This sensationalist trend in the nation’s magazines is worrying to some people, of course. The sex and violence in them have been attacked by everybody from the Phantom’s Daily Worker—which claims to be offended by “strip cartoons” and “hate campaigns” and “sex reports” and shocked at stories like “Girls in Gangs” and “Love Harvest in Blood”—to Arkansas Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings, whose House committee, investigating salacious pocket books, comics, and cheesecake girlie mags, finds that the industry has “degenerated into a medium for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.” The cheap pornography of the likes of Steinbeck, Farrell, Caldwell, and Moravia is cited by Gathings’s committee, along with the depravity of such newsstand successes as Whisper, Keyhole, Foo, Nifty, Zip, and Wham!, just as the Worker goes out after Flirt, Titter, Wink, and Climax, The Saturday Evening Post, G.I. Joe Comics. But, as Zeke Gathings himself has to admit: “Pornography is big business.” And in times like these, one must not, as they say, look a gift horse in his private parts. “Make money,” Mother Luce has said, “be proud of it; make more money, be prouder of it! School yourself for the long battle of freedom in this country!” And so, if it works, who can blame the American publishing industry for running pictures of girls in their panties, dead soldiers bubbling blood, or violated virgins, or for keeping up with current events by printing timely stories this week like “The Bride and the Hangman,” “The Night Love Turned to Terror,” or “We Played and We Paid — the truth about two who took the easy way”?
Likewise the movie-palace managers, struggling against the very TV boom that’s cheering others: they’re also swinging with the new tits-and-blood trend, what else can they do? and this weekend — at least in the area around Times Square — have booked timely films like High Treason, A Slight Case of Larceny, Devil’s Plot, Three Sinners, and The Atomic City, a flick about G-men hunting down H-bomb spies. They have no illusions, of course, about drawing away any of the nighttime trade from the Times Square burnings themselves. But it’s not yet certain just when that show will go on, maybe not for weeks, and meanwhile the streets are filling up with restless undirected masses and the summer sun is climbing in the sky — they can hardly be blamed for trying to lure in a piece of the popcorn action at the very least. If they don’t get it, after all, the pickpockets will. Indeed, it’s a service to Uncle Sam to keep these potentially inflamed and aimless mobs off the streets and air-conditioned while he’s sorting things out at the Supreme Court and the President’s Cabinet meeting. So some play the sex angle, others the executions, and many attempt a bit of both at the same time. Rita Hayworth dances for the Baptist’s head in Salome at the Rivoli, for example, and “Terror Stalks the Screen in 3 Dimensions” at the Paradise in Man in the Dark. Three-D “THRILLS that almost TOUCH YOU” can be had all over town today, but the one that’s lining them up in the streets is House of Wax, which, made by a one-eyed man, is all about reality and illusion and famous people going up in flames. Julius Rosenberg and his boy used to play a kind of baseball game in their ghetto flat using a paddle and a ball on an elastic string, and House of Wax pays tribute to this with a stunning bat-and-ball sequence that sends people leaping right out of their seats. “The Year’s Shock Drama,” Invasion USA, is on at the Fox, and O.K. Nero!, “A Roman Scandal of Roaring Spectacle,” is at the Globe. Murder Without Crime at the Beekman shares an imaginative twin bill with Double Confession, starring Peter (“the droop-eyed cinemenace,” as TIME say) Lorre, whose wife, Karen, is out in Las Vegas this week, suing him for divorce. The Grande puts on an FBI thriller, Walk East on Beacon, said to be the story of the original Groun’-Hog Hunt, and at the 6000-seat Roxy, that palatial old queen from the movie heyday of the twenties, Titanic gives way to Pickup on South Street, “The Double-Barreled Triple-Powered Forty-Five-Calibre Rocker-Socker of the Year: IT’S A BLOW-TORCH!” A veritable paradigm of the times! As TIME, open-eyed, sums it up:
a pickpocket (richard wid
mark) slaps a former road
house entertainer (jean
peters) in the teeth
knocks her out with a right
to the jaw and revives her by pour
ing a bottle of beer in her face
the b-girl retaliates
by conking him over the head
with another beer bottle a communist
spy (richard kiley) beats up
and shoots the girl hits a cop
over the head with a pistol
and kills an eccentric old necktie
peddler (thelma ritter) the pick
pocket knocks out the spy by smash
ing his head against a wall
slugs it out with him on a sub
way platform and on the tracks
in front of an oncoming train
all this mayhem is brought on when
the pickpocket discovers some micro
film containing military
secrets in a wallet he has lifted
from the b-girl’s purse by the fadeout
the pickpocket and the b-girl have found
true love and government agents
with the pickpocket’s help have smashed a
red
spy
ring
Yes, there are happy endings, but the world is tough and you have to work for them. No one knows that better than Uncle Sam, who has been flying about the world all morning, coping with the Phantom’s overnight malice, sweeping up the Free World streets ravaged by an alien ardor, hurling abuse at Russian tanks in East Berlin, rounding up prisoners in South Korea. All night long, on the battlefront to the north, transport planes on flare sorties have been turning night into day in one of the brightest pyrotechnic displays of the war, dropping million-candlepower flares at short intervals for hours on end, surprising gooks in their nighttime mischief and giving them a kind of preview of the Apocalypse before picking them off. Then, with the dawn’s early light, the battleship New Jersey and cruiser Bremerton have led surface ships in an artillery assault on the Korean east coast, and the west coast has been hit by the Polkadot Squadron from the USS Bairoko. In the daily air battle, Major Jimmy Jabara, the Wichita Ace, bags his twelfth MIG. In fact, Yanks are reportedly downing fifteen enemy MIG-15s for every Sabre Jet lost…
when the migs offered battle
in numbers [TIME say] they were being
knocked down like grouse
on a scottish moor
one cocky pilot snorted
that the requirement for ace
hood ought to be raised
to ten kills then added:
“ten hell make it fifteen
or twenty and put a hundred
pounds of cabbage in our tail
assemblies as a handicap!”
Wall Streeters might prefer narrower odds, but still, for every fifteen MIGs down, there’s another Sabre Jet to be built, and anyway, the replacement demand for some reason seems higher than that.
At home meanwhile, the President’s Cabinet has been called into morning session, the Sing Sing prison officials and Times Square program committees have been put on alert, the Nine Old Men have arrived at the Supreme Court. The Senate, not to miss any of the action, is in recess today, but the House of Representatives is heavily engaged upon major legislation, and the situation there is reported to be “one of anxiety and suspense.” Between votes, Congressmen spend a lot of time at their phones. At the White House, queues of visitors are already forming up, waiting for the doors to open, and the guards are jittery: almost ten thousand tourists out here this morning, what if just one of them—? “Simple duty hath no place for the twitters!” Uncle Sam admonishes them in firm Quaker cadences, watching the Vice President squirt across Pennsylvania Avenue from Lafayette Square out of the corner of his eye. “Chins out, chests up, lads, discipline is the soul of a army, and if any strange fruit attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot!” He grins thoughtfully to himself as the Veep bowls over a little kid; then he ducks into the White House through a back entrance, meditating on Moe the necktie-peddler’s observation in Pickup on South Street: “He’s as shifty as smoke, but I still love him!”