A Danish postcard featuring a publicity still of Klaus Kinski from the film ‘And God Said to Cain,’ 1970.
 
The images in this post were culled from a large collection I found online at a site called Filmstar Postcards—and once I started digging through the site’s massive alphabetical list, I couldn’t tear myself away. Historically, postcards have been used as promotional vehicles for everything and everyone. The vintage postcards in this post are of European origin with most hailing from Germany, France or Italy.

Of the astounding array of postcards cataloged by the site, I was most taken with images that captured the faces of the famous before they were well known. For instance, in the “B” section I found a rather astonishing Hungarian postcard of Bela Lugosi that shows a young, dashing looking future Dracula in a white suit staring stoically into the camera with a cigarette between his lips. While most of the celebrity postcards are of the stars of yesteryear, there were a few of more contemporary actors/performers such as Asia Argento, Grace Jones and Serge Gainsbourg. Check them all out below!
 

British postcard of Grace Jones.
 

French postcard of Marianne Faithfull.
 

 
Belgian promotion card by Taschen Gallery for the exhibition ‘Taxi Driver - unseen photographs from Scorsese’s Masterpiece.’ The image was a publicity still for the 1976 film ‘Taxi Driver.’
 

Italian postcard of Asia Argento used to promote the 1998 filmd ‘Viola Kisses Everybody.’
 
Many more after the jump…

A painting by artist Mu Pan featuring Bruce Lee battling a puking Ultraman. Yes.
 
Some have compared the style of artist Mu Pan to that of another highly regarded artist, Ralph Steadman, the collaborator and long-time friend of Hunter S. Thompson. And much like the often ragged, tormented-looking characters in Steadman’s work, Mu Pan’s subjects appear to be engaged in violent clashes with antagonists that range from animal/human hybrids to martial arts hero Bruce Lee locked in battle with the alien/robot known as Ultraman. Excellent.

Pan was born in Taichung City, Taiwan which he left behind at the age of 21 when he moved to the U.S. He would attend college in New York where he acquired his B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Illustration and Illustration as Visual Essay at the School of Visual Arts. According to Pan, if he hadn’t gone to art school, his mother had threatened to send him to a military academy. Lucky for us, this scenario didn’t result in Pan in becoming a military lifer, and the remarkably talented artist now spends his days teaching Illustration to students at his alma mater.

If I had to take a stab at describing Pan’s style, I’d call it a chaotic, often barbaric blend of classic eastern-inspired folk art infused with modern pop culture references. And it looks as good as that sounds. I’ve posted a nice selection of Pan’s work below for you to spend time dissecting with your eyeballs. Some are slightly NSFW.
 

Watercolor.
 

Watercolor.
 

Another image of Bruce Lee by Pan, this time in watercolor.
 

‘Mermaid.’
 
More Mu Pan after the jump…

‘Door-to-Door Maniac’ poster for sale at Westgate Gallery
 
The Man in Black’s acting debut came when he portrayed the deranged, practically foaming at the mouth cop killer “Johnny Cabot” in the 1961 film noir, Five Minutes to Live. Johnny, along with his partner (Vic Tayback, “Mel” from the 70s sitcom Alice) plot a unique bank robbery. Johnny knocks on the door of a housewife (Cay Forester, who wrote the script) offering to give her guitar lessons and then takes her hostage. Her husband (Donald Woods) a bank manager is told that she will be murdered unless Tayback’s character walks out of his bank with $70,000.

Their plans go wildly awry when the banker calmly informs the dumb duo that they’d be doing him a big favor by killing his wife so he can run off to Las Vegas with his mistress! Then their son (a young Ron Howard) comes home from school, throwing another wrench into the works.
 

 
The weirdest part of the film is the way they shoehorned in a Johnny Cash performance (albeit a completely twisted one) when “Johnny Cabot” decides to sing a murder ballad to his terrified hostage about her own impending death. You can skip directly to 36:10 to watch Cash-as-psychopath terrorize her with his guitar, performing “Five Minutes to Live.”

He’s not exactly “Frank Booth” from Blue Velvet, but he’s still pretty fucking creepy. On the movie poster Cash was described as “a lusty romantic guitar singing powerhouse.”

Five Minutes to Live was re-titled Door-to-Door Maniac for a 1966 re-release. Country great Merle Travis makes a cameo appearance.
 

Actress and model Vikki Dougan clowning around at the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus.
 
