1958-09-10 — Page 4

THE CHINA MAIL, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1958.7

Scared to death?

NEW YORK

How do you react when

you hear the story about the little boy who asked his mother: "Mummy, why am I always going round in circles?" And his mother replied: "Be quiet, Henry, or I will nail your other foot to the floor?"

Do you find it horrible?

Tasteless? Unfunny?

This is the kind of story told you can expect to be by responsible people in America today.

And just as you would

be considered dreary if you did not laugh, so you would

They'll bury you free

by ARTHUR BRITTENDEN

"Will each of you send her

from your head?"

be thought curiously three hatre starchy if you expressed

Twenty-three thousand people surprise at the host of grotesquely distorted did zu. And a special staff had to be taken on to deal with the

figures with an obsession for death and the spilling of blocd who are puruded from coast to const 00 tele- vision.

These ghoulish charac- ters have millions of follow- ers, adults as well as child. ren. But not one voice has yet been raised in protest. against them.

OUTLANDISH

No cae knows how the craze started. And, in an alfempt to explain its growing following: psychiatrists are turning out reasons almost as outlandish as the cult itself.

But

revidly macabre null

When viewers were told they could go along to the studia to meet Roland, 13,000 pouple look up the invitation. Trame blocks mretched for miles and people who got out of their cars to walk were jammed round studio for hours,

ndvertisements this week for a im whose makera bost: "The Arst time atomic mutation

on hunian beings has been showni on the screen."

ате

Even the record com- panies cashing in. One record, Dinner with Dracula - it features a mummy.

and vampire, Dracula's daughter, who cerves her Roland before thin an un-

Beid guests actur in k lotc

Instead ut heard-of thetics-has household-name notoriety today. His telephone water bas had huge rings day and night and there

Sales. So has is a constant stream of callers

this home

the

One mon took him a coflin

skeleton and containing a skulls.

14

As word of Ruland's horrify ing activities has spread, more

a second re- cord or one

Get-well card

-crackie

style

Cine

side

Her The Art Mur; on the other Terrible Ivan-To Rob Graves Was His Hideous Plan,

few shillings.

I heard one little boy-he was pointing at one of these toys in the form of a human eye which sprouted six ispa-eays “Oh, mum, I love that." His mother bought it for him.

Children ore also offered rubber masks which give them gnarled and discoloured faces.

ing

BEST SELLERS

Sadistic paintings are appear- on ashtrays, drinking glasses, napkins, and table muts. And, Bay the makers they are selling in their tena of thousands,

One painting shows a muti slumped over ls desk, a dagger in his back. His Jeague, who has kille him, La saying: "Sorry, Charlie, but busines is business,"

In toany shop windows han authenticooking shrunken heads, the lips threaded together with string

There are also the jokes which run from the macabre and the

to obscence

cruci play on

CHINESE, MAINLAND

MUTUAL NON-RECOGNITION

KA DULLES

STOP

'ISLANDS

London Express Service

Vice?-I Couldn't

WALKED one day this week through what people are beginning to call London's race riot district.

Notting Hill was once a prim western suburb physical sicknes and deformity in the days when the Grossmith brothers wrote.

In a country which, as quickly

Boll these records sell for a as it develops strange cults, cella-their-affectionate satire of the Victorian lower

psychiatril In record stores on lis

explain and more television

up ghoul-like they are played again and again

a rush to diagnose the horror

have dreamed

thiau is certain gures to leer and cackle Le

vlowers.

It has already gone on too long and has too many people in its grip To be passed transient odility in

life.

of as a

American

DESPERATE

have

at by teenagers.

THE SIGNS

· I walked round New York's Those who question

main shopping streets for about tho two- an hour. Everywhere there are morality of letting loone headed monsters, blood-sucking signs of this horror cult. There #stationery shop bats and

family is scarcely wolfmen

had that does not have decks 02 audiences quickly In its incursion into television. their minds made up for them, horror cards for sale, for example, the hold of the

The alternative has become ghout craze is nowhere stronger

and minvolved: thun in Philadelphia, a city lang clear

BITLUN or considered by Americans to be horror an the one of their most cultured and your viewers, staid.

There, twice

TV a week. screpus are now handled over to an ex-university graduate who goes into thousands of homes moriacal Agure known as

Roland.

He lives In An underground crypt where sister test tubes

laboratory froth on w

bench, Around him move a vampire wife, a companion who devours boding-drad or olive-and un amoeba like creature which studio technielons devised from a cheese-cloth bag of jelly.

TOP BILLING

Roland, who a few months ago was making only brief appear- ances in programme breaks, has now shut to peak-hour billing on Friday and Saturday nights.

