Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Media


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Elsa Martinelli – 1935-2017

I just learned that Italian model and actress Elsa Martinelli passed away yesterday at the age of 82.
Most viewers will probably remember her in Howard Hawks’ African adventure Hatari!, the John Wayne movie written by Leigh Brackett.
She also appeared in a number of other movies, including The Tenth Victim (from a Sheckley story), The Indian Fighter with Kirk Douglas and in the French swashbuckler Le Capitain (mysteriously re-titled Captain Blood for international audiences).

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Elsa Martinelli was so beautiful it hurt, and was one of my (too many) movie star crushes.
May she rest in peace.

 


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The Dark Alleys of Historical Novels

Historical novels.
I like them – back home my mother was the historical novel fan, and somehow passed the habit to me, if in a less virulent way.

Now, being a reader of fantasy, and sometimes a perpetrator of historical fantasy, I somehow have this sort of inferiority complex towards historical fiction writers (my friend Claire being a case in point).
They are the square ones, the serious ones, the ones that have both literary and historical dignity, that quote primary sources and are asked to give learned lectures and all that.
Me, I’m a hack, one that mixes mummies and Roman legions and tentacled monsters.
Shameful.

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But, on the other hand, historical fiction does have a less reputable side Рone that goes back to Gold Medal, Fawcett, Paperback Library, NEL and Lancer paperbacks, and continued well into the 1980s, and is just as lurid, preposterous and risqu̩ as the things we hack do write.

So I decided to do a gallery with a few specimens – it made me feel better.

Enjoy! Continue reading →


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La Bandera, March or Die

A friend mentioned March or Die yesterday – the movie, not the Motorhead LP – and we got talking about Foreign Legion stories – being both well convinced that neither of us would survive one hour in the Legion, and yet both victims to the Legion’s mistique.

(alas, the trailer is not up to the quality of the movie itself – pity)

And so I went and watched March or Die, also known as La Bandera, a movie I had not seen in quite a while, and that surprised me for a number of reasons.

The plot in a word: the survivors of a French Foreign Legion unit, fresh from the trenches of the Great War are sent back into the Moroccan desert, to escort a team of French archaeologists looking for a lost city.
The local tribes consider the area of excavation sacred.
A violent confrontation ensues. Continue reading →


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Other People’s Pulps: Lassiter (1984)

51QCMFGb+bLThere’s a movie I’ve been planning to cover on this blog for a while now, and finally two days back I mentioned it on Derrick Ferguson’s blog post I shared.
The movie is called Lassiter, and it’s from 1984, a time when Hollywood (or thereabouts) rediscovered the old pulp genre. Blame it on Indiana Jones.

 

A straightforward caper movie with an espionage twist, Lassiter is set in London, 1939.
American cat burglar/cracksman Nick Lassiter (Tom Selleck) is blackmailed by the Yard and the FBI into burglarizing the German embassy, in order to retrieve 10 millions in uncut diamonds.
Add t the mix Lassiter’s ballerina girlfriend (Jane Seymour), a seductive and debauched Nazi femme fatale (Lauren Hutton), and a Scotland Yard inspector (Bob Hoskins) hell bent on seeing Lassiter in the can no matter what, and the whole set-up suddenly gets very complicated. Continue reading →