Intl. Notebook

June 19 2025

BURNING BRIGITTE

Enquirer tries to turn a little smoke into a lot of fire.

National Enquirer gets way up in French star Brigitte Bardot’s business in this issue published today in 1960, with its claim that the “man in Bardot’s life” left his wife for her, but “she won’t even talk to him.” The editors are referring to Irish actor Stephen Boyd, who you may know from the 1959 epic Ben Hur.

How did such a rumor get started? After Bardot had become an international sensation in 1956’s And God Created Woman she was allowed to choose her next leading man and fingered Boyd. Their steamy scenes in the resulting film, 1958’s Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, aka The Night Heaven Fell, stimulated tabloid musings.

Bardot and Boyd’s first encounter had been epic. According to Boyd, “When I arrived in Paris, Brigitte’s husband (Roger Vadim) picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to their apartment to meet my new leading lady. When we got there, he asked me to be patient a moment while he told his wife I had arrived. A few minutes later, Brigitte, wearing nothing but what nature had endowed her with, stormed into the room, threw her arms around me and told me how delighted she would be to work with me.”

As minor pranks go, that’s a fun one. Bardot naked for a stranger? Love it. Well, they weren’t strangers after that. By the end of Les bijoutiers du clair de lune they had become good friends. Boyd later said in an interview that Bardot asked him to marry her: “I don’t know if she was joking, but I said no. I did not explain that I couldn’t marry an actress who could never be faithful to me. Or at least try. Like I would at least try for the first year or two.”

With various stories circulating, the tabloids had all the fuel they needed to flog rumors of Bardot/Boyd sexual involvement. We don’t think Boyd really divorced his wife, theatrical agent Mariella di Sarzana, to be with Bardot. He had been with di Sarzana since summer 1958, while Bardot had divorced Roger Vadim in April 1957, and married Jacques Charrier in 1959. It’s easy to think in terms of free time between marriages, but in reality an affair could have happened at any point.

Ultimately the public will never know, and interest wanes year by year as a function of human mortality. Bardot, aged ninety, has outlived many of her formerly obsessed fans, while Boyd died way back in 1977 and isn’t well known today. But if you’re curious about him and Bardot, there’s an interesting and detailed blog about his life and career. It’s the type of site many vintage film stars probably deserve, but only a lucky few get. You can find it at this link.

Ireland, France, National Enquirer, Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, The Night Heaven Fell, Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd, Roger Vadim, Mariella di Sarzana, Jacques Charrier, tabloid

Vintage Pulp

September 23 2019

INNER SPACE

Come along and ride on a Fantastic Voyage.

There’s something about sci-fi movies from the late 1960s that makes them so pleasing to watch. The source material was innovative and ambitious thanks to a crop of fresh new sci-fi novelists, while cinematically, capabilities in special effects, a trend toward elaborate sets, and bold color thanks to improved film processing techniques resulted in more believable and engaging final products.

Fantastic Voyage, for which you see a beautiful Japanese poster above, benefits from all those elements. We queued it up and watched it straight through, impervious to distraction, marveling at the visionary look of it and its fun story of a team of doctors and scientists reduced to microscopic size and injected into a man’s circulatory system to find and remove a blood clot deep in his brain.

Thanks to its provenance as a novel by Isaac Asimov it’s just scientifically convincing enough—once you accept the idea of a shrink ray—to aid suspension of disbelief. A good popcorn muncher, this one, with a great cast that includes Raquel Welch, film noir legend Edmond O’Brien, and Donald Pleasence. Highly recommended. Fantastic Voyage opened in the U.S. in August 1966 and reached Japan today the same year.

Japan, Fantastic Voyage, Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence, Raquel Welch, Edmond O'Brien, Isaac Asimov, poster art, cinema, sci-fi, movie review

Vintage Pulp

October 21 2017

LOUT OF AFRICA

Singer elopes with girlfriend and everything falls apartheid.

We’d never heard of African Story, aka The Manipulator, before seeing this Italian promo poster painted by Renato Casaro. We were hoping for another semi-comical romp in the vein of Black Emmanuelle or The African Deal (i.e. lily white visitors are magically driven to get freaky in the bush with locals), but this film goes in a different direction. A famous singer named Rex Maynard runs away to South Africa with a powerful music producer’s daughter, prompting the producer to set up a fake kidnapping to scare the crooner and simultaneously generate publicity for his career. Somehow or other a group of actual kidnappers decide to put the bag on Rexie, and mayhem soon follows. Rex may be a soft jazz kind of singer, but he’s hard rock with his fists. He even uses judo to whip ass on several of his assailants. Luckily one of them packs a gun or they’d all have ended up in intensive care. Rex is also slippery as an eel, with his escapability aided by the kidnappers’ generally lax security.

We’d file this movie in the terrible-but-fun category, with Stephen Boyd, who played the rugged Messala in Bur Hur, here putting on his evil capitalist pants, beautiful Sylva Koscina playing the femme fatale, and Michael Kirner expending far more physical energy in the role of the pursued singer than you’d think possible for a guy with his body fat. African Story has virtually no Africans of the black variety in it, but then again this is the apartheid era we’re talking about. Blacks need not apply—particularly for speaking roles (except for those two fisherman guys who you’ll miss if you blink). In fact, you see very few blacks even in the backgrounds of shots. With sequences set in offices, hotels, nightclubs, pools, and at a *ahem* race track, their conspicuous absence reveals the reality of how all good things in South Africa were reserved for whites. And some bad things too, if you count the movie. African Story premiered today in 1971.

Italy, South Africa, African Story, The Manipulator, Renato Casaro, Stephen Boyd, Michael Kirner, Sylva Koscina, poster art, cinema, movie review

ABOUT

EMAIL

LEGAL

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
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