| Vintage Pulp | Aug 18 2021 |
What she thinks is written all over her face.
Above is an uncredited 1951 cover for The Agony Column by Earl Derr Biggers, a book we read a couple of years ago solely because of its strange title. It was originally published in 1916, turned out to be a sort of romance rather than the thriller we expected, and taught us that big city newspaper sections where people wrote anonymously to other readers were called “agony columns.” Example: “Dear Pulp Intl. girlfriends. Don't you know I'd treat you better than those two glib losers? I'm funnier than those guys too. Anonymous admirer.” To which we'd reply, for example, you'd better stay anonymous, or we'll teach what agony really is. You can read what we wrote about the book here.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 18 2021 |
Sometimes just staying afloat takes everything you've got.
Every once in a while Nikkatsu Studios surprises us with a restrained and serious movie, and Jûhassai umi e, for which you see a poster above, falls into that category. In English it was called Eighteen Years to the Sea, and the long and winding plot starts when top science student Aiko Morishita sees fellow student Kaoru Kobayashi win a game of death against the leader of a motorcycle gang. The game is to see who can wade into the ocean farthest weighed down by rocks and not drown. Aiko gets all hot and crazy watching this macho contest, and later tries the same game with her friend Toshiyuki Nagashima. They only look like they're trying to commit suicide.
The weirdness is just beginning. When a student at Aiko's school jumps to his death from a building, she's not horrified, but fascinated. Aiko and Toshiyuki decide to play another game of death, this time with pills, each taking one at a time, not planning to die, but risking overdoses in the pursuit of... we're not sure. Call it the search for some sort of nebulous existential revelation. In any case, they do overdose, but both survive. Those around Aiko come to understand that she has a screw loose. Meanwhile Kaoru, whose macho contest against the gang leader was the trigger for all that has happened, starts dating Aiko's sister.
We'll stop there with the plot description. Suffice it to say that, via the circuitous route director Toshiya Fujita takes to reach his destination, viewers are reminded that life can be hard—apparently even for gorgeous young college students. We don't mean to be glib. It's just that for uncounted millennia someone from both our mother's and father's branches of the ancestral tree had to survive cold, predators, disease, injury, poverty, human malice, and more, generation after generation, just to have their genes culminate in our existence. We would never risk casting all that hard work and luck aside seeking a fleeting insight. But that's just us.
Fujita, on the other hand, clearly thought he had something deep to say. The running time alone tells you that—Nikkatsu movies were often just over an hour long, but this one unspools for almost double that length, clocking in at an hour and fifty minutes. That's a lot of ennui. A lot of ennui. But Jûhassai umi e is good. Maybe even very good. It premiered in Japan today in 1979.
JapanNikkatsuJûhassai umi eEighteen Years to the SeaToshiyuki NagashimaAiko MorishitaKaoru KobayashiYoshie ShimamuraToshiya Fujitaposter artcinemamovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 17 2021 |
Every day and overtime on Sundays.
Above: an Australian promo poster for The Flesh Is Weak, the 1957 John Derek/Milly Vitale vehicle we discussed earlier this month. Shorter version: Derek tricks Vitale into hauling her flesh out to the street to work at the oldest profession. There's no Australian release date for it, but it probably didn't play Down Under until 1958. Read more and see the amazing French promo here.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 16 2021 |
Turns out Barye Phillips and Dom Lupo lived at the same address, but at different times.
We've talked often about vintage paperback art being copied. We have another example today involving Dom Lupo and Barye Phillips. Hearing those two names you'd think it was Phillips, who was a stalwart of mid-century paperback illustration, who'd been copied by Lupo, talented but lesser known. Nope—it's the other way around. Above is Lupo's cover for 13 French Street, which was used by Gold Medal Books in 1951. You also see here Phillips' cover for Little Tramp (larger version here), which dates from 1957. Naughty Barry.But Lupo copied too, sort of. He seems to have used as his inspiration a promo photo of U.S. actress Rita Gam, below. Using photos as the basis for illustrations was pretty normal, as we've documented before, so Lupo was just doing what artists did. You can see he changed the angle a bit, so it's not a true copy so much as a template. There's an internet replication error we should note: a few places say the Gam photo is from her 1952 thriller The Thief. Which means, obviously, she could not have inspired Lupo unless she had a time machine. Since the poses are so similar, we assume the attribution to The Thief is simply wrong—though ironic, because in art, everyone is a little bit of a thief. Great work by all involved.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 16 2021 |
Don't mess with the man upstairs.
