-------Original Message------- From: Bill Crider <
bcrider@houston.rr.com> Sent: 08/20/03 06:49 AM To:
rara-avis@icomm.ca Subject: RARA-AVIS: Here's my
theory
>
> I've spent a good bit of time lately perusing Adam
Parfrey's wonderful book IT'S A MAN'S WORLD: MEN'S ADVENTURE
MAGAZINES, THE POSTWAR PULPS. So here's my theory. The pulps
never died. In the 1950s, they were continued in the form of
paperback books and men's adventure magazines (the ones with
great stories, often supposed to be true, like "Death Orgy of
the Leopard Women").
--
Gary Indiana's review of the Parfrey, written for the Los Angeles Times, is very much worth looking at.
I recently read "The Big Bounce," in anticipation of the upcoming Armitage-directed movie remake, and one of the things that struck me was how the young male protag kept reading these magazines.
What sort of image of masculinity tended to be projected by these stories? Idyllic or psychotic?
The reason I ask is that, in the Leonard, that scene where Young Male Protag lurked outside Mr. Majestyk's house and "The Tall T" was playing on television seemed to imply a dichotomy between Life As It Should Be Led (i.e. by Randolph Scott) and the protag's life (petty crime and dallying with unbalanced females).
Would male life, as depicted in these magazines, be anything that anyone would want to emulate?
A Side Note: For all that the Armitage sounds promsing, I kept thinking of "Reindeer Games" ... imagining a parallel "Bounce" which kept the Michegan setting and had Frankenheimer as is director as well as Affleck playing its bat-wielding protag ...
Chris
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 20 Aug 2003 EDT