{pulp} – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

Philip Core and George Quaintance

A solidly gay day for secondhand books with the discovery of two relatively scarce items by gay artists. Philip Core is probably more well-known as a writer than a painter, author of The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste and the masterful Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth (both 1984 and both out of print, unfortunately). His paintings predominantly feature unclothed men but present these in a far more painterly style than one usually sees from gay artists, the approach too often being a kind of kitsch photo-realism that tends towards soft (or hard) porn. A shame that this volume is rather battered as it seems to be a rare book. Core died of AIDS in 1989 but his paintings are still being bought and sold, gay art being one genre that never lacks for an audience.

The Bermuda Triangle by Philip Core (1982).

Continue reading “Philip Core and George Quaintance”

Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!

No, not Pirates of the Caribbean III although that film will be with us soon and is certain to contain at least one of the above ingredients. The dubious delights of exploitation cinema have been put back on the map recently by Grindhouse, the double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but garish melodrama is nothing new in the film world. Silent films had more than their share of sex, violence, monsters and maniacs, and many featured a degree of nudity that wouldn’t be seen again until the late Sixties, thanks to the Hays Code. “Everything in life is exploitation,” Barbara Stanwyck was told in Baby Face (1933) and she went on to prove it by sleeping her way to the top in a film considered by moral guardians of the time to be so scurrilous that its uncensored print remained buried until 2005.

These wonderful hand-tinted plates from the George Eastman archive are lantern slides used to display information about coming attractions, and would have been screened between features as a kind of motionless trailer. The movie trailer as we know it today had been around since about 1910 but it wasn’t until the late Twenties that the regular production and screening of trailers took off. Lantern slides were a cheap way of keeping audiences attentive while the next feature was being prepared.

Cannibals of the South Seas was a 1912 documentary by Osa and Martin E. Johnson and it’s a good bet it was a lot more prosaic than this slide implies. The Isle of Lost Ships seems from the picture to be a sea-faring horror tale but turns out to be a 1923 adventure story based on a novel by one Crittenden Marriott and directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of the great horror and noir director, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People [1942], Out of the Past [1947], Night of the Demon [1957]). This first film is now as lost as the becalmed ships of its title but it was remade as an early talkie in 1929 and that film still exists somewhere. Film remakes are also nothing new. The tentacles and Sargasso setting made me suspect Mr Marriott had purloined an idea or two from William Hope Hodgson, writer of a series of excellent horror stories concerning the Sargasso Sea and (in his fiction) its population of tentacled abominations; Dennis Wheatley certainly stole from Hodgson, as I’ve mentioned before. But Marriott’s novel, The Isle of Dead Ships, and the films based upon it, prove to be less interesting than the slide promises. And so we learn a primary rule of exploitation cinema that was well-established even then: promise much but don’t always deliver.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Seamen in great distress eat one another
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

The Singing Citadel (1970).

Michael Moorcock’s Elric books are being prepared for republication by Del Rey in the US next year. I’ve assisted with some minor parts of this preparation, including sourcing pictures from Savoy’s edition of Monsieur Zenith the Albino. (Anthony Skene’s albino anti-hero is a precursor of Moorcock’s albino anti-hero.)

Discussion of the Elric books with Dave at Savoy prompted my excavation of this battered Mayflower paperback from the retired book boxes. This slim volume collected four fantasy stories: the title piece (possibly the first Elric story I read), Master of Chaos, The Greater Conqueror and To Rescue Tanelorn…. I’d forgotten about the garishly strange cover, one of many that Bob Haberfield produced for Moorcock’s books during the 1970s. Haberfield is one of a number of cover artists from that period who worked in the field for a few years before moving on or vanishing entirely. The swirling clouds derived from Tibetan Buddhist art identify this as one of his even without the credit on the back; later pictures were heavily indebted to Eastern religious art and while technically more controlled they lack this cover’s berserk intensity. Haberfield’s site has a small gallery of his splendid paintings, including a rare horror work, his wonderfully eerie cover for Dagon by HP Lovecraft.

