His spanking dreams come true…and more!

It’s been several months since I last published a new story on Kindle, but I just put one up this evening which should be available tomorrow, Wednesday 4/17/13, on all the Amazon sites. Just click on the sidebar where it says “My ebooks” and you’ll see all my stories.

The new opus is called DOMINANT CHINESE TWINS ENSLAVE WHINY MAN, and it’s a mix of the erotic and the humorous that characterizes some of my femdom tales. As usual I designed the cover myself in the sleazy crude style of the fetish booklets that used to be sold in the Times Square adult bookstores in the days before rampant gentrification and civic improvement.

Would you like to be in the clutches of these two dolls?

I wish I could draw better, but this crazy cover definitely captures the bizarre, horny, and unpredictable atmosphere of my story, which has everything from tittie bars to foot worship to relentless spanking to the fervent appreciation of the feminine fanny. Leo, an unemployed middle-aged man, meets Orchid, a young Chinese-American stripper, and she takes him home to her apartment. (Okay, so my hero is yet another lucky subbie! Well, Zane Grey wrote about cowboys a lot.) Leo thinks (or hopes) he’s going to have a session of foot worship with Orchid, but he’s in for a big surprise when he meets her sister Lily…a hard-working research scientist with some kinks of her own…

I’ve priced the story at 99¢ so you’re just a click away from instant erotica pleasure! It’s formatted for everything from iPads to Kindles to iPhones and of course for the free Kindle computer apps.

Re the art work, this cover is a little different than my previous ones. The earlier ones are a little more sedate, but this time I used some oil pastel crayons and an ordinary black pen and I started fooling around with the picture. I was actually going to throw it away just before I took out the crayons, but then it started coming to life for me and, as I said, capturing the atmosphere of the story. Maybe you don’t agree and think I should have thrown it out?

When I’m under a lot of stress I find that drawing is a nice emotional release. There’s something cathartic about running thick swatches of pastel across a page, pure color.

As I’ve said elsewhere on various occasions, I’m very much an aficionado of visual art, and I envy artists their immediate impact on the spectator, especially in these days when people seem to read less and less. But YOU don’t read less and less, and I hope you’ll check out DOMINANT CHINESE TWINS ENSLAVE WHINY MAN! 

 

UPDATE: The book is now up on Amazon US & India here! And look for it at Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Japan, Amazon Brazil, and Amazon Canada too!

 

Temptresses! Models! Online radio chat with femdom erotica writers!!

Sorry I haven’t posted in three weeks! March is always a very busy month, what with preparing my income taxes as a freelance writer and other work-related stuff. When I manage to get away from the computer and the thousands of words of weekly copy I do for the adult websites at the DDF Network, writing about mouthwateringly beautiful girls like Katarina from the Czech Republic, who’s one of my all-time favorite models…check her out here on DDFBusty.com…

…I try to relax a little, reading about temptresses and femmes fatale in some of the vintage paperbacks I find at flea markets, or looking at the glorious models of yesteryear in classic girlie mags from the 1950s and 1960s.

This cover accurately captures its femme fatale character & enslaved hero!

Covergirl Shirley Quimby was popular in the early 60s…which is easy to understand!

But I’m starting off April with a bang. Another story will be posted at BestLegShow.com, so check out the site with all the fantastic photos and videos done by leg photographer extraordinaire Jana Krenova here, and look for my fiction in the Stories section.

And on Tuesday April 2nd at 10 p.m. Eastern Time I’ll be a guest on the In Bed With Dr Sue online show, interviewed along with writer Edward Cantor about our various approaches to femdom erotica.

Dr Sue is an insightful interviewer and the fans call in with some provocative questions!

Be sure to visit the chatroom or call in with your thoughts about sex writing and our stories in particular. Just click here for more info! Look forward to hearing from you on the show!

 

Let’s “time travel” back to the hornier 1950s Times Square!

I did a little time traveling last Friday night. Yes, it’s possible if you have the right tools.

