Andrew Nette
@pulpcurry
“It’s worse than death in the mines. You want them to sing opera as well?” Award winning author of fiction & non-fiction, pulp scholar, bibliophile, noir aficionado. Currently living in Berlin.
As you may know from following this account, I’ve a major jones for the staged photographs that appeared on the covers of late 1960s/1970s pulp & mass market paperback fiction. Expose titles did this particularly well. A superb example is HOW TO BE A BAD GIRL, published by Pinnacle Books in 1976.
If you missed it, my latest newsletter looks at 1969, the year Hollywood fully embraced revisionist westerns. One of the most fascinating was MACKENNA’S GOLD. It straddled the divide between the classic big studio western & its revisionist successors. andrewnette.substack.com/p/mackennas-...
My latest newsletter looks at 1969, the year Hollywood fully embraced the revisionist western. One of the most fascinating of these, MACKENNA’S GOLD, straddled the divide between the classic big studio western and its revisionist successors. andrewnette.substack.com/p/mackennas-...
My latest Substack newsletter is live andrewnette.substack.com/p/mackennas-...
1969 was the year Hollywood full embraced the revisionist western. My latest Substack newsletter looks at one of these, MACKENNA’S GOLD. A fascinating film that straddles the divide between the classic big studio western and its revisionist successors. andrewnette.substack.com/p/mackennas-...
My current crime read is VINE STREET by @dominicnolan.bsky.social Read WHITE CITY last year and was well impressed by it and this is shaping up to be just as good.
I miss the days when one could just put the word ‘continental’ on something to denote it was sexually explicit.
Spotted on my travels today. I wonder if there is an English language version?
Today’s Berlin flea market find. TOMB OF DRACULA was, hands down, my favourite Marvel title ever. Full of horror and strangely sophisticated existential angst. And that wonderful Gene Colan art.
For the afternoon crowd, my latest Substack newsletter is about watching films in the middle of a European heatwave. My ten highlights from the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato Festival 2026. andrewnette.substack.com/p/heat-and-f...
Tonight's film was unintentionally the perfect way to mark America's 250th. TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE is a gloriously chaotic, creative mess of sex, murder, booze & drugs. It makes virtually no sense and keeps promising something it can never seem to deliver. But, despite all of this, it kind of works.
My latest Substack newsletter is about watching films in the middle of a European heatwave. My ten highlights from the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato Festival 2026. andrewnette.substack.com/p/heat-and-f...
Happy #Letterboxd Friday. My last four on @letterboxd.social What are yours?
More 1970s Australian horror comics. The cover art for all of these is by Phil Belbin.
Cinema Ritrovato Festival film#25 is ACCIDENT (1967). The best film ever made about the ability of the British bourgeoisie to not talk about difficult subjects - whether it is their sexuality or their participation in serious crimes - ever made. Discuss.
Strong finish to the last day of the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna.
Cinema Ritrovato Festival, film #14. No doubt transgressive in its day, with its darkly satirical take on race & the advertising industry. Watching now it’s like a text about how scrambled and confused America was at end of the 1960s. Still packs a punch just not always clear who it’s trying to hit.
Cinema Ritrovato film #15 was a festival highlight for me. Angie Chen’s MY NAME AIN’T SUZIE (1985). A counter to Richard Quine’s THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG, a rags to riches story of a HK prostitute covers a lot of cinematic territory, a historical document, gritty crime story & torrid melodrama
Cinema Ritrovato Festival film #11, the new BFI restoration of Bryan Forbes’s WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND. It was always raining in postwar British cinema.
Cinema Ritrovato film #8, a stunning restoration of THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. Great performances by Connery & Cain, seamlessly fuses a sort of pulp orientalism with a critique of Britain’s imperial project & one of my favourite film tropes, white men going mad in the wilds of the global south.
My Monday plan for the Cinema Ritrovato Festival. These will all be new to me films except for the restored version of THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, which l am really looking forward to. Sing out if you are around.