On
our second date in my studio apartment, my wife shared her spaghetti dinner with
a decaying corpse who had just climbed out of his grave.
This
not-for-the-squeamish image was from the 1972 horror anthology Tales from the Crypt, which also
featured a skull with cobwebs in its black eye socket. Dirty
Harry’s, .44 magnum pointed at her from another wall, while a hand beckoned
her into 1973’s The Vault of Horror.  Â
You’re
an unusual decorator, she’d said. I told
her it was only art. That I wasn’t the
Starry Night type.
The
rest of my 350 square foot apartment was consumed with over 25 framed pieces of
movie memorabilia from the 1970s, horrifying and violent artwork which
symbolized, paradoxically, the nostalgia I felt for the innocence of my
movie-going youth. Equinox. Race with the Devil. Westworld. Straw
Dogs. The Stone Killer. The French Connection and French Connection II, side by side, over
my sofa. Hell, I knew how to decorate.
They
were photo albums of my movie past, a time when the visceral impact of film
violence communicated, perhaps subconsciously, something of vicarious comfort
to a young teen with feelings of inadequacy about standing up to bullies in
school and talking to girls. Or maybe it
was an escape from our family dinner table conversation which contained terms
like chemotherapy and remission while my mother lay dying in the hospital.
My
first movie poster, which I found when I was 12 in our suburban stationery
store’s moveable metal rack, featured a shot of Bonnie and Clyde and C.W. Moss behind
the bullet-riddled windshield of their getaway car. It wasn’t a movie one-sheet and there was no text
on the poster, only a large image foreshadowing their doom. It remained over my bed for a long time. I wasn’t allowed to see the film, which had
been out for a few years, but I don’t recall my parents ever objecting to the
poster. My bedroom walls were soon
covered with stills I cut out from film books:Â
Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Lancaster.Â
They exuded power and charisma; they were loved and feared, qualities I
yearned for.
But it wasn’t until
my late thirties that I started seriously collecting posters. Ebay was my Rosebud.  I spent hundreds of dollars on American, Japanese,
German, British, and Mexican material of films from the 60s and 70s. Disaster movies, rats, revenge flicks, fantasy
and horror. One-sheets, half-sheets,
lobby cards, press books, Quads. Every
purchase was a trip back to where I saw the movie and who I was with.
Babs Bach ravaged by prehistoric Beatle Ringo Starr in Caveman
RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVES
Entertainment Weekly has a slide show of ten hot actors/actresses from caveman movies. Some are appropriate, but others are pretty lame: anyone who can get turned on by images of Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble has a problem, even if it involves them in a sapphic situation! There's also John Lone in Iceman and his makeup gives him all the sex appeal of Magilla the Gorilla. Saving graces are Barbara Bach in Caveman, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C and Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes even though they admit they had to cheat to include him on the basis that the film pertained to the prehistoric ape era! To view click here
Those resourceful rogues at the 3B Theater nostalgia web site have come up with a strange promo from the dreadful 1976 version of King Kong - buy a pair of jeans and get a key chain containing actual hairs from Kong himself! We won't ask how these were verified for authenticity, but I seem to recall a lot of barbers coming into sudden money around that time. The ad conclusively proves why the Seventies are regarded as "The Decade That Style Forgot"Â Click here for more - and spend some time trawling through their amusing collection of old movie posters and ads.
Here's a golden oldie- Frank Sinatra in one of our favorite private dick movies, Tony Rome directed by the seriously under-rated Gordon Douglas. The spot captures the essence of a groovy era when The Chairman was The King of Cool. Even the TV spot is hip- Frank wears his fedora as only he can, Jill St. John and Lolita star Sue Lyon provide the eye candy, and Nancy Sinatra warbles the catchy theme song - all in 60 seconds! (See issues #4 and #5 of Cinema Retro for Dean Brierly's look at the making of Tony Rome and Lady in Cement)
You may remember the episode of The Addams Family in which Lurch (Ted Cassidy) starts a national fad with his rock song. They actually released it as a legitimate record complete with picture sleeve of the man himself. Here's a rare opportunity to re-live the magic of The Lurch (and it still beats most songs on the charts today!). Click here to listen. For the lyrics and full story behind the record click here
Charles Bronson disdained being interviewed and said less offscreen than Buster Keaton said onscreen. Nevertheless, occasionally a publicist could induce him to sit for a few comments in conjunction with publicizing a new film. Here's a rare Warner Bros. production featurette for his action flick St. Ives. It shows Bronson performing his own stunts and even gets him to mutter a few sentences about his approach to acting. The film was not a commerical success in the 1970s, but it looks damned good. Gotta check this one out! Click here to view the featurette.
If you're already depressed over the current state of late night TV, here's a vintage film clip that won't do much to change your opinion. It's from a 1975 broadcast of The Tonight Show with Don Rickles filling in as host. As was the norm on the show, major stars would drop by unannounced, in this case Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and John Wayne. Click here to viewÂ
Here's a real rare clip: the cast of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in a vintage b&w TV spot- and it's cleverly geared toward the actors taking on the mannerisms of the characters they play in the film. Click here to view