The first tool was a mystery novel written in 1951 (the year I was born), and which I found in this 1956 Dell paperback edition at the flea market a couple of weeks ago. By Friday I was well into it, and since it takes place in a seedy hotel in Times Square, I thought it might be fun to go to Times Square and get a cup of coffee somewhere and finish reading it while surrounded by the ghosts of bygone Broadway.

Without this cover, I doubt I would have bought the book.

The cover painting, by William Rose, perfectly captures the ambiance of the novel, which contains a shady lady who’s up to no good in a sleazy hostelry somewhere between 6th Avenue and Broadway, maybe on 47th Street–which I know from my NYC history was noted for its number of dive hotels. Here’s the 1970s version of the same book, from a different publisher–compare them:

Nicely done cover, but the 70s feeling is totally anachronistic to the 50s story.

Although the latter cover is well executed, and actually includes a clever plot element (the dog), it is totally out of sync with the 1950s aura of the tale. I doubt I would have bought the book with this second cover.

Anyway…for info about where you can find the 1956 Dell version or the 1971 Paperback Library edition, go to the cool site Fantastic Fiction here. (I made a cover scan of my own copy of the book, but the Fantastic Fiction one looks better so I borrowed it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, time traveling. Well, I went to Times Square and I thought I’d have my coffee at the McDonald’s at 46th Street and Broadway, one of the few semi-seedy places still there. This McDonald’s just can’t help but retain some aura of existential angst, literally being situated right smack in the center of the legendary vortex of so many Gotham dreams, triumphs, failures and hopes. (It’s around the corner from Actor’s Equity, after all.) But the McDonald’s was so impossibly crowded last Friday night that I decided to go back home and finish my book there while having Chinese take-out.

It wasn’t as crammed as New Year’s Eve gets, but Times Square gets really clogged with humans around this time of year, and it can feel really lonely if you’re solo and not in a posse of your own friendly humans. So I ankled it back to my apartment. On the way, though, I walked by a souvenir store at 48th Street and Seventh Avenue that used to be a big porn theater where they held premieres back in the 70s and early 80s (yes, gala premieres of X-rated movies, complete with stars, red carpet, and Klieg lights). The only thing remaining that gave proof of that theater having once been there was the sidewalk in front of it, into which porn stars placed their hand prints and signatures–people like Gloria Leonard, Tiffany Clark, and Samantha Fox. Whenever I had visitors from out of town in recent years, I would walk them by that sidewalk and show them the foot-traffic-faded names. But last Friday I noticed, for the first time, that the handprints and signatures were gone, replaced by fresh pavement.

Here is a photo I made in 1995 of that location when it was still the Show Follies theater, with Peep Land next door. I met a couple of pretty hot peep show girls in that joint…but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, in the foreground of the pic I framed a current phone booth advertisement featuring Christy Turlington, one of the supermodels of the time. I always like the contrast of porn with mainstream media’s methods of titillation.

Christy Turlington’s sultry ad for Calvin Klein was as sexy to me as anything in the porn shops across the street. (Click to enlarge.)

When I got home with my Chinese take-out (I prefer moo goo gai pan, aka chicken with mushrooms), I decided to watch a little something on the DVD player while eating. And this turned out to be my second tool for “time traveling”–a bizarre and cheesy 1959 exploitation movie about the white slavery racket called The Naked Road. Because would you believe it? At the very end, there was a great shot of Times Square back in the 50s, complete with a marquee for the Globe Theater showing something called “Spice of Burlesk.” Felt like I was right there on the Great White Way, as the lights of Broadway used to be called in those days.

I really wonder what that “Spice of Burlesk” was. Maybe it’ll turn up on DVD one day? (Click to enlarge pic.)

So at least my eyeballs ended up traveling back in time thanks to The Naked Road, which is available in a six-movie set called Weird-Noir from Something Weird Video and Image Entertainment here on Amazon. (I don’t work for them, but I frequently see their movies and have written about them elsewhere.)

Sleazy flicks, just the way Uncle Irv likes ‘em! (Click pic to enlarge.)

