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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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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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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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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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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At 18.75 x 12.5 inches, this 8 page pressbook is large and packed with promotion for the ape man. Unfortunately it was printed on thin, acid-prone paper, so handling had to be kept to a minimum for scanning. Also, I think the paper was tan originally, not white, so I refrained from doing any color correction. This is the sexiest (thank you pre-code!) of the Tarzan movies with Maureen O’Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller swinging through the trees and audiences wishing they could too. Angelo Rossitto plays an evil native dwarf. (His team-ups with Bela Lugosi were fun to watch.) I wish they had done more of them. Johnny Eck (Freaks) plays the bird creature. The ape costume during the climactic battle scene must have been pretty scary-looking back then, but now is somewhat lacking. Overall, still a fun, romantic action movie.
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Another lost city reluctantly found, another treasure stolen by dastardly white hunters. Brenda Joyce takes over the role of Jane (but without the chemistry of Maureen O’Sullivan) and Tarzan’s home atop the Great Escarpment changes into a next door over from the trading hut location. So, both chemistry and mystery start leaving the series at this point. But still a fun watch as they bring on the Amazons (or “forest maidens” as the pressbook promotes). Coming at the end of World War II, storylines with empowered women made the circuit, but still with feminine frills on, so to speak. Best not to scare the male audience too much.
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I caught Meet Nero Wolfe on a double bill with a Margaret Rutherford Agatha Christie movie back in the 1980s. I forget exactly where in New York City the event took place, but I recall the cramped theater was rather hot after a while and also that both movies were a far cry from the novels they purportedly were scripted from. I can definitely say the Nero Wolfe movie was awfully cast and added cheap humor instead of notable characterization. Even though I was in my teens at the time, I had read most of the Wolfe novels as well as Christie’s and really felt let down by the onscreen shambles. On television, Rex Stout’s creation has faired a little better. Timothy Hutton was quite presentable as Archie Goodwin and even William Shatner, who played Archie in a Nero Wolfe unsold pilot in 1959, was not shabby at all. The Wolfe role has been a challenge taken on by others including Joseph Conrad, Thayer David, Maury Chaykin, Walter Connolly, and Kurt Kasznar. I have a fondness for Thayer David’s take, but I’m biased because I’m a Dark Shadows fan (he played Ben Stokes).
The pressbook is as large as Nero Wolfe, coming in at 17.5 x 12 inches and 16 pages. On the exploitation page it mentions a tie-up with selling Monopoly. “Monopoly, the parlor-game that has swept the country in sensational fashion, to seriously threaten the status of bridge as an evening pastime, is shown on the screen for the first time…” Wow. We can thank Monopoly for saving us all from playing Bridge. Who knew?
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Here's the 11×17 inches pressbook for Tarzan's Desert Mystery. While Jane is away helping the war effort, Tarzan must contend with Nazis, hungry plants, and a pesky giant spider. A fun matinee romp in the series, this is the 8th movie for Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Amazingly, while I'm a big fan of the Tarzan movies, this is the one I have yet to see. It's on my bucket list.
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