Searching for more Haberfield covers turned up these two examples, both part of the SciFi Books Flickr pool, a cornucopia of pictures by vanished illustrators. Browsing that lot is like being back inside the In Book Exchange, Blackpool, circa 1977. The digitisation of the past continues apace at the Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers pool and the Pulp Fiction pool. Don’t go to these pages if you’re supposed to be doing something else, it’s easy to find yourself saying “just one more” an hour later.

And in other Moorcock-related news, Jay alerts me today to the existence of an archive of New Worlds covers, something I’d been hoping to see for a long time. New Worlds was one of the most important magazines of the 1960s, mutating under Moorcock’s editorship from a regular science fiction title to a hothouse of literary daring and experiment. As with so many things in that decade, the peak period was from about 1966–1970 when the magazine showcased outstanding work from Moorcock himself, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, M John Harrison, Norman Spinrad and a host of others. For a time it seemed that a despised genre might be turning away from rockets and robots to follow paths laid down by William Burroughs, Salvador Dalí, Jorge Luis Borges and other visionaries. We know now that Star Wars, Larry Niven and the rest swept away those hopes but you can at least go and see covers that pointed to a future (and futures) the world rejected.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world

Thomas Allen’s paperback art

Topple (2006).

Mate (2006).

American artist Thomas Allen constructs witty and clever dioramas using figures cut from the covers of old pulp paperbacks. Probably not the future James Avati and co. anticipated for their paintings but it certainly gives their art a new lease of life. Things have come full circle since Allen’s constructions have been used to decorate a series of James Ellroy reissues. Allen’s prints are currently on display at the Foley Gallery, New York, until March 3rd.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Raw Deal

John Ireland and Marsha Hunt in Raw Deal (1948).

Yes, there was another decade besides the ’70s when Hollywood made films with downbeat endings. The NYT manages to write about Raw Deal without mentioning its director, the great Anthony Mann. Never mind, at least they credited John Alton.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, Nights Are Noir in Fog City
By WENDELL JAMIESON
New York Times, January 29, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 28 — The orange and blue neon lights of the Castro Theater shone blurrily on the damp asphalt beneath the crisscrossing catenary wires of the streetcars. The words on the marquee in the Friday night gloom, read: “Marsha Hunt: In Person.”

Ms. Hunt made more than 50 movies before her career was wrecked in 1950 by the Hollywood blacklist. One of them, a 1948 crime melodrama called “Raw Deal,” has gone on to an unlikely second life as a favorite of the cultish devotees of film noir. On Friday it opened the fifth annual Noir City film festival here, and Ms. Hunt, 89, was on hand to watch its dreamlike silvery hues make a rare appearance on a big — very big — screen.

Lithe and glowing, Ms. Hunt took the stage after the film and said she was surprised not only that this dark little B movie had found fans nearly 60 years after its release, but that so many of them were here, nearly filling the Castro’s more than 1,400 seats. The crowd was a mix of young and old, polished and scruffy, with only a few fedoras in sight.

“I can’t get over this,” Ms. Hunt said as the film festival’s founder and organizer, Eddie Muller, genially interviewed her at the foot of the stage. “It was a strange sort of film,” she added, “about as negative as you can get. They hadn’t coined the term ‘noir’ yet.”

She’s right. It’s hard to imagine a darker film, literally or figuratively, than “Raw Deal.” Consisting almost entirely of luminescent day-for-night photography, it’s the story of an escaped con (played by Dennis O’Keefe) and the two women who love him (Ms. Hunt was one; Claire Trevor was the other), and features, among other pitch-black set pieces, a villain (Raymond Burr) who disfigures his girlfriend with a flaming dessert, and a furious midnight brawl in a seaside taxidermy shop. At the end everyone is either ruined, dead or under arrest.