Actress and model Vikki Dougan earned her nickname “The Back” thanks to the dangerously low-back, curve-hugging dresses she wore in the 1950s and 1960s. Dougan’s alluring back has even inspired a song written by folk music legends The Limelighters whose lyrics passionately request that she “turn her back” on them. And, as the title of this post suggests, Dougan’s provocative posterior bearing dresses and look also served as inspiration for the animated character “Jessica Rabbit” from the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Dougan would begin her modeling career at the age eleven in 1940. In 1948, nineteen-year-old Dougan (who had changed her name from Edith Tooker to “Vikki Stappers Dougan”) was named the winner of the New York Skate Queen competition. This success landed Dougan a spot in what sounds like the greatest fashion show of all time held by the Roller Skating Institute of America (RISA) which showcased the latest in roller rink fashions. Zowie. Dougan’s fame would take flight, and she would score roles in various films, photo spreads in prominent magazines such as LIFE (photographed by Ralph Crane) as well as posing for commercial advertisements for lingerie. Dougan also did a couple of mostly PG-13 spreads for Playboy and was romantically linked to some of the most famous men in Hollywood including Frank Sinatra.

Sometime in the 1960s things started to slow down for Dougan and in 1964 Cavalier magazine ran twelve photos taken of Dougan in the buff which had initially been shot for Playboy. Following the session, Dougan refused to let Playboy publish the cheeky photos, and she filed a lawsuit against Cavalier which was eventually settled out of court for a tidy sum approximated to be in the neighborhood of $75,000. Photos of Dougan showing off her fabulous back follow and are slightly NSFW.
 

1958.
 

 
More Vikki Dougan after the jump…

 
A Madrid judge has ordered the exhumation of the body of Salvador Dalí to adjudicate a paternity claim on behalf of Maria Pilar Abel Martínez, who has reason to believe that she is the famed surrealist’s daughter. 

Born in 1956 in Girona, Spain, Martínez, who is a tarot card reader by trade, has contended that her mother had an affair with the famous artist in 1955. Dalí was married to Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, whom the artist invariably referred to as Gala, his “muse.” (As we’ve written before, Dalí notably published an elaborate and bizarre cookbook dedicated to Gala.)
 

Maria Pilar Abel Martínez
 
At 61 years of age, Martínez says the affair took place in Cadaqués while her mother, Antonia, was working as a maid for a family that spent time in the town. She also jokes that the only thing she’s missing to look identical to Dalí is “a mustache.” You can judge that resemblance for yourself.

Without any existing biological remains from which to draw DNA, the judge has agreed to permit an exhumation to settle the issue of…. Dalí‘s issue (sorry).

Martínez has already undergone two paternity tests but never received the results. Dalí died in 1989 and is buried at the museum dedicated to his work in the Spanish town of Figueres in northeastern Catalonia.

Dalí did not have any other children and left his entire estate to his country of birth. The significance of the paternity suit, unsurprisingly, revolves around inheritance. If paternity is established, Martinez would legally be allowed to use his name and would also be entitled to part of his estate.
 
via Vice News
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
At last, Salvador Dali’s insane sex-cookbook is getting republished

Sign Language Interpreter during Public Enemy performance

 
Even though this video was shot back in 2014, it’s making the rounds again today because of reddit and imgur. The imgur video doesn’t have sound. I was able to track down the original video on YouTube with sound so you can get a better feel for what’s going on and hear the actual lyrics she’s interpreting.

The footage is from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The sign language interpreter’s name is Holly Maniatty and, well, she obviously rocks! 

 
via Boing Boing

 
Zardoz might be the only movie that can fairly be compared to D-Day, in that if you haven’t endured it yourself, you really haven’t the slightest notion what it’s like.

Zardoz was released in 1974, the second movie that Sean Connery made after leaving Cubby Broccoli’s Bond franchise for good. According to the movie’s director and writer, John Boorman, Connery badly needed money and agreed to do the movie on that basis. He must’ve been really broke.

The movie is 23rd-century romp in which all of humanity is divided up into the lusty and animalistic “Brutals” and the psychic and ethereal “Eternals” at the “Vortex” who have no need to procreate, while a huge flying stone head distributes armaments across the countryside. Sean Connery plays “Zed,” an “Exterminator” who manages to infiltrate the “Vortex,” where he discombobulates the Eternals’ barren notions of sex and violence—or something. Along the way the huge stone head—“Zardoz” to you—memorably bellows the mottos “The gun is good!” and “The penis is evil!” The movie is heady and trashy in a way that only the cinema of the 1970s could possibly muster.

Boorman made several straightforwardly excellent movies, including Excalibur, Hope and Glory, Point Blank, and Deliverance, which makes the eternal peculiarities of Zardoz all the more astonishing.

Zardoz was released in early 1974, and the March issue of Playboy that year featured a nude spread connected with the movie that included nude photos of Charlotte Rampling.