Stranger on the Third Floor is sometimes cited as a proto film noir, coming a year before the first official noir, 1941's The Maltese Falcon. In this day and age, any vintage crime film is called a film noir on crowdsourced websites like IMDB, so depending on where you look film noir isn't as pure a cycle as it used to be. But in this case the debate is fair. The film is about newspaper journalist John McGuire, who serves as a witness at a sensational murder trial, while his fiancée Margaret Tallichet frets about the impact of recognition on their lives. The two of them are planning to move out of their boarding houses and find a place together, but McGuire's building has lately been haunted by a mysterious stranger played by Hungarian actor Peter Lorre. Who is he? Why is he hanging around? Is he somehow connected to the murder?
Gene D. Phillips, in his book Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Film Noir, cites Stranger on the Third Floor as a film that “codified the visual conventions of film noir.” It has flashbacks, a brilliant nightmare sequence, a sense of growing dread, a false accusation (or possibly two), a narration (though not of the hard-boiled variety), and a usage of angles and shadows that is extravagant. Where it differs from film noir is in its general lack of cynicism and world weariness. In fact, it's the opposite. McGuire ponders whether doing his civic duty by testifying will have consequences, but at no point does he feel like a sucker for doing so. He believes in society and its basic functions. The Maltese Falcon, by contrast, offers civic duty as an option, but Sam Spade acts as he does because of his personal code. Duty is secondary, and ultimately, so is love.
Despite these differences between Stranger on the Third Floor and canonical film noir, casting the net wide enough to include this movie makes sense. It definitely gets its influences from the same places as film noir, particularly in German Expressionist cinema of the early 1900s. Interestingly, Lorre would feature prominently in The Maltese Falcon, as would Elisha Cook, Jr., who plays the defendant at the trial. So the connection between Stranger on the Third Floor and film noir is concrete on that level at least. All that said, does our opinion matter? Watch Stranger on the Third Floor and debate whether it's a film noir yourself. You'll see a visual masterwork regardless of which cinematic bin you stick it in. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1940.
HungaryStranger on the Third FloorPeter LorreJohn McGuireMargaret TallichetElisha Cook Jr.poster artcinemafilm noirmovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 15 2021 |
...and I had a shattering orgasm. Let's see, next up, the thirty-second time I committed the sin of lust. I was nineteen...
Above: The Sins of Allie-May by Albert L. Quandt, 1950, from Quarter Books. This company wasn't great at crediting artists, and this piece, predictably, is unattributed. Could be George Gross. Could be Howell Dodd. Could maybe even be Rudy Nappi. But officially, it's a mystery.
| Mondo Bizarro | Aug 14 2021 |
Tabloid crosses line between science and science fiction.
Our examples of the cheapie tabloid National Examiner all have art on their front pages, but when you have a scoop like this cow blockbuster, typography alone is more than adequate. Needless to say—but we'll do it anyway because in this millennium people believe in illuminati pedophile rings in pizza parlors—a cow never gave birth to a baby boy. Hope that wasn't disappointing to hear. The story, from this issue that hit newsstands today in 1967, claims that it happened in Russia when a woman named Natasha Kropotkin was critically ill and her fetus was transferred to a cow in order to save its life. The fetus, not the cow. Anyway, the achievement stands second only to the launch of Sputnik in Soviet scientific annals. Kropotkin is a Russian word meaning gullible, by the way. If the child had been real, though, he'd be in his fifties today, and we imagine him working in the field of animal husbandry, middle management level. Medically speaking, other than involuntarily mooing at times of stress and having a tremendous problem with gas, we picture him as normal in every way. He'd also be hung like a bull. Elsewhere inside Examiner are many more bizarre stories, and a couple of nice photos of Italian actress Maria Grazia Bucella. You can see plenty more mid-century tabloids in our comprehensive index located here.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 13 2021 |
Victor Mature gets intimate with mortality in film noir classic.
