Short-fused By Showgirls!

Pictured above: Showgirls dancing with a "robot" in a floorshow at the London Casino in 1937. There's a great in-depth piece about the Jazz Age dinner club at the Jazz Age Club website, which makes for some pretty interesting reading.

The Wild Wild West

Evelyn shares her thoughts on ladies who falsify their cup size.

Lobby card for A Night At The Follies (1947).

Everyone has prurient interests; it's a part of the human condition. Whether those interests are seasoned with psychological detritus is dependent on the person in question. As with all of the pieces that make up the pie chart of the (ideally) rounded human personality and worldview, of course, it's about finding a balance. About making sure we're not so surgically focused on one aspect of ourselves and fetishizing it, that we lose sight of all of the other important stuff that makes us us; or shutting ourselves off from other points-of-view or ideas. At the risk of sounding once-again like Joe Friday  barking at "these times", with the continuing struggle rational, progressive-minded people face in the long outmoded sexist mindset that one gender is merely a pleasure device and thusly has no place in the broader world of business and human development beyond, well, developing humans (and dinner), and the equally zealous stance of another faction that brands any form of figure appreciation baseless commodification, sex has become a sticky subject.

Of course I don't need to tell about the selling power and influence some expertly teased pulchritude or pudendum has on the buying public. It only takes a web search for, well, anything, to verify that. Porn, strip clubs–these things are more prevalent than ever. I'm not putting a moral qualifier on them, just pointing out that while floor shows and burlesque houses and under-the-counter stag loops existed in the myopically viewed "Good Old Days" that a lot of people seem to want to return to, despite all of the fallout that would occur from such a backslide, that in the age of the Internet, the lever seems to have been cranked so far in the other direction, that there isn't a reasonable middle ground anymore. 

There is such a thing a sex positivity and yes, as a heterosexual male I am able to appreciate the form of a female without reducing said female to the simple embodiment of said form, or being disrespectful about it. I know you only have my word on the matter, and in the interest of full disclosure I am probably self-biased, but there you have it.

Evelyn campaigns for nudity.

Before the draw of strip clubs became, primarily, the dancers' pole dexterity and the amount of Motley Crüe and 50 Cent on the sound system blaring in the background, or Ed Hardy Lotharios with big wads of singles sitting around pretending that they're big shots because the lap dance squad seem to be paying them a lot of attention, there was the performance art and spectacle of the burlesque routine. Where basement-level, baggy-pantsed comedians would try to amuse audiences between dance routines ranging from painstakingly choreographed dance numbers with intricate costumery and thematically linked stage dressing set to live bands, to top-tossing strip teasers disrobing to records. Yes, it was still essentially women taking their clothes off to music, but admittedly the world of burlesque dancing isn't just about sex. It requires creativity, skill and panache. It's about tease and seduction, not in-your-face anatomy.

Burlesque dried up in the 1960s, but like vinyl, is hip again; it's been en vogue for the last decade or so, and fortunately it's retained the performance art aspect and sensuality of the art form rather than being rebirthed as a kitschy cousin to the LIVE NUDE GIRLS atmosphere of a Spearmint Rhino or Tom's Jiggle Hut. There are, of course, a number of names associated with the past-time, both classic and contemporary, from Bettie Page and Candy Barr to Dita Von Teese and the Pontani Sisters, and most metropolitan areas have a thriving contemporary burlesque scene that incorporates not only traditional female performers, but LGBTQ acts as well. 

One of the big name stars of the salacious stage of yesteryear is Evelyn West. Born Amy May Coomer to a poor farming couple in Kentucky in 1921, Amy moved around quite a bit from Kentucky to Chicago to Sacramento, California, following her mother through a divorce, re-marriage  and eventual relocation for plant work during World War II. After the war, Amy began to strip in San Francisco, and eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she appeared in the 1947 stag feature A Night At The Follies. In the fifties she returned to the midwest, where she married a St. Louis club promoter named Al Charles. When Al passed, she moved to Hollywood (Florida, that is) and spent her golden years interacting with fans online until her death in 2004.

Like most exotic dancers of the time, she supplemented her income by posing for men's magazines, similar to the way adult film stars of the 80s and 90s would appear as Penthouse Pets and double as headlining dancers in strip clubs. Or so I'm told.

Clearly Evelyn had some ideas about the male-female relationship, as indicated by the blurb in the top image. It's hard to tell how serious she was with the quote, as she reportedly had a pretty wry sense of humor and was an ardent publicity hound as well. She allegedly had her 39-and-a-half inch bust insured for fifty grand by Lloyds of London, the same company that Creature From The Black Lagoon star Julie London had her legs underwritten with. 

Whatever you think of Evelyn West and her career choice, you have to concede that it was a choice, and that even through all of her exploits, she carried herself with confidence and a self-awareness that intimated that she was a glamour girl because she was comfortable enough with herself to be one, seemingly not because she was using it as some sort of thrill-seeking psychological balm.