After I watched The Naked Road, I went back to finishing The Murder That Wouldn’t Stay Solved, which was a very entertaining and enjoyable mystery full of colorful New York dialogue and characters, written by an author I had never heard of before, but whose works I will seek out again. He wrote this book under the moniker Hampton Stone, but achieved greater renown as George Bagby–although his real name was Aaron Marc Stein. He lived from 1906-1985. Look him up on Wikipedia under George Bagby here. He wrote about a hundred novels.

So thanks to his book and the footage in The Naked Road, I felt like I got to spend a little time in 50s Times Square–and it’s my pleasure to share it with you.

 

Porn scribe’s diary 12/2/12: Oh to be vamped by Marta Toren or Debbie Linden…!

Lately I’ve been very wrapped up in myself and feeling much like a “man alone.” One reason is my natural reclusiveness; I like to spend time by myself, reading books and magazines, watching films, browsing on the computer. The other reason is business; as a freelancer I am always looking out for more work opportunities, and it takes up a lot of my time and attention. When you add to this the fact that I basically already have a full-time freelance job writing copy for adult websites and columns for erotic magazines, it doesn’t leave much time for other people. I like to socialize; in fact, I would rather spend my time hanging out–I certainly did a lot of that in my twenties before I became a very busy porn magazine editor as well as freelance story and script writer on the side; but lately, even though I have less work now that I don’t edit magazines, I feel time is getting more and more precious. I guess this could be simply because I am much older now than when I was sitting in an office until midnight writing and assembling the pictures for my first smut mags, Game and Partner back in late 1981 to early 1983.

As you can see from the coverlines, my current obsession with kinky behavior is nothing new. The late British beauty Debbie Linden is the covergirl on both issues–she was one of my favorite models back then. I got the cover images above from the great online magazine source Oldmags.com.

Anyway, back to the present. Once a week I get together with some fellow vintage movie buffs and we watch old films. Last week we watched a suspense film from 1952 that featured Claude Rains and the beautiful Marta Toren, entitled The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, released in the USA as Paris Express. It was based on a novel by Georges Simenon, one of my favorite writers of psychological suspense. Below is a vintage European poster I found at a cool film blog here.

Marta Toren, who died in her early thirties, had a short but busy career. Swedish like her countrywoman and friend Ingrid Bergman, she worked with many of the top leading men of the 40s and 50s. Marta held her own with Humphrey Bogart in Sirocco, a kind of “anti-Casablanca,” and she was fetching and cunning as she manipulated Claude Rains in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, in which she’s often photographed in a Technicolor manner that resembles the noir paperbacks of the era.

I’m glad I get out for “movie night” once a week, but sometimes my impulse is just to stay in my cocoon.

I’ve been feeling reluctant to blog too, lately, so I’m going to try to do short posts to get back into the swing of it, just sharing quick thoughts and maybe a picture or two. Sometimes I think I make this into too much of a production. (That’s my problem in general; I make everything into too much of a production.) Another problem is I feel more and more that I shouldn’t be spending my time writing for free on this blog, when I want to find more freelance work. I feel this even though I started this blog to promote my erotica ebooks which you can find here. Such is the nature of being a self-employed writer–you’re always looking for more gigs. And yet, when I get into it, I really enjoy blogging; it’s a great form of expression that enables me to utilize my two strongest talents: writing and picture-editing. Once I get going, I could blog all day…

By the way, my ebooks are also available at Amazon UK, France, Italy, Germany, India, Spain, and Japan; just search for “Irv O. Neil” in your country’s online Kindle store and you’ll find my listing of books. And if you’ve read any of my titles, feel free to leave a comment on this blog or a review on Amazon. Your feedback is greatly encouraged and appreciated. I would love to know your thoughts, pro or con! As the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in 1847, “What a writer asks of his reader is not so much to like as to listen.”

 

Fifty Shades of the Fiend!

With the approach of the holidays, and especially the first frenzied shopping day known as “Black Friday,” I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is ONE femdom ebook you MUST read this season!

Here is a tale that captures the kinky underside of the festive scene…as our submissive hero Brian takes his Chinese stripper girl friend Orchid shopping, and ends up buying presents not just for her and her family, but for a stud she picks up at the department store and takes home to screw in front of Brian…

Just click ahead to my Amazon page here to find SHE MADE ME A CUCKOLD ON BLACK FRIDAY and the other perverse volumes in my “Irv O. Neil Erotic Library”…with their covers illustrated in the wonderfully crude and sleazy style of the underground fetish booklets once sold in the sleazier porn shops around Times Square in the days before the area was “cleaned up” to become more “family-friendly.” (And do take with a grain of salt my pomposity in giving my books that “Erotic Library” label, because it is meant to a certain extent to be tongue-in-cheek. A sense of humor is an essential component of the skilled pornographer.)

On other fronts, I did the In Bed With Dr. Sue podcast last Tuesday and that was an interesting experience. I hope everybody out in podcast listening land enjoyed our chat…

Both Sue and her callers asked some stimulating questions, so if you want to get a little insight into the working process of four writers of erotica, check it out in the archives here. The first half concentrates on smut/porn/erotica scribes Angela St. Lawrence, Louis Friend, Ed Cantor, and myself. With the arrival of a surprise guest, a literary agent/editor named Lori Perkins who was promoting a book of musings and opinions about Fifty Shades of Grey, that mammoth erotic romance/BDSM bestseller, the second half of the podcast focuses more on the current workings of the publishing industry in the wake of that literary phenomenon.

Meanwhile, my own dedication to vintage publishing and its products remains as strong as ever. I went to a memorabilia show on Saturday and picked up these lovely paperbacks from the 50s and early 60s:

I also found this 1975 book about the “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s and early 1940s. Its 1975 cover by Mike Kaluta, which was probably done specifically for the volume, captures the feeling of how publishers conveyed images of women in bondage long, long before Fifty Shades of Grey.

Actually, the later 1978 paperback edition of The Shudder Pulps used a vintage illustration from one of the original magazines, instead of Kaluta’s modern interpretative painting of the weird menace style:

And a bit of history: much of pulp is interconnected with later magazine genre forms. Martin Goodman, the man who published these examples of damsels in distress–Fifty Shades of the Fiend, you might say–

…eventually published this in the early 1960s:

…which everybody knows about. And his son Charles aka “Chip” Goodman eventually published this in the late 1980s…

…which I created and edited as a true labor of assman’s love.

Anyway, you’ll forgive my nostalgic ramblings…it’s just that after doing the podcast I couldn’t help but reflect on how things have changed, cover-wise, from Uncanny Tales to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ironically, the recent reprint of The Shudder Pulps goes the more subtle route cover-wise, judging by this image from the Amazon store:

Political correctness? Ah, thy minions are legion!

——–

I found the weird menace covers in the article “Pulp Horrors” by Don Hutchison here. I found the Amazing Fantasy cover here. And you can find back issues of my seminal ass journal CHEEKS at the great online store OldMags.com.

Finally, I found the vintage shot of radio listeners here.

 

Fetish writers on the air!

Hello again. I know it’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. I didn’t have writer’s block–I can’t afford writer’s block since producing 6000-7000 words a week of porn/erotica for websites and magazines is how I pay my bills. But, among other things, when I wasn’t busy cranking my smut, I got very absorbed in reading the novel Nana, Emile Zola’s 1880 blockbuster about a nineteenth century French courtesan and the men she ruined on her way to the top of the theatrical and social worlds of Second Empire France.

Nana was a long book, and I kept getting distracted from it by spending time browsing online; watching vintage movies on TCM (I particularly enjoyed two installments in the 1940s comedy-mystery series The Falcon, starring George Sanders); and leaving comments on favorite sites like FemdomArtists. But my dedication was well worth the time when I finally turned the last page of Nana and said, “Now THAT was a great book.” Sadly, I haven’t read enough of the classics in my life and I’m still playing catch-up. For more about my thoughts re Nana, check out my weekly column “Notes of a Rebel Subbie” at the femdom/financial domination website Domme Dose here.

Let’s see, what else have I been up to? I went to the yearly NYC vintage paperback collectors’ convention in mid-October, and that was fun. I came home with a few good books. In fact, one of the things I got was Nana’s Mother, a kind of prequel to Nana which tells the sordid story of her upbringing. Its original French title is L’Assommoir, which apparently is or was French slang for a dive bar where people basically knock themselves out drinking into a stupor. (I don’t speak French, and I got this information from the introduction to Nana.)

Here are some of the items I got at the paperback show:

The following week I went to another collector’s show and found this book:

Its original hardcover title was Loathsome Women, and it’s a curious volume wherein psychoanalyst Leopold Stein M.D. speculates on the idea that four of his female patients are not merely neurotic…but perhaps might actually be what were once considered witches! The kind of witches who would be tried and executed back in the Middle Ages and up to the Salem trials. He provides background on the history of witches which I found very informative, since I hadn’t read much about the subject before. And he makes a convincing case as to why people in the olden days might well have thought women were bewitching them. He also makes it understandable why, even though people don’t generally ascribe such supernatural or satanic powers to women today, that such notions still carry emotional weight on a gut level. Also, as Stein notes (and he wrote the book in 1959), nowadays the word “witch” is more often spelled with a “b” than a “w.”

I guess I have a kind of bookish existence lately…it’s partly a way to conserve money…but I really should get out and have some other types of fun one of these days. I keep telling myself I want to go to a professional dominatrix again…

It’s something I haven’t done in several years (although I’m always window-shopping online) but I can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm. Or the courage? Or, quite frankly, the money? (Because when I like a domme, I like to see her again and again, and that adds up in shekels. This is a problem when your erotic life costs money.)

On another front, next Tuesday 11/13/12, I’ll be one of the guests on “In Bed With Dr Sue,” an entertaining biweekly podcast at Blog Talk Radio here. Dr. Sue is a sex therapist who takes calls on the phone sex site Niteflirt. Her podcast is separate, and the show covers many provocative topics from foot worship to cuckolding to how to share your kinky desires with your partners. One particularly interesting show had the topic “What Do Dommes Really Think of Their Subs?” wherein she spoke with the beautiful and vivacious Queen Kitty from the Midwest.

The topic of the show I will be on is “Writers of Fetish Literature” and Dr Sue will be chatting with (in alphabetical order) Edward Cantor, author of the femdom novella Window Shopping and various femdom-themed pieces at his blog Writing for a Queen (his queen being the aforementioned Kitty); Louis Friend, the author of the short story collections Freedom Is Slavery and Life On My Knees, as well as the creator of the blog Prurient Interests; Angela St. Lawrence, specialist in sexy phone chat and a writer whose site Blistered Lips has many entertaining tales spanning a wide range of kinky behavior; and yours truly Irv O. Neil. (By the way, I don’t work for or with any of these folks, I’m just posting their links as a courtesy and to spread the word about good stuff to read. And of course if you want to check out any of my erotic ebooks, just click over here to the Kindle store.)

I’ve been reading some of my colleagues’ stories over the past week and they are very arousing and entertaining. I recommend you check them out, and listen to the show too. In fact, if you read some of the stories before the show, you might come up with some interesting questions to call in and ask us writers! Again, it will be on Tuesday 11/13/12  at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time right here; and if you miss it, you can always catch it afterward in Dr Sue’s archives here. We’ll be discussing many of the questions people have about erotica and fetish writers, so if you love porn/erotica/smut, tune in! You can also hang out in the Blog Talk Radio chatroom during the show.

It’s a long time since I’ve been interviewed about my work on the radio; the last time was in the late 70s after I wrote an article called “The History of the Whorehouse” for the venerable men’s magazine Swank. I was nervous about that one because the radio host was known for being acerbic and attempting to bait his guests, but I managed to adopt a scholarly tone while still admitting I had actually been to brothels, so he wasn’t able to talk me into a corner. Anyway, I’m looking forward to this new experience in radio, this time of the podcast variety.

Actually in college around 1970 or 1971 I briefly had a radio show myself, on which I played ethnic music of various kinds and pretended I was interviewing experts on that week’s music (or, at least, persons of that week’s ethnicity). For example, when I played Greek music, I did both my own voice as the “host” and pretended I was interviewing someone like Zorba the Greek…people swore it sounded like I had two people in the studio.

