| Musiquarium | Oct 1 2012 |
The Japanese weren’t the only ones who produced amazing 45 sleeves for James Bond music. Above you see art for Shirley Bassey’s Bond theme “Goldfinger,” released by Columbia Records and EMI in Italy in 1965, with Sean Connery and gold plated Shirley Eaton caught during a moment between takes on the set. In Italy the movie was called Agente 007, Missione Goldfinger, which is why the title on the reverse differs from the front. Check out those Japanese Bond sleeves here.
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 20 2012 |
Above are two Japanese door length posters for 1971’s Les pétroleuses, aka Frenchie King, which starred French sex symbol Brigitte Bardot and Italian counterpart Claudia Cardinale in what was considered a dream paring. Bardot had said that Cardinale was the one actress in the world that was destined to replace her. She even made a quip of it, saying, “After B.B. comes C.C., no?” Both were well established by the time they appeared in Les pétroleuses, both thirty something, both looking good. Many of the reviews we read said that Cardinale was not the same class of beauty as Bardot. Gotta say, we think those people are blind. Cardinale has an earthy, smoldering thing going on that works particularly well in this sweaty, shot-in-Spain production. She and Bardot play rivals in the old west, with B.B. as the leader of a gang of nomadic girl bandits, and C.C. as a townie with a quartet of virile brothers. Bardot ends up gaining ownership of a local ranch, but Cardinale learns that there’s a fortune in oil under the land. Scheming, slapstick and shootouts ensue, as they ride a lot, glare a lot, Cardinale sings a terrible song, Bardot bares her opposite-of-terrible backside, and the two have a bodice ripping fistfight. But dream pairing or no, the movie received tepid reviews, and deservedly so. It’s intermittently funny but mostly clumsy. On the other hand, we could look at Cardinale all day, so that’s something.
| Intl. Notebook | Jun 22 2012 |
Ever notice how often pulps and noirs are centered on circuses and carnivals? We noticed it too, which is why we put together a collection of circus posters from the U.S.A., Belgium, Holland, Britain, the Soviet Union, et.al., circa 1930s to 1960s. Which circus would we see? The dynamite tossing clowns just below are enticing, but Big Otto the blood-sweating hippopotamus is by far the star attraction of this group. Otto and more below, and check out a collection of magic posters here.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 8 2012 |
While we’re aware that web searches generate different results depending on the where and when, we were still a bit thrilled when we did a random search today on Italian poster artist Sandro Symeoni and came up as the number one result. That has to do with having featured his art in three different posts over the last couple of years. Today, we have another rare Symeoni, a piece of production art he painted for the Clint Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. It’s truly brilliant. We also located several more of Symeoni’s posters and uploaded those below. Symeoni died in 2007. There was a posthumous exhibition in Italy last year that raised his profile a bit, and we suspect collectors will focus on his work even more in the coming years. If you want to see a bit more on him, definitely do so at our previous posts here, here, and here.
| Femmes Fatales | Jun 1 2012 |
We featured Italian actress Virna Lisi as a femme fatale in September, but we’re bringing her back today because this shot really works for us, and she is, after all, Virna Lisi. If you’ve never seen her, we suggest you immediately watch How To Murder Your Wife. It’s about a playboy (Jack Lemmon) who goes on a drunken binge and wakes up married to a stranger (Lisi). He desperately (and inexplicably) wants to be rid of her, and so he concocts a murder plot. He has no intention of actually going through with it, but things get complicated. It’s a comedy, and it stays funny viewing after viewing. Rent it, watch it, love it.
| Vintage Pulp | May 9 2012 |
Party Selvaggio, aka The Wild Party, is an interesting attempt to capture the decadence and glamour of 1920s Hollywood. The screenplay is based on a Joseph Moncure March poem, which in turn is loosely based on the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921. In brief, Arbuckle was accused of sodomizing an actress named Virginia Rappe with a bottle, an act which led to her death due to a ruptured bladder. No such thing happened, but sensational news reports portrayed Arbuckle as a fat lecher who routinely used his bulk to overpower helpless women. These fairy tales proliferated to the extent that morality groups—which were about as restrained and reasonable back then as they are now—were calling for Arbuckle to be put to death. He was acquitted at trial, but his reputation, career, and life were destroyed.
In Party Selvaggio, the Arbuckle role is played by James Coco, who decides to throw a bash for major Hollywood players in hopes of revitalizing his ailing career. Unfortunately, the shindig goes horribly wrong. Coco earned some praise for his portrayal, but the star of the film is really Raquel Welch. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she’s the draw. The poster lists her second but places her image front and center, and she gets top billing in the official trailer. This was Welch stepping away from overtly sexual roles and being given a chance to act, which we mentioned was her driving ambition during the mid-point of her career. So how did she do? Well, despite the presence of legends-to-be Merchant-Ivory in the producer-director roles, this is a party you can miss. Welch gives her all in what is essentially a musical role, but the film never strikes the right chords. Don’t you just love this Italian poster, though? Party Selvaggio opened in Italy this month in 1975.
| Vintage Pulp | May 4 2012 |
This evocative poster is for the 1975 thriller Perversione, which was originally made in Spain as La encadenada, and for its U.S. release was retitled Diary of a Murderess, or Diary of an Erotic Murderess. Spoiler alert: there’s a murderess in this film. Marisa Mell is nurse to a rich widower’s mentally disturbed son, but she turns out to be a grifter intent on liberating some of the family knick-knacks. She's especially covetous of an antique chalice that resides in a safe. At some point, she finds a diary left behind by the widower’s dead wife, and in its pages the departed plots the murder of her husband, writing her plan in helpful step-by-step detail. Mell decides follow the diary’s instructions, all the better to get hold of that chalice.