Evelyn West with her Lloyd's Of London contract.

Will The Real Dr. Beecher Please Stand Up?

Another blast in Minnesota's perpetual snowstorm cycle kept me indoors yesterday, so I set myself up in front of the television with a 50s b-movie double feature. I suppose the folks over at MGM already knew when assembling the Midnite Movies double-feature disc of The Vampire (1957) and The Return Of Dracula (1958), what I stumbled upon watching it, thus rendering this whole article pointless and meandering in its minutiae breakdown, but that's what I do; so here we go.

The art of recycling isn't anything new in the world of entertainment. The Mayberry set from "The Andy Griffith Show" has been famously repurposed a number of times for "Star Trek", from "The Adventures of Superman", and so on. There's more info in this MeTV article. When you watch enough television from the same era, or movies produced by the same studios, especially low budget ones, you begin to notice familiar landmarks and objects popping up over and over again. For example the computers in Adam West's Bat Cave doubling as the sonar equipment in The Seaview on "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" or as miscellaneous set dressing in "Lost In Space".

There was one small split-second shot in The Return Of Dracula that caused me to pause and consider if the two films had more in common than just shared space on a DVD. This shot below, of an establishing shot of a doctor's shingle near the forty-five minute mark.

Actor Robert Lynn plays a minor, uncredited character in the film named Dr. Paul Beecher. Now I wasn't as familiar with The Return Of Dracula as I was with the second feature, having seen The Vampire a number of times (it's kind of a favorite of mine). I hadn't seen The Return Of Dracula in probably ten years. But the shot piqued my interest, because I knew that John Beal, the principal actor and titular monster in The Vampire, played a doctor named Paul Beecher. Sure enough, as you can see below, we see Coleen Gray (Paul's nurse Carol Butler) walking past the exact same sign, in front of the exact same house!

Well, I hadn't even bothered to note the opening credits of the films, but sure enough, both were produced for Gramercy Pictures and distributed by Universal. Both films were directed by Paul Landres, who did a number of low budget genre pictures and directed quite a few episodes of television shows like "Flipper" and "77 Sunset Strip". Both pictures were produced by Arthur Gardner and Jules V. Levy of the Gardner-Lavin-Levy production team that produced genre pictures for Gramercy in the 1950s, as well as television shows like "The Rifleman", "The Big Valley" and "The A-Team". Both pictures were written by Pat Fielder, a screenwriter-for-hire who wrote dozens of television show episodes and four Gardner-Lavin-Levy produced Gramercy pictures: The Vampire (1957), The Monster Who Challenged The World (1957), The Return Of Dracula (1958) and The Fire Barrier (1958).

The Return Of Dracula came out a scant ten months after The Vampire, so Gramercy undoubtedly scrambled to pad out a feature fraught with time and financial constraints, as the pictures were reportedly received rather poorly and made poor box office returns. It's likely that Gardner and Levy were cranking out these little noir-horror thrillers to see if one would stick and recoup the losses from the previous one(s).  

Both films also feature great music by (and in the case of The Return Of Dracula, is improved by) Gerald Fried. If you haven't seen either film and you're a fan of 1950s b horror and science-fiction pictures, I definitely urge you check out The Vampire. It's similar in tone to the Sam Katzman-produced The Werewolf from the year before, mixing mid-century science-fiction elements in to explain the origin of the film's creature. This vampire in question's transformation is brought on by pill addiction and a reversal of the character to primitive instincts (similar to Arthur Franz in 1958's Monster On The Campus ) rather than needing sustenance to bring life to an undead body.

Trailer for The Vampire starring John Beal, Coleen Gray 

and Dabbs Greer

The Return Of Dracula, on the other hand, has all the thrills and suspense of a lackluster episode of NBC's Boris Karloff-hosted "Thriller". There isn't much there beyond Fried's score until you reach the end. Similar to the famous bathtub scene in William Castle's The Tingler, which came out the following year, we get a color insert used for the staking scene, which the trailer has the audacity to show, but in black-and-white!

Trailer for The Return Of Dracula starring Francis Lederer 

and Norma Eberhardt 

Color insert shot of staking scene, jolting enough to be effective

and probably the only really interesting thing about the film. 

The Experiment in Progress

My painting is still in progress. Not super familiar with acrylics, so the layering is taking some getting used to. For such thick paints, they sure do brush on translucent!

Doodle Doodle Doo

Yeah, I'm back with more Doodle-A-Day cards. Two more drawings of two of my favorite things: robots and dinosaurs.

Character Study

I’ve been doodling this guy in various forms over the last couple of days. Just some nerdy little guy who can fit all kinds of requirements in visual expression. Like having his face torn off or making a meek point of order.

Painting In Progress

Painting in progress! Acrylic on cardboard. More soon (hopefully).