My friends told me the show was entertaining–at least until it was cancelled by the station manager because I read aloud on the air, in a Transylvanian accent, men’s magazine ads for “rubber novelties.” (It was Romanian music night.) Alas, I didn’t have the foresight to have somebody record the shows for me. Too bad, because they would have been a fun artifact to have today. Ah, the carelessness of youth…

But there are always vintage paperbacks to enjoy!

 

Brilliant dominatrix probes my perverse literary psyche!

A rainy, dreary day in Manhattan. I went out for a walk simply because I had to get out of my apartment for a little while, and I stopped at the flea market where I picked up a translation of Flaubert’s novel, Salammbo, the exotic tale of a priestess of ancient Carthage. I’ve always wanted to dip into this book.

I recently saw a sword-and-sandal version of the story:

This is a more lurid poster for America:

Of course Salammbo has power over men, clouds their brains with lust…what other kinds of stories do I like to read lately? Or write? (I’m being 50% serious and 50% self-deprecating.)

[I got those cool movie posters from this great site here.]

I recently read the 1890s Pierre Louys novel Woman and the Puppet, about a wealthy Spanish nobleman who gets enamored and enslaved by a girl who works in a cigarette factory…despite her numerous lies, manipulations, and open infidelity, he always keeps crawling back…

Here is a picture of me enjoying the book, which I used in my brief column about it here on the Domme Dose website where I write weekly…

Amongst my various sins in this life, I freely mix a purple tee shirt with a green sports jacket…

Right now I’m about a hundred pages into Emile Zola’s late nineteenth century novel Nana, which is about a French actress, a bad thespian but a magnificent stage presence and sex symbol of her era (1867), who basically dominates various big shots. It’s supposed to have some amazing scenes of humiliation. The book is very absorbing, meticulous in its recreation of things like high society midnight dinner parties full of decolletage and drunkenness, but it takes real concentration to read. I hope I finish it. I probably will if only to get to those scenes of degradation…

Here are a couple of cinematic interpretations of Nana…the first from 1982:

The second from 1934, starring the actress Anna Sten, briefly a rival for Garbo-type status in Hollywood:

These are some early paperback covers of Nana. Both depict the amazing opening chapter, which goes into minute detail to describe how she comes onstage in her first theatrical performance as the “Blonde Venus” and, after a rocky start due to her lack of theatrical skills, eventually wows the audience with her total sex appeal and lack of pretention…

I got these Nana covers from the Caustic Critic blog, which has an interesting post about the history and influence of Zola on paperbacks here.

Meanwhile, I do my own humble best to write about the femmes fatale who walk amongst us–at least in my imagination. And today on the femdom site Domme Dose, a smart and beautiful dominant gal named Femme.S, with whom I’ve exchanged various comments on the site, wrote a very interesting review and interpretation of my two ebooks Learning to be Cruel and Learning to be Cruel Part 2. You can read her column, entitled “Learning to be Cruel: A Reminder of Why being Bad Feels so Damn Good to Me” right here. You can also learn more about Femme.S by visiting her blog here.

And if you haven’t read my Learning to be Cruel stories yet, I hope you’ll check them out. You don’t have to read the first one to enjoy the second; each is self-contained, although the second has a brief synopsis of what happened in the original story. You can find them on the Amazon store, complete with free samples that you read right online.

Just go to my Domme Dose columns here and here to read more about them!

 

Porn scribe’s diary 8/10/12: Nude girl observed by handsome madman!

I burned myself out last week, I think, writing more than 14,000 words for websites, magazines, and a new femdom Kindle ebook. My eyes have felt strained all this weekend, so I’ve been writing in short bursts on Twitter just to keep my hand in, as writers are wont to do. Follow me there until I put a new lengthy post up here in a few days.

But hey, since I don’t believe any post here is complete without some nice eye candy, here’s something I stumbled on last week–a cover from the old sci-fi mag Amazing Stories.