But nothing is as it seems here. The chalice is actually the Holy Grail, Mell has actually failed to ditch her terrible husband, and a few other surprises pop up to keep viewers guessing. Director Manuel Mur Oti has crafted an atmospheric piece here, but we recommend it for giallo fans only, because it’s a bit slow off the starting line. Also, we suggest watching the original version, because we’ve heard that the American cut is several minutes short on nudity. It may not matter though, because the movie may be impossible to find. We located our copy online, but the links have since died. Not that we’re recommending any illegal downloading. Us? Never. Perversione premiered in Italy today in 1975. Below, just because we can, we’ve posted an image of Mell at her lovely best, and you can see another one of great interest here.
| Intl. Notebook | Mar 28 2012 |
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 12 2012 |
This book is brilliant, but it will be problematic for some readers because the villain Captain Muller—and he's a very, very bad guy—is gay. His sexuality is a metaphor. As a German officer his incredibly high opinion of himself has primarily to do with his control over and manipulation of men. While some artists use paint or words, he feels he's a Picasso or Titian using humans—the most difficult medium of all—to produce more concrete effects upon civilization than mere visual art does. And his ultimate expression of oneness with his medium is sexual congress with them. Clark's final postulation is that for many men of war, and particularly fascists, violence is a form of eroticism.
Other elements here are also metaphorical, even the island itself. Though the expats, among them an elderly British professor and a German baron, are of different ages and cultures, they become fast friends. Their island is not perfect. There is want and conflict. But without being indoctrinated into the ways of hate people generally help, or at least tolerate, each other. The island represents the possibility of smooth human coexistence. But Captain Muller's purpose is to exert control through violence and fear. He's immediately interested in and drawn to the four expats, and shrewdly understands that the group's relationship with two locals—a legless veteran of the North Africa front and a beautiful young mother—may be the key to achieving his goals.
While all this is going on an American spy arrives on the island and sets into motion a plot to steal diagrams of the submarine bases the Germans are building. The narrative focuses on the professor's and baron's efforts to remain uninvolved, but also follows how a promise
they've made to get the young mother and her child off the island draws them all, bit by terrible bit, into the war against their will. Transitioning from apathy to activism is a standard theme in literature and film, but Clark manages to navigate this course with rare skill. As it develops, The Dreamers generates squirm inducing intensity, almost akin to psychological horror.But the book's value is in more than just its bold narrative. As time goes by people's knowledge of history comes not from those who lived through it, but from interpreters of it. When conducted under rigorous standards, re-examinations of history are useful and even necessary, but many of this group are not rigorous, and have shady political motives. In the U.S. this manifests as fanciful spins on slavery, the Civil War, and other periods. Many American schoolchildren are now being taught that fascism is the exact opposite of what it was in reality. The Dreamers, written during the fascist era, is clear about what fascism is, how it works, what it seeks to accomplish, and what end of the political spectrum it comes from. Every novel we've read from this period is consistent on these points.
Thus in addition to being a very good book, The Dreamers is yet another reminder that: Mussolini was well liked for years in the U.S. because he was perceived to have saved Italy from communists. Regardless of whether Adolf Hitler had any religious beliefs in private life, the German people knew him as a Catholic, he constantly invoked God in his speeches, and the Holocaust was conceived, conducted, and abetted by people who were overwhelmingly religious. Fascism was vehemently sexist, racist, patriotic, and anti-liberal. Fascism distrusted diplomacy, independent knowledge, and a questioning press, replacing them with aggression, indoctrination, and propaganda. And like all governing systems, fascism was ultimately opportunistic, borrowing any political idea that helped consolidate power.
One benefit of maintaining Pulp Intl. is constantly reading books written contemporaneously with historical events and learning how they were perceived by people who lived through them. The Dreamers has extra value because of this. It's homophobic, though Clark's use of a gay villain is intended to coalesce into metaphor. His scathing attitude toward Germans, on the other hand, never does. It seems as if he hates them en masse. His protagonists often muse about German moral shortcomings. These condemnations of an entire people are an obvious case of turnabout is fair play, and one can hardly be surprised considering what the world was learning about Hitler's atrocities. The Dreamers remains an illuminating reading experience.
| Femmes Fatales | Feb 17 2012 |
Above, an eye-opening photo of German actress Solvi Stubing, one of the great sex symbols of Italian cinema. Her film career began in 1964, and included appearances in Nude per l'assassino, aka Strip Nude for Your Killer, Le deportate della sezione speciale SS, aka Deported Women of the SS Special Edition, and Le amazzoni, aka Battle of the Amazons (we wrote about that one here). This photo is from the French magazine Sexyrama, 1970.
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