This poster for the classic crime drama Kiss of Death both catches the eye and captures the mood of what has come to be regarded as a better film noir. The plot deals with a career thief and inveterate tough guy played by Victor Mature who decides to turn narc for the cops and help them gather evidence against numerous criminals. Needless to say, the decision turns out to have more pitfalls than expected, as he ends up in the crosshairs of a psycho hitman.
We've never been Mature fans—it's those cheeseball sword and sandal epics he made later in his career—but he's awfully good in this, deftly capturing the essence of a man feeling his way through desperate circumstances. Richard Widmark is also excellent as the hitman. He has a ridiculous but sinister laugh he uses to good effect. And Coleen Gray plays the embodiment of redemption, a standard role in these flicks, but one she manages adroitly. We'll have to rethink our feelings about Mr. Mature. If you haven't seen him before, this is a good place to start. Kiss of Death premiered in the U.S. today in 1947.
Kiss of DeathVictor MatureRichard WidmarkColeen GrayKarl Maldenposter artcinemamovie reviewfilm noir
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 13 2021 |
Blaxploitation flick goes slapstick and the result is bold but bad.
This poster for the blaxploitation flick Darktown Strutters, aka Get Down and Boogie, was painted by top talent John Solie and is a high quality piece of art. The movie it promotes, conversely, is a low quality piece of art, one of those efforts any rational assessment concludes is an utter disaster, but which has advocates, among them Quentin Tarantino. The advocates are wrong. Tarantino—and it pains us to say this—is wrong.
This musical-alleged-comedy about a female motorcycle gang in L.A. battling the owner of a fried chicken franchise is about as entertaining as watching a circus clown punch himself repeatedly in the nose. If you watch it with your Vaudevillian cortex activated you might get a few bemused laughs. And if you dig into it with a pickaxe and mining helmet you might find commentary upon cultural appropriation, feminism, capitalism, and law enforcement.
But if you examine it from a technical point of view you'll simply cringe, even factoring in its highly limiting three-day shooting schedule. Since when does lofty intent stand in for basic execution? We missed that memo. But we do love the poster, and we like the promo image below. It shows Edna Richardson, Bettye Sweet, Shirley Washington and, front and center, Trina Parks, who thankfully had other opportunities to show her actual talent. Darktown Strutters premiered in the U.S. today in 1975.
Darktown StruttersGet Down and BoogieTrina ParksEdna RichardsonBettye SweetShirley WashingtonRoger E. MosleyJohn Solieposter artcinemablaxploitationmovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 12 2021 |
I know you had plans today, but I got bad news. Our ox done come up lame. So let's get the plow strapped on you and get to tilling that back forty.
We recently bought a stack of digest paperbacks. These books generally came in the early 1950s and were often sexually charged dramas with women as the main characters. Dirt Farm falls into that basic category, though the lead is male, a war vet named Bern Winter who takes a fieldhand job hoping to exorcise his personal demons with hard work.
Unfortunately, he's had the misfortune to walk right into a family out of Erskine Caldwell. There's the developmentally disabled man-child who's also a potentially dangerous physical brute. There's the amoral sex maniac who has lascivious designs on a sibling. There's the paragon of perfect femininity onto whom everyone attaches their hopes and dreams. There's the subservient domestic staffer bestowed with the wisdom of the ages. There's the emotionally crippled accident victim who wanders around in a daze playing a fiddle. And there are secrets. Secrets galore that bespeak the decadence of the South and its moneyed class.
The straight shooting manly-man protagonist could ignore all this lunacy or disrupt it, and of course he dives in head first. These digest books are usually pretty good. Far better than you'd suspect if you haven't read any. But Dirt Farm feels like a rushed attempt to take advantage of the burgeoning southern noir sub-genre, and is shoddily constructed and ultimately pointless. Onward and upward.
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