It’s abundantly clear that the content of Zardoz was a kind of reaction to the sexual revolution that had been taking place for a number of years before the movie was made. In the text that accompanies the pictures, Boorman makes a remarkable statement of sorts about this, indicating that his experiences visiting communes in America convinced him of the folly of gender equality, a stance that feels all the stranger considering the harsh critique of masculinity featured in his previous movie, Deliverance. Here it is:
 

Researching for the film, Boorman visited many communes throughout the U.S.A. “I was shocked,” he admits now, “in the way you are shocked by something you thought you knew and find you didn’t. I was shocked because women were living in the commune in real equality with the men and I realized I hadn’t seen that before. I had thought that I believed in women’s equality, but I discovered that really I didn’t. I can’t accept that they’re the equals of men. Guilty about it? Yes, but I can’t add any more to my burden of guilt. Once you get to 40, you really can’t take on any more.”

 
Boorman’s DVD commentary, which is available on this page, is considered by not a few people to be the greatest of all time. At one point he says that “Charlotte was very disappointed in this sequence because she said she had been looking forward to being raped by Sean Connery and that it was all over far too quickly.” Hmmm.

In 2015 Rampling was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in 45 Years, making her one of a tiny number of women who have posed nude in Playboy and also been nominated for an Oscar. (Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger, and Charlize Theron are the only ones I can think of, although Burt Reynolds posed nude in Cosmopolitan and received an Oscar nomination.)
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Sometimes it seems that luck is far more important than talent. Louis Wain was a talented artist but he was never a lucky man.

Louis Wain was the man who drew cats. He was born in the East End of London in 1860, the only boy in a family of five girls. This meant that when his father died Louis became the family’s sole provider. As he was good at art, he started submitting illustrations for various magazines. These proved popular. This led to his joining the staff of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1882. His artistic streak most probably came from his mother as she had once been a textile designer. Little is known about his father.

In 1884, Louis married the family’s governess, Emily. She was ten years older than Louis who was then a rather green 23-year-old. It was because of his love for Emily that Louis started drawing cats. Emily had a small black and white cat called Peter whose company she greatly enjoyed. When Emily became too ill to play with Peter, dear old Louis spent hours sketching the cat in the hope his drawings would bring his wife some needed cheer and a much hoped for recovery. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Emily had cancer and died three years later in 1887.

The year prior to Emily’s death, Louis had the good fortune to show his editor a small selection of the cat drawings he had made for his wife. The editor liked these illustrations so much that he published two of them in the following edition of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. This was the first real luck Louis ever had. His drawings were greatly received and led to his being commissioned to illustrate two books Madam Tabby’s Establishment and A Kitten’s Christmas Party.  After Emily’s death, Louis focussed solely on drawing more cats. It was his main connection to his wife which also became a way to make money.

Louis produced cat illustrations for postcards and greeting cards, adverts, books and toys. Then, just before the First World War, he designed a series of ceramic cats which he mainly called “Lucky.” These designs for vases—chunky, square, and brightly painted—were inspired by the latest fad for Cubism. Unfortunately for Louis, his designs weren’t so lucky with the home market as they were considered ugly and tasteless and did not sell at all well in England. But fortunately, in America, these crazy cats were highly popular. This should have been Louis’s retirement fund, but a large consignment of his ceramics bound by ship for the United States was sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. This, together with the war, briefly put and end to Louis’ Cubist cats.

After the war, his designs were picked up once again and manufactured in Italy. By now, Louis was in severe financial difficulties. His naivety about the world had led to his squandering much of his hard-earned cash on crank business propositions or foolishly giving it away in response to begging letters. It’s unclear how much money Louis made from this second production of his ceramics. If he did make money, well, it proved of little avail as Louis was certified insane and committed to an asylum in 1924.

Louis Wain’s art and designs fell out of favor until the early 1960s, when his cat paintings became highly fashionable again.

Today, like his paintings, Louis Wain’s ceramic animals are greatly sought after and can sell for as much as $10,000 each. The designs mainly feature cats, but there are also designs of pigs and dogs. As ever, with the unlucky Mr. Wain, some of the designs that flooded the market about a decade ago were considered to be fake. But those who posses a genuine Louis Wain Cubist cat, they are lucky enough to own a thing of great beauty.
 

 

 
See more of Louis Wain’s ceramics, after the jump…

A couple of images taken by forensic artist Nigel Cockerton during his ‘facial reconstruction’ of a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka. 
 
Nigel Cockerton is a Scottish forensic artist with a Master’s degree in Forensic and Medical Art, whose services have been previously utilized by the FBI. Cockerton decided to have a little fun with a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka—a high-end party liquid put out by actor Dan Aykroyd that comes in a skull-shaped bottle. But since Cockerton’s job is to recreate the faces of people who have passed into the great beyond, he decided to bring the skull “back to life.” So to speak, of course.

