Abbott and Costello's Jack and the Beanstalk (1952)

Important news: this “classic” Abbott and Costello film from 1952 is now out on BluRay:  https://www.classicflix.com/blog/2022/04/18/jack-and-the-beanstalk-70th-anniversary-limited-edition-this-july

Important news? Well, it’s important to me, and I shall tell you why. When I was in elementary school, I had a birthday party. The highlight was to be a double feature at the local movie theater: Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd and Abbott and Costello’s Jack and the Beanstalk feature (mentioned above). My dad took me and a few of my friends to The Strand Cinema to see it. 

But at some point before the Jack and the Beanstalk movie started, he announced that we were leaving. I had the strong impression that it was all too much for him to bear.  

On the way out, I protested that we wanted to see Abbott and Costello meet Jack and the Beanstalk. But to no avail. He made us leave anyway. He simply would not, could not, stand any more Abbott and Costello. And that was that. There was a bit of a scene with my mother when we got home and I explained what happened. 

Borderline by Lawrence Block

249 pp. Hard Case Crime/Titan Books. London. 2014. ISBN 978-1-78116-777-9

This is a reprint of a novel originally published in 1961 under the pseudonym Don Holliday. The original title was "Border Lust." But I didn't discover that until I was halfway through it. 

 The Hard Case Crime publishing house markets it as "scorching pulp fiction." But I soon realized that this is material from Block's earliest period. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he supported himself by writing what is referred to on his web site as "midcentury erotica." This sort of thing has been characterized elsewhere as soft porn for the mass market. I'm at a loss to explain what we'd call it today. 

"Soft porn" seems too harsh.  It's pretty tame by contemporary standards. This makes it something of a curiosity for readers such as myself, who were children back in 1961 and grew up reading Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine. It's racier than Spillane and Fleming, but not "dirty" per se, at least to my way of thinking. So what do we call it? Smut? Filth?  

About halfway through I lost interest in the sex scenes, skimming or bypassing them entirely to see where all this was leading. Setting aside the spicier bits, it's entertaining, pretty well-written for popular fiction, and the plot moves along briskly. The book is only 166 pages in length, so I found it well worth finishing. The "beatnik" slang used by some of the characters sounds, of course, terribly outdated today. But it's interesting too, a relic of a bygone time.

Back in those days, Block wrote 12 to 15 novels a year like this under various pen names just to support himself. Kudos to him for sticking it out until he'd reached the point where he could publish better work under his own name.

N.B. The Hard Case Crime volume includes three of Block's short stories from the same era, one of which is the memorably titled "Stag Party Girl" from the February 1963 issue of "Man's Magazine." More information about the 1961 version, and background about the original publisher, Greenleaf Classics Nightstand Books, can be found at Vintage Greenleaf Classics Books.