Pressbooks (Non-Horror)

Lloyd Bridges only movie serial, Secret Agent X-9, also featured two actors who played Charlie Chan’s sons in that popular movie series, Key Luke and Benson Fong. Going after a synthetic fuel formula provides the motivation for thirteen chapters of action and cliff hangers. Universal was unique with their serials by not providing the traditional chapter recap of the story so far. Instead, they had characters in a following chapter recap, through their dialog, what transpired in the previous chapter (as noted in Gripping Chapters: The Sound Movie Serial, by Ron Backer, BearManor Media). Universal did a Secret Agent X-9 serial in 1937 too. That storyline centered around stolen jewels. Both serials were based on the comic strip character of the same name written by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond.

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Secret Agent X-9 1945 PressbookRead More »

This may be the oldest herald (and pressbook, posting soon) in my collection. While the 1921 The Secret Four movie serial is now lost, it looks pretty darn exciting. This herald is about 22 inches long and 9.5 inches wide, so quite a herald to be handing out to movie patrons. The movie was 15 episodes across 30 reels, silent of course, and filled with great chapter titles like The Creeping Doom (8), Floods of Fury (13), and the Dive of Despair ((5). Maybe it’s me (okay, sure, it usually is), but looking at this herald, and with the movie filled with “international intrigue to seize world power by gaining possession of hidden oil deposits in the United States (IMDb),” I’m reminded of the pulp hero, Doc Savage, who first appeared in the 1930s. I wonder if this may have been one source of inspiration for the character.

American Releasing Corporation eventually became American International Pictures (AIP), which specialized in double bill bookings. This double bill pressbook is for Female Jungle and The Oklahoma Woman. Two separate folded sheets for each movie were put into the folded cover sheet, with the emphasis on newspaper ads touting sex appeal to entice movie-goers. For Female Jungle, it was “Jayne Mansfield…sex on the rocks” and for The Oklahoma Woman it was “a whip-wielding she-devil.” Clearly, young teen men were the target audience. Touch Connors (don’t touch that) starred in The Oklahoma Woman. Connors (no relation to Chuck Connors) eventually came to his senses and renamed himself as Mike Connors (who you may know as Mannix from the television series). The publicity campaign was a no-brainer (actually brainless) with “Put up a big front with Jayne” selling the woman-on-the-floor-holding-desperately-onto-the-leg-of-a-guy theme, and the promise of the Queen of the Outlaws cat-fighting with her female rival and cracking that whip (on guys, ouch) theme.

Roger Corman already had The Oklahoma Woman, which cost $60,000 dollars, ready to go. They just needed a second movie to complete the double bill and did so with the $49,000 Female Jungle, a Burt Kaiser written and produced effort. Female Jungle was shot in six days. According to IMDb, Mansfield was paid $150 dollars for her role in the movie, which was expanded after a serious incident kept Kathleen Crowley from continuing in her lead role.  Lawrence Tierney and John Carradine also appeared in this one.

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Female Jungle and
The Oklahoma Woman 1956
Double Bill PressbookRead More »

Here’s a glimpse into how pressbooks usually wound up on the theater manager’s desk: folded in half and simply mailed in a nice envelope. This MGM example is cool because of the explanation that’s also a bit of salesmanship for The Three Musketeers 1948.

The first Mickey Spillane novel became the first movie too. I, the Jury was filmed for 3D, but by the time it hit theater screens, the short-lived 3D craze of the 1950s was waning, so most first and second run houses showed the movie in standard 2D. Harry Essex adapted the novel (his writing credits include Creature From the Black Lagoon, Kansas City Confidential, It Came From Outer Space, and, okay, Octaman–hey, no one’s perfect).

David J. Hogan in his Film Noir FAQ doesn’t give much love to the movie, but he does point out the action scenes were well handled and that Spillane came from a comic writer background, which could explain why his character, Mike Hammer, is so super macho. Unfortunately, Biff Elliot was a poor choice to play Hammer and drags down the movie. So, dare I say it, he didn’t nail the Hammer. Trekkers know him as Schmitter from the Devil in the Dark episode of the original Star Trek. He also did episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and some horrors, the Navy vs. the Night Monsters and Blood Bath. I’d like to see those on Svengooli.

The pressbook is a big deal at 16 pages. One of these days I’ll figure out the psychology behind the choice of colors used in pressbooks as it doesn’t match the one used in film colors. The color used in this pressbook doesn’t quite match to the violence and grittiness in Mike Hammer. What do you think? One last note: this pressbook must have gone a round with Hammer as two unnecessary cuts ruin two pictures.