I found it at a cool blog called Erotic Mad Science here. Check it out! It has a cool two-part essay starting here about the kinds of gals who submit to experiments in sci-fi stories, whom the author calls “Kitty Carrolls” after a character in the 40s movie The Invisible Woman.

By the way, the story The Girl Who Loved Death has been re-released in an Armchair Fiction paperback utilizing the cover image above. I haven’t read it, and I don’t have anything to do with the publication, but you can find it at Amazon here.

 

Va-va-voom Debra Paget! This wench pleases me…

I was so distracted this morning as I tried to do my daily writing! Last night at my artist friend Marcus Boas’s house (if you want to read about him, check out this link and scroll down to my article “When Women Were the Special Effects”), a bunch of us were watching the 1954 historical action movie Princess of the Nile, on a recording made by a friend from an old broadcast on AMC. The dancer Debra Paget was so sexy in this movie I couldn’t stop thinking about her all morning…

The movie was kind of a wildly inaccurate historical mash-up (for example, they re-used Corinthian columns from a Roman movie called Demetrius and the Gladiators in the set design of an Egyptian palace), but it was a fun melodrama with a light touch, and Debra seemed to be dancing through a lot of what we saw (we’ve only got through the first third so far–you know, we want to savor it).

What was cool about Debra was that unlike the ass-kicking females of today’s action fantasy cinema, she wasn’t doing it to prove a point about “female empowerment” like they do today, thereby making modern action flicks into not so subtlely emasculating political statements. (Because today’s action “heroines” invariably beat the daylights out of men.)  Instead, in 1954, Debra was just showing off her beauty and athleticism and dancing skills, embodying popular pulp fiction fantasies about lusty wenches, wily princesses, and fearless warrior girls, and having a great time while giving the audience a great time.

You can check out the action scenes right on You Tube here. Listen closely for Michael Rennie’s great line right after she finishes dancing: “This wench pleases me!” That’s what I call dialogue!! I love that over-heated, over-the-top stuff, it’s so much fun. Every time I even think of that line, I crack up.

“This wench pleases me!” Best intoned with a British accent!

Debra Paget retired from the screen in the 1960s, is in her late 70s now, and is involved in Christian evangelism. In my opinion, her movie appearances were definitely early manifestations of her ability to connect with the Divine. And to connect us with it, too. Because I see the evidence of the Divine in such things as dancing girls, indeed I do–as the strippers I’ve known over the years would testify, if I could locate them all to ask!

——–

If you want to learn more about Debra Paget’s career, check out a great site called Luis’ Debra Paget Page here. That’s where I got the shot of Debra dancing. You can find the movie poster here. I don’t work for them; I just saw that they sell the poster.

 

A little cleavage goes a long way…

I went to a memorabilia show last weekend, and one of the dealers had a copy of this 1962 Popular Library paperback movie tie-in edition of The Phantom of the Opera. That cover offers a nice pulp fiction come-on, even if it is a photograph instead of a painting.

I came upon this at age 11, as my interests were shifting from monster movies to monster mammaries.

It was too expensive to buy and scan for myself (the dealer wanted $18, and even if I negotiated down to probably $12, it would have been too much), but I found an image of it at the site of the horror film magazine Rue Morgue here.

I had a copy of this edition back in 1962 when I was eleven. It was inadvertently lost when my mother sold the family house many years later. I never finished reading the book, but this cover was of endless fascination to me in my early teens. The bold way the otherwise demure Heather Sears looks at the camera–the bold way her decolletage exposes two inches of cleavage and the top of the spherical terrain of her momentous tatas–kept me coming back to admire in hallowed secrecy this treasured volume.

It was just two inches, but a little cleavage went a long way in those days. Come to think of it–it still does. I have a bit of a fetish for cleavage, and I actually find it more sexy than bare breasts (not that I don’t like bare breasts a whole lot too).

I didn’t see the movie until years later. It was a minor version of the story, but both Heather and Herbert Lom were good in their roles. As was Decolletage in the role of Decolletage!

Hmm, this is all making me rather silly…I better stop while I’m still ahead.