vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
The Big Heat is a fast, hard, and brutal film noir, one of the jewels of the cycle, and it came with a striking poster likewise considered classic today. Above you see an alternate poster, along with a black and white promo probably made as an ad mat for printing in newspapers. The movie premiered today in 1953.
Rod Taylor and Luciana Pauluzzi swap subordinate positions for 1967’s Chuka.
Edmund O’Brien goes for the time honored hair grab on Marla English for 1954’s Shield for Murder.
Marilyn Monroe swoons as Richard Widmark snarls for Don’t Bother To Knock, 1952.
Inger Stevens and Terry Ann Ross for Cry Terror, an adaptation of a novel we talked about a few years ago.
Kim Hunter soothes an overheated Marlon Brando in a promo for 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
George Raft menaces Marlene Dietrich in the 1941 comedy Manpower.
As promos go, these actually make sense. They show three unidentified models mesmerized by vampire Christopher Lee for 1970’s Taste the Blood of Dracula.
Glenn Ford is at it again, this time looming over Rita Hayworth for the 1946 classic Gilda.
Aldo Ray and Barbara Nichols for 1958’s The Naked and the Dead.
This one shows less domination and more protectiveness, as Humphrey Bogart prepares to defend Ida Lupino for High Sierra, 1941.
Humphrey once more. Here he’s with Lizabeth Scott for Dead Reckoning, 1947.
This shot shows Brazilian actress Fiorella Mari with an actor we can’t identify in a movie we also can’t identify.
Shelly Winters and Jack Palance climb the highest mountain together for I Died a Thousand Times, 1955.
As we said, we didn’t find as many examples of kneeling men, but we found this gem—Cappucine makes a seat of director Blake Edwards on the set of The Pink Panther in 1963. Does this count, though? While Edwards is subordinate, he isn’t kneeling and it really isn’t a legit promo.
And lastly, in a curious example, Hugo Haas seems to tell Cleo Moore to stay in a shot made for 1953’s One Girl’s Confession.
Above, three Italian posters for Il grande caldo, better known as The Big Heat. The top piece was painted by Ezio Tarantelli, and the middle one is by Anselmo Ballester, both of whom we featured a while back, here and here. We already talked about the film. If you haven’t watched it, try to make the time. It’s good.
We have a feeling this promo image of Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame made for their 1953 film noir The Big Heat never got published. Handout photos such as these were provided by studios—in this case Columbia Pictures—to the press for usage when writing about various movies, but what newspaper or magazine would have used this? It’s beyond provocative for back then, and in fact its bizarre, coercive feel would make the internet explode even today, were any two stars to pose in this way. Amazingly, promos for vintage thrillers often featured female stars sitting or kneeling within phallus range. In fact, we’ve seen enough to consider putting together a collection. We’ll give that some thought while you glance at another example we shared a while ago.
These photos of U.S. actress Gloria Grahame come from one of our favorite old movies, the film noir The Big Heat, in which she starred with Glenn Ford. How many good films was Grahame in? Plenty, including The Bad and the Beautiful, Crossfire, the amazing In a Lonely Place, Human Desire, The Glass Wall, and Odds Against Tomorrow. Outside the drama/noir genres, she was also in It’s a Wonderful Life, which is one of the most watched U.S. films of all time, and Oklahoma!. In The Big Heat she plays the prototypical film noir bad girl who wants to be good but has a hard time getting there. We won’t say more. Just check it out. The photo is from 1953.
When Swedes heard about The Big Heat, they said “Gud, tack själv,” because they were all freezing their asses off and thought the movie was a documentary about how to stay warm. But no, it was just top-notch film noir, which generated its own warmth, especially if you looked at Gloria Grahame. The movie was directed by film noir black belt Fritz Lang, and tough guy Lee Marvin had a great supporting role. Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes, Jocelyn Brando is related to Marlon—she was his older sister. She died in 2005 after a lengthy career acting mostly on the telly. The Big Heat opened today in Stockholm, 1953.
The first assembly of the League of Nations, the multi-governmental organization formed as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, is held in Geneva, Switzerland. The League begins to fall apart less than fifteen years later when Germany withdraws. By the onset of World War II it is clear that the League has failed completely.
Four members of the Herbert Clutter Family are murdered at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas by Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith. The events would be used by author Truman Capote for his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, which is considered a pioneering work of true crime writing. The book is later adapted into a film starring Robert Blake.
Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia, which features eight animated segments set to classical music, is first seen by the public in New York City at the Broadway Theatre. Though appreciated by critics, the movie fails to make a profit due to World War II cutting off European revenues. However it remains popular and is re-released several times, including in 1963 when, with the approval of Walt Disney himself, certain racially insulting scenes were removed. Today Fantasia is considered one of Disney’s greatest achievements and an essential experience for movie lovers.
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”
Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster while walking back from church along the shore of the Loch near the town of Foyers. Only one photo came out, but of all the images of the monster, this one is considered by believers to be the most authentic.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred in Vietnam more than a year-and-a-half earlier but been covered up by military officials. That day, U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including women, the elderly, and infants. The event devastated America’s image internationally and galvanized the U.S. anti-war movement. For Hersh’s efforts he received a Pulitzer Prize.