The extent of his import on viewers was made clear when Roland announced that his wife needed a fresh pillow for her coffa. He then asked viewers:

ROLEX

Orchid

MOISTNICE+PROCIOS

Put lose

Film companies, desperte to meet the challenge of television, have jumped, not surprisingly, on the horror bandwagon,

First they dug out old coples

alid of Dracula

Frankenstein hns. Now they are turning out new productions which, in their old repulsiveness, make the

recpies" po pale as a nursery tale,

Some cinemas are even invit

people

their Ing

Lo make will-or take out an insurance polley-botore they see some of these horror films. The policies, sad to be lodged with Lloyd's of London, do not cover people with known heart conditions or those who might commit suicide during the showing of the film..

One company is offering "free burint" to anyone frightened to death.

In other cinemas nurses stand by to serve "courge cocktails."

Even New York's most distin guished newspapers have carried

TYLOWERLIKE (yet superbly strong),

dainty (yet taking humidity in its stride, laughing at dust and moliture)

... (the Orchid, by Rolex of Geneva)... perfectly suiting its name, and exquisitely accurate to time a gay and busy life ...the Orchid, by Rolex of Geneva)... to elegance, which thrives unkler durem, is equally at home with ballroom silks und satins or country-house camel-amal cashmere ... (the Orchid, by Rolex of Geneva)... this watch with lù diamond-cut gold case is a wrist-watch for the world's most beautiful women who want...deaIVO

must have a lovely watch accurate beyond belief, reflecting the Incredible skill and patience of the Swiss craftsman's benché

"Please don't ever change. You're just adorable exactly as u ure," is printed on the front of one the cards. You open it and inside you find a drawing of a ghoul with a haggard faco and eyes.

Another card slows two hover Ing vultures. Inside is the message: "Sy to hear you've bren ill,"

them, there has naturally been middle-class, "The Diary of a Nobody."

craze.

THE THEORIES

One theory which has eminent bucking is that by

are finding excape Americans from the potential horror of nuclear world, which they fec) 19 beyond their control,

Notting Hil was just the signs of it. The unmistakable port of district they had in mind, signs you can see any day or with its stucco-fronted, Jerraced night around Soho or Shepherd's houses, their bow-windowed Market. parlours discretly curtnined against the quiet streets.

Now the heirs of the "No- bodies" have moved away from Notting Hill into the subloplas of outer London, And Notting Hill has slipped badly on the social scale.

What "vice" there might have been was keeping itselt very much under cover.

Yet a low

Notting Hill that day looked very much like any other poor district of London. hours later, under the cloak of darkness, the rlots flared again.

There is no shortage

of

Another view is that there is a streak of violence and hatred In the streels, I passed Indian In Everyone

Dat and

most women in sorls and Chinese girls uutiot through in tight, high-collared dresses. theories about the genesis of the people and watching a homor show.

In the maze of identical streets Notting Hill trouble. I will not What is the real reason for aroundh the teeming street weary you with mine, But there worth the horror craze? i do not market of the Portobello Road, are one or two points lenow and, like many others, I coloured West Indians were considering. cannot understand P.

But I can remember one little girl run

much in evidence.

See It!

- PETER - BURGOYNE'S- -News From Britain.

Clearly the British fell the prisoner." Their embarrussett gesture of deflance was justified, captors didn't know what to do

had consulted no ce

with them and asked the Ice- Iceland

landic Navy to take them back, about the new limit and had

turned down repeated British offers to consult and compromise over the tricky problem of fish- Ing arcas,

refused to

In a massive huff the Icelanders have their fellow- countrymen returned and these had to be transferred to one of the Royal Navy ships,

But what had started out as

Then some of the trawler 4 drama.20on same to look sidppers began to get restive. It vaguely farcical when Irelanders was all very well showing the and Brilons met in the

grey Icelanders that British trawler- northern waters.

iren would fish inside the twelve- mile limit if they felt like it- but just nt the moment the area didn't seem worth fishing. catches were so poor.

In specially designated areas the British frigates played lag with the Icelandic Kunboats,

First, that the actual rioters, seeing Coloured children played in the people who resort to active using their superior speed to cut the streets. A smai! Jamaican violence, represent a very, very them off whenever they tried to screaming boy pushed a playground swing small percentage of the crowds approach a British trawler,

for a couple of white girls. Some who throng the streets when the Icelandle sailors who boarded 100 of the coloured children already trouble starts.

a British trowler were

she

Toy shops show off trays of

Horribles," There from a shop when "Little are china Ogures, named Holc in the Head, Three-arined Pete, alown a shrunken head. That I can understand.

and The Vesture, between 5s, and 78.

They cost

on

had a sharp London edge their soft Caribbean accents.

Vice, I had been told, flourish- ed in Notting H. I looked for

No, thank you, I won't

shake his hand!

A

man

It

When the

first

V2

struck

10

Secend that Brixton and Step- which both have larger ney. coloured communities in Net- ting Hill, have been free of violence. And some parts of Stepney have had a bad re- putation

a for vice for long ilme.

Third, that a politicsi or- ganisation in the area has for some me now been running a "Keep Britain White" campaign.

Fourth, that violence has only erupted at night; during the day everything. has been quiet,

Consider these points. Do they add up to spontaneous rociol hatred?

