Vintage Pulp

November 29 2019

FATAL VISION

Murder is in the eye of the beholder.

Above are three beautiful posters for L’occhio che uccide, or “the eye that kills,” which premiered in Italy today in 1961. The movie was originally called Peeping Tom when released in Britain in 1960. The second and third posters are signed by Renato Casaro, while the top one is unsigned. But it resembles his work, so what the heck—let’s say he painted all three until someone corrects us. This movie was a career killer, a bizarre and confounding thriller that irreparably damaged the ambitions of director Michael Powell, but which today has ardent advocates. In the mood for a voyeur mass murderer who tries to turn his killings into art? See our write-up here, and check out a Japanese poster for the flick here.

Italy, Britain, L'occhio che uccide, Peeping Tom, Michael Powell, Renato Casaro, poster art, cinema

Sex Files

October 2 2016

JEEPERS, PEEPER

Sometimes you just can't help looking.

We dug into our pile of adult film posters and found this eye-catching promo for the film Peeping Tom. It starred Jerry Butler, Kimberly Carson, Nina Hartley, Shanna McCullough, and others. The poster star is Leslie Winston, who probably never looked better in a photo than she does here. We’re curious whether the promo was made to push a cinematic release of the film, but we doubt it. As far as what happens in the movie, it’s self-explanatory, no? Jerry Butler is a peeping tom. Not much in the way of subplots, though Carson plays his conscience, egging him on in his dubious pursuit of thrills as he spies on couples, ludicrously, from behind columns and potted ferns.

The film’s end card, aiming for a veneer of the scientific, informs viewers that, “At present there are 15 million peeping toms and 1,000 being created every day.” To which we say the U.S.’s rapidly growing Sex Offender Registry has a lot of catching up to do. Of course, since you can end up on it for flashing your boobs or urinating in public, maybe catching up is only a matter of time. Peeping Tom first appeared in 1986 and premiered—or became available for purchase on videocassette—in Japan today in 1988. We have more of these Japanese promos scattered around the site, most easily found by clicking the keyword “xxx” just below, and we’ve put together a collection of ten we’ll be uploading later this month.

Peeping Tom, Jerry Butler, Kimberly Carson, Nina Hartley, Shanna McCullough, Leslie Winston, poster art, cinema, xxx, movie review

Vintage Pulp

July 27 2016

NIGHT STALKER

Sometimes a devoted following is a bad thing.

Above, a Japanese poster for the British thriller Peeping Tom, which we talked about in detail here. The movie premiered in the UK in 1960, and opened in Japan as Chi wo sû kamerathis month in 1961.

Japan, Britain, Chi wo sû kamera, Peeping Tom, poster art, cinema

Vintage Pulp

January 31 2016

SNUFF’S ENUFF

1960 thriller combined voyeurism, repression, child abuse, and sexual crime long before the public was ready.

Hollywood lore is sprinkled with tales of maligned cinematic masterpieces. British director Michael Powell’s 1960 voyeuristic thriller Peeping Tom is one of them—a film so savagely reviewed that it irreparably damaged what had been an acclaimed directorial career. While Powell should not have suffered so brutal a fate, his film’s rebranding as a work of incandescent genius is also not fully deserved. In the end Peeping Tom is a perfectly decent piece of filmmaking, amazingly forward-looking but also flawed. It deals with a man-child obsessed with filming women at the moment the fear of death appears in their eyes, and our villain does this of course by murdering them, and he manages to kill, film, and keep his subjects in frame at all times by using a spear-like contraption attached to his camera tripod. As you can probably guess, his carefully balanced existence is upset by the arrival of a prospective love interest, and we know from the moment she appears that she’ll be in front of his lens at some point.

In the U.S., Peeping Tom came after Alfred Hitchcock’s similar Psycho, but it Britain it arrived first. Censorship was slipping in British cinema, but to get a sense of how prudish authorities still were, consider the fact that Hitchcock’s movie caused controversy not only for its shower

murder and for showing Janet Leigh in her bra and in bed with a man, but for being the first film to show a flushing toilet—an affront to bluenoses though the contents were merely a torn up note. Peeping Tom pushed the envelope farther and did it first, showing the killer Mark Lewis preying on sex workers and nude models, showing nudie reel star Pamela Green sprawled topless on a bed just before her murder, and drawing out the killings to agonizing length as Lewis coaxes the perfect expression of terror from his victims. Powell develops his killer to the extent that the audience must understand him as a human, and uses point-of-view to make the character’s films-within-the-film the equivalent of snuff movies.

The list of technical achievements goes on—Powell deftly manages to make Peeping Tom brutal without spilling a drop of blood, and his visual approach is engrossing. So why isn’t the movie a 10? Well, there are a few glaring script incongruities, some of the acting is below professional level, the killer seems careless for someone that has been at it for a while, and the idea of so obviously disturbed a man—stuttering, mumbling, visibly shying from any form of human contact—being able to attract

evan a woman as kind and credulous as Anna Massey just doesn’t ring true. There are men who are projects, and there are men who are lost causes—are we right, girls? That’s what the Pulp Intl. girlfriends say anyway. But Peeping Tom is a film every cinephile should see. The moral objections of contemporary critics seem quaint now—many hated being forced to experience the murders from the killer’s perspective, but the viewer’s loss of choice echoes the killer’s helplessness to control himself, and that may very well be Powell’s best trick.

The Noir City Film Festival ends tonight with a pairing of Peeping Tom with the Michelangelo Antonioni classic Blow-Up, which means here at Pulp Intl. we’ll close the book on the fest and move back into the more diverse subject matter that usually makes up our website. We wanted to use Noir City as an excuse to delve into the film noir catalog and we managed to watch sixteen of the

twenty-five films on the schedule—some for the second or third time—and write about twelve of them.

This all made for a quite enjoyable week, with much wine drunk and popcorn noshed (we have a Whirley popcorn maker we had sent over from the States that does a bang-up job), but it was also a bit of work. At this point we doubt we’ll go through all the considerable effort of screening next year’s Noir City slate, but you never know. Next January is a long, long way off—or at least, it should seem that way if you’re living life the way you should. We’ll marinate on it and see.

Britain, Peeping Tom, Psycho, Michael Powell, Carl Boehm, Karlheinz Böhm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Pamela Green, Alfred Hitchcock, poster art, cinema

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

January 14

1967—Summer of Love Begins

The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.

January 13

1968—Cash Performs at Folsom Prison

Johnny Cash performs live at Folsom State Prison in Folson, California, where he records a live album that includes a version of his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues.” Cash had always been interested in performing at a prison, but was unable to until personnel changes at his record company brought in people who were amenable to the idea. The Folsom album was Cash’s biggest commercial success for years, reaching number 1 on the country music charts.

January 13

2004—Harold Shipman Found Hanged

British serial killer Harold Shipman is found dead in his prison cell, after hanging himself with a bedsheet. Shipman, a former doctor who preyed on his patients, was one of the most prolific serial killers in history, with two-hundred and eighteen murders positively attributed to him, and another two-hundred of which he is suspected.

January 12

1960—Nevil Shute Dies

English novelist Nevil Shute, who wrote the books A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, dies in Melbourne, Australia at age sixty-one. Seven of his novels were adapted to film, but his most famous was the cautionary post-nuclear war classic On the Beach.

January 12

1967—First Cryonics Patient Frozen

Dr. James Bedford, a University of California psychology professor, becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation. Bedford had kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs and was untreatable. His body was maintained for years by his family before being moved to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona.