This week we go to the movies with New Orleans Uncensored. It’s a tawdry bit of pulp cinema from William Castle who is better known for his horror movies. This flick isn’t horrible but it isn’t great either. The best thing about it is seeing the city in 1955.
Here’s the whole damn movie:
The Fall Guy theme continues. This time without Lee Majors or Rick Perry.
Could this vaguely Slavic looking gent be Rudy’s bag man?
It’s time for an encore performance of a 2016 post with a twist. This time we have a triptych of covers:
Blood Money is late period Hammett. The covers are a bit dogeared but that’s okay so was Dash in 1951.
Speaking of money, it’s our annual fundraiser. If you like this feature, please throw a few bucks our way.
The last word goes to Pete Townshend:
You’re not seeing double. The theme song for Town Without Pity was indeed the theme song for the last Saturday Odds & Sods. I did not, however, include a movie poster or book cover. Here they are:
Here’s the trailer for this underrated Kirk Douglas classic:
Finally, one more version of the theme song; this time an instrumental.
Nelson Algren was known for his gritty novels. A Walk On The Wild Side was set in and around a New Orleans bordello. It was turned into a movie with an all-star cast in 1962. The producers dropped the A from the title. I did not.
The last word goes to Lou Reed with a song that has nothing to do with either the book or movie. It’s also not PC in 2019 but it’s still a good song:
The guy on this cover looks like a regular guy circa 2019. Times have changed.
I wonder if the Hippie Doctor was at Woodstock? They needed help with the brown and flat blue acid, man. He looks tough enough to subsist on apples, gruel, and JCC sammiches, man.
The last word goes to CSNY, man:
Dr. A and I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood last weekend. We both loved it. I thought it was his best movie since Jackie Brown.
Anyway, Sharon Tate is a character in the movie and went to the cinema to watch her own movie, The Wrecking Crew. Here’s a side-by-side image of Donald Hamilton’s book and the poster for the Dean Martin movie.
It’s trailer time:
The Wrecking Crew became the nickname of a group of elite LA studio musicians. They were celebrated in a documentary of that title in 2015:
You’re not seeing double. This Salome is Oscar Wilde’s play with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. You know, the book that provided the book for the Strauss opera featured yesterday. The mind still reels.
My Wicked, Wicked Ways is technically not fiction as it’s a memoir. But like most memoirs, it takes substantial liberties with the truth, which makes it faction but not factional. It’s definitely pulpy.
I chose Flynn’s memoirs because I’ve been watching some of his classic movies lately, I saw Dodge City for the first time the other day. A major omission as it’s the town-taming movie that Blazing Saddles parodies along with Destry Rides Again.
I guess that covers it. Here are the book covers.
This week’s selection is inspired by Muellerpalooza:
To go along with the Happy Trails post, I searched for “western paperback covers” and stumbled into some early 20th Century dust jackets. Dane Coolidge was a California writer of genre fiction; mostly Westerns. His first two books featured covers by the great painter Maynard Dixon who got first billing in the post title because I’m very familiar with his work. The only Coolidge whose work I’m familiar with is Calvin and I’m not a fan.
Hidden Water was published in 1910 and The Texican in 1911. Sometimes it’s fun to fall down an internet rabbit hole.
Mad Magazine recently announced it was ceasing publication of new material. It was the first humor magazine I ever read. It was the home of snotty adolescent humor when I was a snotty adolescent. I loved it but eventually moved on. It was, however, reassuring that it was still around. Who among is won’t miss Alfred E. Neuman?
Here are two classic covers from the 1960’s:
Five nickels bought Murder Me For Nickels back in the day but they’d purchase next to nothing in 2019. Holy inflationary spiral, Batman.
Gypsy Rose Lee was the exotic dancer as proto-rock star. I recall seeing her on teevee chat, variety, and game shows when I was a tadpole. And her memoirs were adapted into the great 1959 musical, Gypsy.
Lee “wrote” two successful crime fiction books. New Yorker staff writer Janet Flanner aka Genet was her ghostwriter. Flanner was best known for writing the Letter From Paris feature, and her attempt to referee Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer during their legendary verbal brawl on The Dick Cavett Show.
Let’s get bookish:
The last word goes to the Divine Miss M with a showstopper from a 1993 version of Gypsy:
Elmore Leonard is best known for urbane urban crime stories set in Detroit or South Florida. In his early days, he wrote a string of successful westerns. Boy howdy.
W.R. Burnett is best known for hardboiled crime fiction novels that were turned into movies: Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle, and Nobody Lives Forever. He also wrote the odd book set in the West. Pale Moon is one of them:
The Dead Ringer is set in a carnival, which explains the peeping gorilla. But was its name Tom?
John Creasey was a successful and highly prolific crime fiction writer. And when I say prolific, I mean it: he wrote over 600 novels using 28 pen names. He made Stephen King look like a slacker.
The Toff was one of Creasey’s best-loved series. He was a gentleman detective who specialized in “fish out water” stories: hence the urban and urbane Brit at a farm.
My late mother was a fan of Creasey’s work and they were among the first grown-up books I read as a tadpole. No wonder I’m an Anglophile, eh wot?