In about a week, Cockerton reconstructed a “face” based on the Crystal Head bottle glass skull, and the results were not quite what anyone expected. Of course, nobody expected a forensic artist to take on such a task either so there’s that. Using his impressive skills, Cockerton built up the “face” of the skull with muscles, skin, and cartilage made of clay then added some fake hair. When he was finished the skull wore a frozen, exuberantly happy face—which Cockerton speculated belonged to a woman of European descent between the ages of 21 to 30.

The original decision to package the vodka in a glass skull was based on the strange folklore associated with the discovery of various “crystal skulls” that were believed to have originated in ancient Mesoamerica tens of thousands of years ago. This theory was later proven to be false by both the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution who both placed the creation of the skulls somewhere in the middle or late 1800s. The British Museum was also able to determine that the geographical point of origin for the skulls was likely Germany. Now that I’ve cleared that up, it’s time to see the crystal skull that Cockerton gave a “face” to. The images that follow might be slightly NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
I still wasn’t convinced, so the sales assistant upped his pitch.

“And these glow in the dark,” he smiled.

I wasn’t buying it. The guy obviously didn’t know his stuff. Dracula’s teeth weren’t supposed to glow in the dark, not even the Wolfman’s teeth did that. Now I was begrudging the fact I had pocketed my school lunch money to walk into town past the prison, abattoir, and graveyard to buy a set of vampire teeth that glowed in the dark but that didn’t drip with blood like Dracula’s.

“Or, would you prefer this set of Wolfman fangs?” he added rustling through packs of novelty teeth.

To give the man his due, I was in a joke shop among the whoopee cushions, fake dog turds, and electric shock handshake pressers. It wasn’t exactly Transylvania. It wasn’t exactly Hammer Horror either which was the very thing that had inspired me to make this little shopping expedition.

On late Friday nights, the local Scottish television network screened horror movies under the title Don’t Watch Alone. My parents were cool enough to let my brother and I sit up to watch these creepy old black and white films featuring Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney, and co. Then one Friday night, on came Dracula with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The following week, The Curse of Frankenstein with the same two stars and both films in glorious technicolor. My mind was blown. Hideous monsters and blood-red fangs. I’d found a new thrill, a new passion that superseded even my Spidey collection and my hopeless dreams of ever owning an Aurora Monster Kit.

For the next few years, horror movies and in particular Hammer horror movies ruled my life. I dug up, sought out, and tracked down every little piece of what-have-you on Hammer and the films they made. I signed-up for the Peter Cushing fan club. I asked for Denis Gifford‘s classic Horror Movies book for Christmas—which was almost a mistake as he hated Hammer horror but at least his writing on the old B&W movies was superb. I clipped all the horror movie listings in the Radio Times and the cinema ads from the local paper and stuck ‘em all in a big scrapbook which I kept for years until I lent it to some fucker who never gave it back. (Rule #1 kids: Never lend people stuff you really, really want to keep ‘coz they’ll never give you it back. But if you can lend it, then give it freely, but just don’t expect to ever get it back. Because that’s not going to happen.)

Hammer started way, way back in the early thirties when one-half of a double act “Will Hammer” of Hammer & Smith aka William Hinds, a jeweler and theatrical agent, set up Hammer Film Productions in 1934. He had an early hit with The Public Life of Henry the Ninth, a comedy spoof of Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. Then with the assistance of Enrique Carreras, the company made a series of short, moderately successful films including one starring Bela Lugosi The Mystery of the Marie Celeste.

But Hammer really didn’t take off until Anthony Hinds and James Carreras joined their fathers William and Enrique as directors. Suddenly, Hammer was branching out into sci-fi and then horror films with The Curse of Frankenstein which sealed the company’s success and then, of course, Horror of Dracula which famously had a marquee at the Haymarket, London that dripped neon blood from Christopher Lee’s vampire fangs. Over the next twenty years, a rotation of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and various vampyros lesbos made Hammer the brand name for the best in British horror movies.

So, back to the joke shop where I ultimately went for the Wolfman’s teeth, as those green glowing, non-bloody vampire fangs were pretty damned anemic and being a werewolf was the closest I ever came to having a dog in my childhood.

Now, here for your retinal pleasure is a damned fine selection of Hammer movie posters from early science-fiction to late kung-fu vampirism and devil worship. Enjoy.
 

’The Quatermass Xperiment’ (1955).
 

‘The Creeping Unknown’ (aka ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’) (1955).
 
More marvellous montser posters, after the jump…