Meet Tony Boy

Since switching sides ofter his

The really hep among AMSTERDAM,

captare in 1945 he has become London he joked: "A pity It Britain's teenage population ONE-TIME Ger- America's satellite savicor, hos landed ол the wrong are switching from Teddy

who

was his Jupiter rocket, planet." His atlitude

now Boy to Tony Boy dress. was developed from the V2 by his building the monster against responsible for the almost all-German team, which which V2 is a squib is equally The travesty of Edwardian violent death

succeeded In putting up a cynical; "If the only way I can satelite ofler the home-grown Lulid rockels is

litary maiming of more than Vanguard had miserably failed. purposes that is the way I will 9,000 British civilians is being honoured here by Englishmen.

or

I THINK...

do it."

107

Why, then, is von Braun, the unquestioned founder of long

Simply treatment?

clothes which for several years now has been the uniform of thousands of adolescent youths and, incidentally, the symbol of Juvenile gangsterlemis, being abandoned in favour of this new silek style based of what

But as I watch these queues range terror, getting this guest-the well-dressed Italian wears.

this lion of honour

He Is 46 year old Dr crowding to moet Wernher VOIL Braun, the of the latching pad, I because he is a scientist, and Handsome, bull shouldered cannot help thinking of

that othom trained in the relentine Esiantist who invented the other war-time queue at

New discipline think about these V2 rocket which bombarded Cross waiting to buy Ash things in an off-beat way. England for 201 terrifying three-deep Ine of workaday days after the Luftwaffe and English women, who suddenly DESERTION been swept out of the skies. became a mangled mass when

science.

Trousers are still drainpipe width, but the thick-soled Teddy Boy "creepers" are replaced by wafer-thin pointed shoes of an- polished leather. Most notable difference; the long-often knee-lengu-Edwardian jacicets are "out," and plain, short, boxy among them. To me blood is a von Braun special exploded

jackets with high lapels are "In." Even von Braun's desertion thicker than the camaraderie of of his

native country in Hair styles are changing, too, defeat seems entirely normal The laborious, well-greased Perhaps more than any other to the Germon rocket, mas here, duck-tall arrangements are be person von Braun epitomises To the dedicated scientist "the Ing cropped down to something

peculiar

mind facilities for research" matter which the owner' hopes makes Brando more than feelings for him look like Marion

ploying Mark Anthony,

Some Tony Boys have begun sporting gold earrings.

Fashion Footnote for Best Generation: Blue jeana are "out" Lamionwise. Their place is being taken by "safari" sincios, Tue perhaps to some defect is tailored from khaki drill, my scientific training, I cannot

thu

Whenever he shows up at the rocket congress here, English men who, liko me, had been on the receiving end of his fadis- criminately murderous weapon Iine up to shake his hand.

sclentine shoulder in to be which is humane and culti far American near him

when the Presevated, yet deleated to the native mil. comeras fash Dutchmen in

art of building this

city, which wis cruelly art

weapons.

That is why the moon ta in occupied by

Braun's yon marauding countrymen, are He claims that his consuming such demand by the ecicntiu treating him like some Rem- loyalty is to space, to extending it offers exceptional facilities

Imowlodge about the realms for experiment, Sinco von Braun ricked his beyond earth. But his business back gallantly rescuing a lady's dress is Recatono Arsenal, handkerchief on Monday Alabama.

brandt of the rocket age.

acores of admirers have paid

destructive

sympathetic respect in his room HIS EXCUSE

at the Holel Exope where he

is lying on a board.

the

soc things this way, Von Braun Cod War

uncrownod bo the

may now

king of Cape Canaveral, but I will not shake the hand which All these men hustling round Ask von Braun how he fell fashioned the rocket that made too many hard landings on Hiker's former Junior genius about making

V2 for Britists homes for thero to be scientists, are fellow

Imbued Hitler

and he says, without

no hard feelings. degree of that hypocrisy, that it was simply an warped Freemasonry which excuse 10 get on bidding washer .out social sla so long rockets. The means justified the end-however terrible that was Von Bram has certainly for thousands of people he had served the science of rocketry, never met.

with zome

|as relence is served.

Chapman

Mort

Laken

At week's end, though, dramı was restored when a British frigate reported that ans

Jee- landic gunbon! had tried

rom her.

MIDWEEK

Friell

TUC

"All we have to do when we call a strike is to instruct each of our members to opply to the bank for a £500 personal loan!".

WESTISH

FRYING TONIGHT

"No fish, just chips please. I don't want to have

any responsibility for splitting NATO."

SAFE

the

DEPOSIT BOXES

Britons didn't quite know how to react to the tmgi- comic business of the Anglo- Icelandic row over the dating waters around Iceland.

There was a superficial air of drama about the fact that friguses of the Royal Navy were escort- the ing Britsi trawelers into

Kunit twelve-milla no-fahing

Pincheramed by Iceland.

"I suppose it's all tight, Georgis, if you say Diana

Dors has a place here, too!"

to