Book Ad of the Week: THE BLACK GESTAPO (1975)

The Black Gestapo
by Joseph Nazel
Holloway House, 1975

Novelization of the Lee Frost-Wes Bishop production, containing eight pages of black-and-white photos

Book Ad of the Week: THE CONTEST (1970)

December 11, 1970

The Contest

by Mort Weisinger

World Publishing, 1970

Mort Weisinger is best known for his years at D.C. Comics, where he co-created Aquaman and Green Arrow in the Golden Age and edited the Superman line during the Silver Age. He also wrote the book 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get For Free, and after his retirement from comics became a freelance journalist. The Contest is a novel based on his involvement with the Miss America Pageant, an experience that also inspired the article "I Love My Wife, But Oh, You Beauty Queen!" for Parade magazine in 1971. Columbia Pictures optioned The Contest for $120,000 and the Signet paperback had "Soon to be a major movie!" on the cover, but the movie was never made.

Pressbook Promotion: THE KLANSMAN (1974)

Book Ad of the Week: THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (1968)

June 13th, 1968

The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
Random House, 1968

The film adaptation was never made.

SLAVES by John O. Killens

Reviewed by Paul Talbot

The 1969 movie SLAVES (#53 on Temple of Schlock’s “Endangered List”) is yet another screen version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and was directed by Herbert J. Biberman (SALT OF THE EARTH) decades after he was branded as one of the “Hollywood Ten.” Using material from the last two-thirds of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic book, Biberman spent years working on a script with John O. Killens, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated black author whose books dealt with racism in America, and feminist writer Alida Sherman. SLAVES was shot in the summer of 1968 and starred Stephen Boyd, Dionne Warwick, and Ossie Davis. Killens turned the script into a novel (published by Pyramid Books) for the movie’s May 1969 release.

In the story, gentle slave Luke (based on Uncle Tom) is sold to the cotton-raising, slave-breeding sadist Nathan Mackay (i.e. Simon Legree). Although Mackay is vicious towards his slaves, he is fascinated by black history and collects rare African-made sculpture. On the plantation, Luke sees much physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, and ultimately inspires a slave uprising. The brief (142 pages) novel is tame and heavy-handed with corny, righteous dialogue like: “The enlightened master-servant relationship [is] based not on the chain and gun and whip, but on actual trust between the master and his trusted slave…Slavery is more degrading to the master than the slave.”

The book does succeed in being a rougher, franker rehash of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with harsh passages including: “The two whips were like angry snakes, as they bit into his black body, drawing red blood…His stomach was an earthquake and he vomited till there was nothing else to vomit and then he vomited blood.” At one point Mackay’s spoiled, rum-swilling slave concubine Cassy (“The Massa’s bitch”) repeatedly spits on her owner and verbally berates him: “Take me! You rotten no-good bastard! Take me if you’re man enough.” (Cassy is the only character name retained from Stowe's novel.) In another scene, rebellious slave Jericho is taken to “the burning tree where they string up the real bad darkies and burn their manhood from between their legs,” but all of the “shocking” material is handled briefly and nothing is memorable. A toothless old slave crone named Carriebella is the only mildly-interesting character.

There is much material obviously inspired by the then popular Mandingo/Falconhurst “slaver novels” including: an auction where a lecherous white man fondles teen slave girls’ breasts; brutal whippings; a hefty, older female slave who runs the plantation; voodoo practitioners; and a master-on-slave rape resulting in death during childbirth. The cover screams, "The Brutal Days and Depraved Nights of a Human Slave Camp!” and “Bolder than Mandingo!” but there’s no doubt that this dull, self-important paperback disappointed the Mandingo fans. Like the screen credits, the novelization title page pays no debt to Stowe’s novel. The book contains no stills (except for a Boyd/Warwick clinch on the front), but there is a cast and crew list.

Pressbook Promotion: CLEOPATRA JONES AND THE CASINO OF GOLD (1975)

Book Ad of the Week: COCAINE FEVER (1982)

Cocaine Fever

by Mark Windsor

Based on a screenplay by
Roland S. Jefferson

from a story by
Roland S. Jefferson,
John Poole IV,
and
Demetris Johnson

Published by Holloway House in 1982
Reprinted with a different cover in 1990

The "major motion picture" was never made.

(Players, July 1983, Vol. 10, No. 2, p.76-77)