Tag: 1950s
“The plot didn’t matter at all”
Just some splendid stills from thrillers (mostly) of the 1940s and 1950s, reproduced from ‘Film Noir’ (Alain Silver, James Ursini, Paul Duncan: Taschen). I love Film Noir. ‘Gilda’ is one of the best and most noirish. Above is Rita Hayworth doing a passive-aggressive musical number/striptease in a club to get back at her boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend for their machinations with each other and with her. As you do.
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“A shock-fest for your scare endurance”
“DEMON-PROWLER OF MOUNTAIN SHADOWS… DREADED MAN-BEAST OF TIBET… THE TERROR OF ALL THAT IS HUMAN!!
A great poster for the 1957 Hammer film production ‘The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas‘. I’ve not seen the film and I hadn’t heard of it before I found this poster, but look at the pedigree: directed by prolific Hammer hack Val Guest, written by Nigel Kneale of the Quatermass series, starring Peter Cushing. Apparently it was originally a BBC television play, which I should imagine was ineptly made for about £5 as was their wont.
It’s also fascinating how quaint warnings like “WE DARE YOU TO SEE IT ALONE!” are for things like this, half a century on. Most of these films wouldn’t frighten, shock or disturb anybody over the age of ten nowadays.
Nazo, Emperor of the Universe
See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) in the 1930s and the previous post about WWII kamishibai for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.
Are you pyknický?
More hard drive detritus! I’ve cleaned the images up a lot, because the originals look like somebody–definitely not me– just snapped the pages from some kind of text book. Nothing so methodical or high tech as a scan. As usual I don’t know where these slightly unnerving pictures came from. My highly scientific detective work (playing around with Google Translate for a while) led to the conclusion that the captions are in Slovakian. The drawing of various faceless nude people (last image on this page) has a bit of a prison camps behind the Iron Curtain vibe. Hard to tell the age of them. The somatotype thing came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, so presumably these illustrations are from that period or slightly later.
Also as usual, corrections or additional information are welcome.
Typ pyknický presumably means endomorphic type, i.e. prone to fatness, but I like to…
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The white room
THE VOID
Alistair Gentry 