Pressbooks (Non-Horror)

In the first chapter of Bruce Gentry — Daredevil of the Skies serial, the mysterious villain, Recorder, sends a flying saucer (disc) to crash into Bruce’s plane. It happens within the first few minutes and the saucer is animated. The following year, The Flying Saucer (1950), had Soviet and American agents fighting over possession of a flying saucer. The term “flying saucer” was coined by a United Press newspaper man in 1947, after an amateur pilot saw nine objects in the sky giving off bright flashes of light. Of course, the U.S. Airforce now prefers the term UFO (unidentified flying object), but “flying saucer” has a cooler, vintage ring to it. The flying discs that Recorder controls remotely, acting more like drones, leads Bruce to investigate them to see if they can be repurposed for commercial use. I’m not sure if drones, which first saw action in 1917 during the First World War, were thought to have commercial potential in the 1940s, aside from their military uses. In 1935, the British began using the term “drone” to refer to their pilotless aircraft. And because drone is too simple a word, the term used today is UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). That doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like drone. Long story short: the first appearance of a flying saucer in cinema may be credited to this serial. Although a bit wonky in the animation department (clearly basement budget), that’s still important to note.

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Bruce Gentry — Daredevil of the Skies (1949)
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A noir with Lawrence Tierney. From the Nitrate Diva: “This pulpy, high-octane B noir from RKO flirts so outrageously with comedy that you may not see its nastiest blows coming. Deranged tonal shifts and a farfetched plot make The Devil Thumbs a Ride more disturbing than many comparatively somber and cohesive entries in the noir canon. Murder, sadism, depravity, greed, and betrayal: that’s business as usual. But peppered with wacky sitcom-style hijinks? Now that’s twisted.” Ditto, I say. There are slick slacks noirs, almost noirs, and plain trousers noirs; then there’s this one with  Lawrence Tierney.

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The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) PressbookRead More »

A light-hearted romp with the usual shenanigans. What cracks me up every time is the bit between Lou and Aunt Huddy (she dabbles in the black mountain arts). Lou wants a love potion. Both get into a tiff, make voodoo doll effigies of themselves and start sticking it to each other. I love it. Dorothy Shay (The Park Avenue Hillbillie) sings some songs. What’s not to love?

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Abbott and Costello in
Comin’ Round the Mountain (1951)
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Columbia focused on World War II saboteurs with The Batman and The Secret Code serials. In The Batman, J. Carrol Naish played Dr. Daka, a Japanese mastermind, who, with his henchmen, tangled with the caped crusader. In The Secret Code, the evil Nazi mastermind, Jensen, is played by Trevor Bardette. J. Carrol Naish, again sporting ludicrous makeup, played Charley Chan  in the 1957 television series, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan. During an interview conducted by Ben Mankiewicz, the 93 year old James Hong, who played Chan's Number One Son, mentioned how Naish had him fired from the show because he missed a line. My respect for Naish has dropped quite a bit after that revelation. How absurd too: Naish gets the real Asian actor fired. Wild. 

ComicRack and YACreader version: Download The Secret Code pressbook

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The Secret Code (1942) PressbookRead More »

Here is the theater herald for The Secret Code (1942) Columbia serial. The Black Commando, a competing action hero to Republic’s Spy Smasher, fights Nazis through fifteen chapters. See The Files of Jerry Blake for a detailed decoding of the serial. Interestingly, especially for a kid into cool stuff, the code tutorials at the end of each chapter were informative. I wonder how many kids sent around coded notes in their classrooms after seeing The Secret Code?

Give me any movie with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in it and I'm already sitting with the popcorn or wine or beer or (insert your own beverage or food of choice), and I'm golden. Put a little rain in the sky, a little dark in the streets, and  a cozy couch or chair to go limp in, and I'm more than golden. Of course, add a theater balcony (remember those?) and a big screen, and I'm in heaven, pure and simple. This movie is such an odd little gem, with fate, destiny, and tangled webs of lives between the two, all bottled up by a sweepstakes ticket and a fascination with a small, hopefully wish-granting, statue.  

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Three Strangers (1946) PressbookRead More »

At 24 pages, this 11 x 17 inches pressbook is a good deal of promotion, theater ballyhoo, and actor articles. Take a look at the portable Emerson Radio (I’d still want one!) or the “inner sanctum” wallet (ditto). Very interesting is the 16-page comic story in Mysterious Traveler Comics. The blurb reads “…offering at a special low rate reprints of this section for use as heralds or as kiddie program giveaway.” Kiddie program giveaway? Never thought a crime noir movie would be good for a kiddie giveaway. Go figure.

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Raw Deal (1948) PressbookRead More »

After you watch enough movies from the 1940s you get a feeling the men did most of the heavy lifting storywise. Women were either hometown girl, femme fatale, or cute and sassy cut outs to paper over. While the guys threw all the punches, the woman either dodged, sidestepped, or pulled out a gun to handle the situation if those fists were aimed to close. I mention this because if you look carefully at the poster art for Johnny O’Clock, guess who’s in the driver’s seat and who’s tagging along for the ride. Men: can’t live with them, can’t find a safe enough place to stash the bodies. Go figure. If you haven’t seen Dick Powell playing detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, you really ought to. While it’s a better movie than this one, he always gives a hardboiled, smart ass performance that’s pure noir alley, so you can’t go wrong catching this one too.

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Johnny O’Clock (1947) PressbookRead More »

This Paramount airborne thriller has a nifty cast that includes Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger, Fred MacMurray, Joan Bennett, Zasu Pitts and others. It has the usual beautiful blonde-intoxicated male driven plot with a few twists and turns. Of particular interest for us jaded passengers is the United Airlines Boeing 247 and tour of airports. Those were the days.

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13 Hours by Air (1936) PressbookRead More »

The poster art and unusual size (9 inches x 20 inches folded, 18 inches x 20 inches unfolded) grabbed my attention for this Underground (1941) pressbook. More pulp than noir in effect, but still noirish enough to be compelling. Here are the first few pages. To read the entire pressbook, download the ComicRack reader version. Even if you don’t have that application, you can change the downloaded file extension to .zip instead of .cbz and extract the jpeg images. They’re big, so best to view on a large screen.

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This is the rare and quite fragile pressbook for Song of the Thin Man, an enjoyable detective movie from an enjoyable MGM series of Thin Man movies). Unfortunately, MGM, around this time period, liked to print their pressbooks on cheap newsprint pulpy paper, which doesn’t hold up well over time. I had to be extremely careful while scanning this beauty, but even then I added more rips in the browning paper. But there’s a wealth of creative promotion and style here, so it was worth it. I hope you think so too. This movie was the sixth and last one in the series.

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Along with the pressbook, many times there were advertising or promotion supplements. These were printed inserts that included promotional articles and ideas, merchandising tie-ins, poster advertising, theater lobby displays, and additional newspaper adverts. Here are the two supplements (2 pages and 4 pages) for Tarzan the Ape Man. Johnny Weissmuller had a contract to promote BVD underwear. When the movie rolled around, a given tie-in for BVD was a no-brainer. 

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Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)
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