Vintage Pulp

November 27 2024

MANCHE TRAP

You can't spell “demon” without Demongeot.

French filmmakers often gravitated toward English language crime novels for inspiration. Une manche et la belle, another thriller set in the fertile South of France, was based on British author James Hadley Chase’s 1954 thriller The Sucker Punch. Henri Vidal plays an ambitious young exec at Pacific Bank, for whom trouble starts when he aces his colleague out of a rich client. The client, played by Isa Miranda, takes a personal liking to Vidal. Isa’s secretary is Mylène Demongeot, and she takes a liking to Vidal too, in that flirtatious but elusive way she was good at bringing to the screen. Vidal marries Miranda and the two head off on a Venetian honeymoon, but rich people need staff, so the cherubically beautiful Demongeot is brought along for the ride. But three’s a crowd. Under the circumstances, wedded bliss develops a quick end date. A murderous one, if Demongeot has her way.

Can she entice Vidal into a reckless decision? Well, sure, who wouldn’t get reckless for her? Imagine if there were a murder trial. The judge: “Can’t show you any leniency without suffering professional ridicule and the loss of my cushy gig up here on the bench, but bro—I get it.” The entire world got it, which is why Demongeot became a popular cinematic sex symbol. You’ll frequently see the movie cited as one in which she was topless, but the bare frontage on display was that of a body double, which we determined thanks to the wonders of the pause button. Too bad—even playing purest evil Demongeot is special. She might be the original inspiration for the ubiquitous “Distracted Boyfriend” meme. Une manche et la belle, a pretty fun flick all things considered, premiered in France today in 1957.

France, Italy, Nice, Venice, Une manche et la belle, A Kiss for a Killer, Henri Vidal, Mylène Demongeot, Isa Miranda, James Hadley Chase, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

July 18 2024

BOYS WILL BE TOYED WITH

I want this to be good, you two. So take one more look over here to remind yourselves what you're fighting about.

Last time we read a novel by the globetrotting Ed Lacy, we said afterward we’d travel anywhere with him. In 1961’s The Freeloaders, for which you see a beautiful but uncredited cover above, he once again conducts readers to an exotic place—the Côte d’Azur, in the company of a small clan of Americans trying to survive without work visas in and around Nice.

Freelance writer Al Cane, the most recent addition to the group, has occasional gigs and makes enough money to live. Ex-boxer/ex-cop/ex-advertising man/constant enigma Charley Martins has savings that keep him in a nice seafront apartment. But painter Gil Fletcher and inveterate schemer Ed Jones struggle daily. The women within the group are diverse. Charley’s girlfriend Pascale is young, beautiful, and precocious; Gil’s partner Simone is opportunistic and fickle; Ed’s girlfriend Daniele is industrious and kind.

Eventually, Gil, desperate to stay in Nice and in need of money for he and Daniele, cooks up a foolproof robbery scheme. But to quote Mickey Rourke in Body Heat, “Any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you’re gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius.” Gil is no genius. The rest of the story deals with the aftermath of the crime on the Nice guys, the unraveling of the mystery of who the mysterious Charley really is, and Al’s growing lust toward Pascale.

As with other Lacy novels, the flavor is as important as the plot, and he dishes up the South of France (with sides of Italy) in satisfying fashion. There are always a few nits to pick with him. Any time you write a novel there are at least fifty ways to fuck up. Lacy is no genius, but he always entertains. That’s travail numéro un.

France, Italy, Nice, Cannes, Ventimiglia, Berkley Books, Ed Lacy, Leonard Zinberg, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 10 2023

THE ROAD TO LEVANT

If you let yourself be free what amazing things you'll see.

Nudism or naturism is yet another staple of mid-century publishing. Numerous magazines were devoted to the practice, and many novels we’ve read, such as Marriage Can Wait, Murder Doll, High Red for Dead, and of course, the immortal Nudist Camp, feature nudism. It’s also featured in some pretty fun movies, such as 1962’s Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. So when we saw this poster for Isle of Levant, one of the seminal nudism movies of the 1950s, we decided to have a look.

The film was made by Swiss director Werner Kunz and originally titled Lockender Süden. In its English language version it’s professorially narrated by E.V.H. Emmett. The story told is about a trio of young Danish women and their dog who take a road trip through Germany, Switzerland, and France to arrive in the Côte d’Azur and get naked on Île de Levant.

It’s largely a travelogue, but it’s also pretty interesting from purely historical and architectural perspectives. Aided by the familiar visual of a crawling line on a map, you see the sights as the trio passes through Hamburg, the Rhine Valley, Rottenberg, Zurich, the Rhône Valley, Avignon, Cannes, Nice, Saint-Tropez, and Le Lavandou, all before the era of modern mass tourism, in a classic Fiat 600 Multipla, with its rear engine and backward front doors.

As for the nudism, Kunz makes you wait for it. About forty minutes into the sixty-eight minute exercise the girls hit the island and their clothes hit the sand. At first, many people wear g-strings, but later there’s nothing. As is typical for such films, the nudists are the best-looking examples from far and wide. Activities range from volleyball to hiking to sketching to snorkeling to boating, but as this is a lifestyle film, there’s no sex nor hint of it.

Because nudism isn’t—and wasn’t then—considered sexual by its practitioners, there are a few brief shots of naked children. We live in a country where naked children on beaches are not a strange sight and we pay them little mind, but in terms of filmed reality, this is where things acquire a double layer. Selling films of naked children changes everything. Though these nudism flicks were ostensibly educational, and the nudists themselves agreed to appear as a way demonstrating the advantages of their lifestyle, a large percentage of the actual consumers of the movies—surely—got off on them. And for a small subset, thence, nude children.

In a sense, the nudists of the era, despite the purity of their beliefs, were exploited by filmmakers, who knew—again, surely—that the money that flowed in was from seekers of knowledge about nudism and seekers of boners over naked women and men. As for pedophiles, though they were a segment of society that were basically never thought about by the populace at large back then, we suspect the filmmakers were aware of them. In any case, nobody is unaware today, which is why those shots now stand out in neon.

But if you wear your shiny happy 1950s glasses, Isle of Levant is worth a gander. It’s a historical curiosity, and one that made us nostalgic for an era in which we never lived. Because they were uncredited, we’ll never know who the trio of roadtrippers were, but we had an overwhelming sense of time passed and innocence lost watching them. And we thought: To have made that journey with them from Denmark through the Rhine Valley to the idyllic Côte d’Azur would have been so very fun.

Intl. Notebook

July 22 2017

BARDOT IN A BOTHER

You're annoyed? I'm the one who's a human armchair.

This is a classic piece of tabloid art. Brigitte Bardot is pictured on this National Enquirer published today in 1962 reading what is supposed to be a tabloid paper and looking annoyed. The art suggests she thinks the press is lying about her, reporting fake news, as it were. And being the tabloid press, it probably was. Below you see the photo Enquirer cropped to get the cover. In it, Bardot sits on her younger sister Mijanou’s lap between takes on the set of the 1959 comedy Voulez-vous danser avec moi?, aka Come Dance with Me, in Nice, France. Sis looks just as bothered as Brigitte, but she was probably just bored, since she wasn’t appearing in the film. She did act in more than a dozen movies of her own, though.

France, Nice, Voulez-vous danser avec moi?, Come Dance with Me, National Enquirer, Brigitte Bardot, Mijanou Bardot, tabloid

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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.

July 8

1965—Biggs Escapes the Big House

Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.

July 7

1949—Dragnet Premiers

NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.

July 7

1973—Lake Dies Destitute

Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.

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