Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2019 February 06 • Wednesday

Here's another movie tie-in advertisement from the November 1954 Esquire we were reading the other day.

John Payne is brought on board to sell tuxedos.

That ad tells the reader that Mr. Payne is co-starring in Love Is a Weapon.. In November 1954 that was indeed the plan but the movie itself wouldn't come out until May 1955, by which time it had been re-titled Hell's Island. (Other pre-release titles were, apparently, Chubasco and The Ruby Virgin. It also got re-released in 1962 as South Sea Fury.)

Hell's Island, or whatever it's called, sounds like a movie I'd like to see. According to Wikipedia, it also got dragged into a Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency, in which the president of Paramount admitted that the poster for the film was "very bad" and inexcusable. So I guess the poster for this movie played some part in warping impressionable young minds?

If so, then nothing could be more irresponsible and dangerous than posting an image of the Hell's Island movie poster online, so here are four of them.

Juvenile delinquents ain't what they used to be, of course, but none of these posters shows John Payne clutching a bathing suit-clad Mary Murphy, which is the image described by Wikipedia in their item on the Senate subcommittee hearing.

So perhaps they meant one of the lobby cards and not the poster.

The one on top left does show clutching and a bathing suit.