And that darkness was just fine with the moviegoers here, which applauded vigorously as the closing titles rolled, just as they had at the beginning when the credit for the film’s director of photography, John Alton, the master of all that darkness, appeared on screen.

Mr. Muller, an author and film noir aficionado, dreamed up the film festival five years ago as a way to increase visibility for the Film Noir Foundation he runs, which works to restore the movies, and to promote his own books. (He most recently helped write Tab Hunter’s autobiography.) The Castro, built in 1922 and recently refurbished, had some dead time in January, and the festival (which runs this year through Feb. 4) was born — with a bang. The first double bill in 2003, “The Maltese Falcon” and “Dark Passage” — two seminal San Francisco noirs — sold out.

“It was huge right out of the gate,” he said. ”It totally threw me.” In the years since, he’s sold an average of 880 seats a night.

Of course subject matter and city are well matched. San Francisco has a noir pedigree rivaling that of New York or Los Angeles, its fog, slanting streets, circa-1940’s office buildings and dank narrow streets creating untold scores of blind alleys for characters unlucky enough to be trapped in them. Several noirs, including “Raw Deal,” have been set here.

On Friday the weather didn’t disappoint, with a steady rain falling much of the day. The sun made a half-hearted attempt to appear around noon, then gave up and went back to bed.

The Noir City festival may not be Sundance, but it too has its celebrities and scenes. Before “Raw Deal” on Friday the Castro’s balcony was crammed for a reception, with an open bar, a jazz band and Ms. Hunt signing copies of her book, “The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ’40s and Our World Since Then” (Fallbrook, 1993).

Among those on hand was Richard Erdman, 81, a character actor whose face is as recognizable — his credits include “Stalag 17” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” — as his name is unknown. He had a supporting role in “Cry Danger,” the first film on Saturday night’s double bill, and looked so familiar standing there at the reception that it was almost impossible not to run up to him and say, “Haven’t we met before?”

Like Ms. Hunt, Mr. Erdman seemed a little puzzled as to why exactly, so many years later, these movies are finding a new following. Asked for a theory, he thought for a moment and said: “I really have no idea. I’m not putting it down, I just don’t understand it.”

He heaped praise on Mr. Muller and his crew of volunteers for running a high-class operation. “They’re not chintzy,” he said, sipping a glass of white wine.

Film noir is enjoying something of a second golden age at the moment. In addition to the San Francisco festival, the Film Forum in New York City offered a major noir series last year, and studios like Warner Brothers and Fox have ratcheted up their noir reissues to such an extent that many films that never made it out on VHS are appearing on DVD. Just last week Warner Home Video released 1952’s “Angel Face,” starring Robert Mitchum, which had only been available on foreign or pirated VHS tapes. Mr. Muller provides the commentary track.

“With film noir, if you show it to a group of 20-year-olds, they’ll find something to get hooked on,” said George Feltenstein, Warner Home Video’s voluble senior vice president for marketing for its classic catalog. “There is a sexiness to it, there is a mystery took it. These are very seductive movies, they are not cookie-cutter.”

Warner Brothers has released three noir box sets. The first, which came out in 2004 and featured titles like “Out of the Past” and “The Asphalt Jungle,” hit No. 1 on Amazon.com’s DVD list. This year Warner’s fourth noir set will include 10 rather than 5 movies. Here’s a scoop for noir fans: Two will star Mr. Mitchum.

Whatever the machinations of the DVD business, here at the Noir City festival, everyone was in a pretty good mood by the time the second title of opening night, “Kid Glove Killer,” a super-rarity from 1942, rolled to its conclusion. This one had a happier ending, with Ms. Hunt getting a marriage proposal, delivered beneath a microscope, from a skinny and surprisingly big-haired Van Heflin.

Coats and fedoras went back on, and the crowd headed for the exits. Ms. Hunt stood by the door, shaking hands and signing autographs, as her new legions of fans emerged onto the shiny street and headed off into the night.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Film noir posters
• Early Kubrick
• Kiss Me Deadly