the tides of success sweeping everyone on to fine, fat futures.
But not everyone, of course. Entire ethnicities were excluded from that sweeping tide of success. Things are unobtainable for Beecher, but only because he’s made a choice to reject them. What a luxury, to reject something, then bemoan what one “can’t” have, when many people really can’t have it. It’s not a flaw in the book, so much as a cultural blind spot—perhaps deliberately inserted by McGivern, who was generally insightful about such issues. You have to sort of smile at Beecher’s inability to appreciate being reasonably young, healthy, and knocking around the south of Spain drinking wine. Not everyone gets to do that. That’s exactly what we do, and we appreciate it every day.
Beecher is coerced into helping to steal a plane headed for Morocco, but the mission goes wildly sideways, which unexpectedly mutates the narrative into a desert survival adventure. In order to set up and progress through this section, McGivern has his characters sometimes undertake actions that don’t exactly resound with logic, but even so the book is good. McGivern can really write, even when it verges on the preposterous. He was more at home in the suburbs of Savage Streets, but he navigates the Spain and Morocco of Seven Lies South deftly enough. We have no hesitation about trying him again.
We’re back in the house today—Casablanca, that is. Several days ago, on the film’s Italian premiere date, we showed you some Italian posters, and today, on its U.S. premiere date, we’re taking a close look at possibly the most famous fictional bar in cinema history—Rick’s Café Americain. Casablanca is one of the greatest films ever made, and it’s fair to say Rick’s was a supporting character. Filmgoers of 1942 found themselves steeped in its otherworldly Moroccan atmosphere, as scenes were staged in its courtyard, dining room, gambling room, at its lively bar, and in Rick’s roomy upstairs office and personal living quarters. We’ve never confirmed this, but we suspect one third of the film occurs inside Rick’s Café. We have photos of every area we could find of this iconic and exotic “gin joint”—as Bogart cynically describes it—and we even turned up a blueprint.
You’d be tempted to think bars like Rick’s exist only in film, but you’d be wrong. We’ve been to places that have exotic architecture, excellent food and drink, lively musical entertainment, well dressed internationalclientele, and the aura of being in the middle of a spy caper. The decadent colonial bar Abaco, located in Palma de Mallorca, comes immediately to mind, as does the supper club Meson Pansa Verde in Antigua, Guatemala, where they have live jazz in a converted wine cellar and a friend of ours once famously pushed his date into the pool. We’ve been to Rick’s-like places in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Greek Islands, and, appropriately, Morocco, in both Fes and Marrakech (we’re not fans of the Rick’s that currently operates in Casablanca—same name, very diminished feel). But magical places do exist, which means even if Bogart’s beloved café was never real, having those types of nights is possible. We recommend making it your mission to seek them out.
The FBI stretches its jurisdiction all the way to Morocco in 1953 thriller.
Above, two beautiful Italian posters for F.B.I. divisione criminale, originally titled La môme vert de gris, but known in the U.S. as Poison Ivy. The film was based on a Peter Cheyney novel also named Poison Ivy, and starred Eddie Constantine as an American G-man in Morocco, and Dominique Wilms as a femme fatale known as—you guessed it—Poison Ivy. We talked about the movie at length in May, so if you’re curious have a look here.
Here you see two posters for the 1953 French crime drama La môme vert de gris, which was called Poison Ivy in the U.S. This was adapted from a 1937 novel by Peter Cheyney that featured his recurring character FBI agent Lemmy Caution, who onscreen is played by Eddie Constantine. When two million dollars worth of gold goes missing Constantine is sent to Casablanca to determine its disposition and identify all malefactors involved. He finds himself pitted against a criminal mastermind of sorts, and a hive of henchmen that occupy a nightclub, a yacht, and a hideout in Casablanca’s old quarter. Constantine deals with all comers by applying the time-honored advice: when in doubt, punch them out.
Film buffs the world over associate Casablanca with the Humphrey Bogart film of the same name, but the city you see here is different from the one made famous by Bogart and Co. ten years earlier. The Casablanca of this film is a maze of L.A.-style roads, white skyscrapers, and an industrial port the size of Long Beach. We checked population figures and learned it was already a major city of more than 500,000 people during the early 1940s, which means that Casablanca‘s village feel is really just a clever cinematic fantasy. Poison Ivy‘s Casablanca is real, and the many location shots mixed into the movie prove it.
That’s Dominique Wilms on the top poster, and she’s the reason we watched the movie. In this, her cinematic debut, she plays a femme fatale named Carlotta de la Rue, which of course indicates that she’s a woman from the street. If that isn’t enough to warn the men away, her friends call her Poison Ivy. Why? Because she burns. Hopefully that’s meant figuratively, and above the waist. A character bringing so much heat must of course perform a torch song, which she sings with detachment, while the lyrics—as they usually do—indicate deeper issues: “I wander with my sorrow, along with my memories, looking for my old joys, which I’ve seen fade and die.” See? She just wants to be loved, assuming a man isn’t thwarted by her acid tongue, that ironic right eyebrow, and the barbed wire encircling her heart.
The movie is certainly watchable, though it’s nothing special aside from its exotic setting. But you have to appreciate the French love for U.S. crime fiction. In fact, director Bernard Borderie got the band back together and cast Constantine, Wilms, and her prehensile eyebrow in the next Caution movie, 1954’s Les femmes s’en balancent. Constantine and Wilms also co-starred in 1957’s Le grand bluff, another Caution adaptation, but helmed by Patrice Dally. Constantine went on to make Caution the signature character of his career. Wilms, who at age ninety is still out there somewhere, had about a dozen more roles before leaving cinema behind, but we think she had “it,” and will definitely check out some of her other work.
After two months of evading police and federal authorities, Angela Davis is arrested in New York City by the FBI. She had been sought in connection with a kidnapping and murder because one of the guns used in the crime had been bought under her name. But after a trial a jury agreed that owning the weapon did not automatically make her complicit in the crimes.
1978—Sid Vicious Arrested for Murder
Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious is arrested on suspicion of murder after the body of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen is found in their room at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. Vicious and Spungen had a famously stormy relationship, but Vicious proclaims he is innocent. He is released on bail and dies of a heroin overdose before a trial takes place.
1979—Adams Publishes First Hitchhiker's Book
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first of five books in a series, is published by Douglas Adams. The novels follow on the heels of the tremendously successful British television series of the same name.
1976—China Coup Thwarted
The new head of the Chinese Communist Party, Hua Goufeng, snuffs out a coup led by Chairman Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and three other party members. They become known as the Gang of Four, and are tried, found guilty of treason, and receive death sentences that are later commuted to lengthy prison terms.
1987—Loch Ness Expedition Ends
A sonar exploration of Scotland’s Loch Ness, called Operation Deepscan, ends after a week without finding evidence that the legendary Loch Ness Monster exists. While the flotilla of boats had picked up three sonar contacts indicating something large in the waters, these are considered to be detections of salmon schools or possibly seals.
1971—London Bridge Goes Up
After being sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, London Bridge reopens in the resort town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
1975—Burton and Taylor Marry Again
British actor Richard Burton and American screen star Elizabeth Taylor secretly remarry sixteen months after their divorce, then jet away to a second honeymoon in Chobe Game Park in Botswana.
clientele, and the aura of being in the middle of a spy caper. The decadent colonial bar Abaco, 