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I, the Jury (1953) PressbookRead More »

A dying man walks into detective Michael Shayne’s office, holding onto a baggage ticket. The story unfolds from there. With Hugh Beaumont (Leave It to Beaver) as Shayne, the story is more poached than hard-boiled, but this PRC production is directed by Sam Newfield, one busy beaver to be sure as he was prolific and completed 250 feature movies beginning in the silent age and up to 1958. He also directed a lot more too, including training films, shorts, industrial films, and for television. He directed The Terror of Tiny Town 1938, an all small-person novelty western that’s best seen during a midnight show.

Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) was a Poverty Row outfit but they had their own small studio. Sam Newfield directed so many of their movies he used two other names to make it look like PRC had more directors. Mostly producing B movies, the studio did the usual fare including westerns, horrors, and assorted action dramas. The Devil Bat and The Devil Bat’s Daughter were hits for PRC as well as many other films, and the classic noir, Detour, was also produced by the studio. They even had their own version of the Bowery Boys (Dead End Kids) called the Gas House Kids with Billy Halop. Halop’s career peetered out due to personal problems and his aging (no more playing Tommy), but he did have a resurgence in the 1970s with television’s All in the Family, where he played in ten episodes.

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Three on a Ticket (1947) PressbookRead More »

Here’s The Three Musketeers pressbook portion that covered advertising. “The Three Musketeers was an extremely personal project for [Gene] Kelly for two reasons” (from the TCM article on the movie). “The first was the fact that he was recreating the character (D’Artagnan) played by his favorite star (Douglas Fairbanks) in his favorite movie (the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers). Kelly was later quoted in Tony Thomas’ The Films of Gene Kelly: Song and Dance saying “I loved playing this part. As a boy I idolized Fairbanks, Sr. and I raised myself to be a gymnast.” The second reason is that Kelly was hoping his performance in The Three Musketeers would convince MGM to let him do a musical version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac.. Regardless of his energetic performance in The Three Musketeers, the studio brass wouldn’t go for a musical Cyrano even though Kelly pestered them for years about it.”

The TCM article goes on to say how much June Allyson disliked playing the period piece. Lana Turner also had issues with her role as it was not a starring one. After a brief suspension by MGM and a rewrite of her character, she did eventually acquiesce.

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The Three Musketeers (1948) Pressbook
AdvertisingRead More »

Universal Pictures’ Radio Patrol was taken from the newspaper comic strip of the same name. The strip, created by Charles Schmidt (artist) and Eddie Sullivan (a real-life crime reporter), picked up steam when William Randolph Hearst wanted something added to his King Features Syndicate to compete against the popular Dick Tracy comic strip. Radio Patrol was also adapted for radio, a comic book, and a Big Little book (a thick, pocket-sized, hard-covered book with text and page illustrations). The 12-chapter serial was directed by Ford Beebe (Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, and lots of jungle pictures) and Clifford Smith (The Adventures of Frank Merriwell).

From the Files of Jerry Blake:

Radio Patrol features many sloppy-looking but energetic fights–brawls that have the lack of staging and wild-looking blows common to most 1930s serials, but also feature some good punches and some nice flips and leaps (as in the Chapter Eight office fight). However, almost all the fistfight scenes are marred by one recurring flaw–directors Ford Beebe and Cliff Smith’s decision to shoot all the fight-scene close-ups of star Grant Withers against the same backdrop (a cement steel-mill wall with the shadow of a ladder in this background); when these shots of Withers are inserted into fights that take place in locations other than the steel mill (apartments, sidewalks, etc.) they have a jarring effect on the viewer–particularly since these mismatched close-ups provide the only glimpses of Withers during the fight scenes; the star’s stunt double Eddie Parker stands in for both medium and long shots, with Beebe and Smith taking few pains to hide the switch.

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Radio Patrol (1937) PressbookRead More »

At a saddle-sized 18 by 21.5 inches, this pressbook rides the range in style. Tom Mix came from a rodeo background and was rough and tumble onscreen, providing the action and thrills that made westerns so appealing to young audiences. He also toured with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. The west of Tom Mix was the contemporary one for his time, with the occasional automobile riding the range along with the horses.

A surviving print of this film was found buried on a chicken farm in what was then known as Czechoslovakia in 1966. Many silent movies had been lost by their studios due to ignorance of their historical importance and to calamities from improper storage or fires, a cultural loss for all of us.

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Tom Mix No Man’s Gold (1926) PressbookRead More »