Page 112 – LIFE

Rail Romance: Riding the Orient Express

March 13, 2023October 7, 2013 by

That the train known for decades as the Orient Express still operates today often comes as a surprise to people who might have assumed that, like old-school luxury cruises and leisurely dirigible flights across the Atlantic, this vestige of a vastly different time must have vanished years ago. But the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, as it is officially known, continues to run along many of the same routes that made it so famous so many decades ago, visiting places as far-flung as London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Budapest, Dresden, Prague, Innsbruck and (of course) Istanbul.

Here, LIFE recalls the Orient Express of the last century through photographs made by Jack Birns in 1950—wonderfully evocative, atmospheric pictures from a time when phrases like “the Iron Curtain” and “communist Bulgaria” were not only encountered in history books, but in newspaper headlines and in daily conversation.

A September 1950 issue of LIFE, in which some of the photos in this gallery first appeared, described the Orient Express of the middle part of the last century thus:

To mystery lovers there is no more romantic train in the world than the Orient Express, which runs between Paris and Eastern Europe. The white-haired lady spy of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes rode the Orient Express, and the crime of Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Calais Coach took place on it. Legend has built the train into a vehicle for skullduggery. But there is, in fact, good basis for its reputation. Only last February, on the Orient Express near Salzburg, Austria, Eugene Karpe, the U.S. naval attaché friend of [prominent American businessman later jailed for espionage in Hungary] Robert Vogeler, fell or was pushed to his death under mysterious circumstances.

The Istanbul train is called the Simplon-Orient because it uses the Simplon Tunnel to pass through the Alps. Americans cannot go all the way as they cannot get visas for Communist Bulgaria, and luxury accommodations are now more limited than in the 1930s. But . . . the trip is still a fascinating ride through a secretive world of diplomats and refugees. It also provides a look at fringes of the Iron Curtain which can be had no other way.

The Simplon-Orient Express alongside Lake Geneva, near historic Chillon Castle.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Milan, a man handed a diplomatic packet through window.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Yugoslav inspector made a passport check as the train neared the Bulgarian border.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A rail employee at a station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

At Sukovo, in east Yugoslavia, a young Serb held a dog at the station.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Greek soldiers boarded boxcars at Svilengrad to guard the train against Communist marauders who would sneak across the border from Bulgaria to join Red guerillas in Greece.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A train station along the route of the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Aboard the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Poster for the Simplon-Orient Express, 1950.

Jack Birns/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

‘Two Lives Lost to Heroin’: A Harrowing, Early Portrait of Addicts

January 17, 2020October 3, 2013 by

‘We are animals in a world no one knows’

In February 1965, LIFE magazine published an extraordinary photo essay on two New York City heroin addicts, John and Karen. Photographed by Bill Eppridge, the pictures and the accompanying article, reported and written by LIFE associate editor James Mills were part of a two-part series on narcotics in the United States. A sensitive, clear-eyed and harrowing chronicle of, as LIFE phrased it, “two lives lost to heroin,” Eppridge’s pictures shocked the magazine’s readers and brought the sordid, grim reality of addiction into countless American living rooms.

To this day, Eppridge’s photo essay remains among the most admired and, for some, among the most controversial that LIFE ever published. His pictures and Mills’ reporting, meanwhile, formed the basis for the 1971 movie, Panic in Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as addicts whose lives spin inexorably out of control.

Here, LIFE.com presents Eppridge’s “Needle Park” photo essay in its entirety, as it appeared in LIFE a portrait of two young people who have become, as they themselves put it, “animals in a world no one knows.”

[See more of Bill Eppridge’s work.]

Karen and John were the main subjects of a LIFE story on heroin addiction. Here Karen had her arms around John and his brother, Bro— also an addict—as they lay on a hotel bed.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965

James Dean in the Rain: The Iconic Photo of Hollywood’s Most Enigmatic Star

August 11, 2021September 29, 2013 by

While he was never Hollywood’s most iconic figure Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis and a half-dozen other actors and actresses can stake a more legitimate claim to that title no legend of the silver screen, male or female, was ever as engagingly enigmatic as James Dean. When he died on September 30, 1955, at just 24 years old, Dean had starred in only three films (two of which hadn’t even been released yet). But in those three movies East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant he crafted a legacy as a sensitive, tortured outsider that has influenced generations of actors, musicians and artists around the globe.

Here, LIFE.com revisits a photograph that captures the essence of Dean’s enduring appeal. The picture, shot by Dennis Stock in early 1955, shows Dean walking alone in an eerily empty Times Square. It’s a lousy day. Wearing a long, wool coat, hunched against the chill, a cigarette loosely clamped in his lips, the actor is seen in mid-stride, stalking through the bleak Manhattan rain. At first glance, it might be a portrait of isolation, or even downright despair.

And yet . . . something in Dean’s expression lends a kind of quiet, mischievous elation to the scene. That he was not yet a star, much less a legend, when the photo was made is beside the point. In this picture, at this moment in his life, the Indiana native is a young, talented, blithely rebellious spirit in the big city, pursuing a dream.

He’s alive. He has his whole life ahead of him. Nothing can stop him.

James Dean, NYC, 1955

Dennis Stock Magnum

LIFE in WWII: Rare and Classic Photos From North Africa, 1943

January 17, 2020September 28, 2013 by

Some World War II battlefields have been immortalized in histories, memoirs, novels and films that the names alone can conjure stark and stirring images for even the most casual history buff.

But how many of us recognize names like Sidi Bou Zid? El Guettar? Seden? Wadi Akarit? To a lesser or greater degree, these and other battles with now long-forgotten names also helped to determine the course and the outcome of the Second World War. That they were fought not in Europe or in the Pacific, but instead in the deserts and towns of North Africa, might come as something of a shock to people who never knew in the first place that Allied and Axis troops fought and fought for years in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and other countries along the northern rim of the African continent.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos—many of which never ran in LIFE magazine—made in Tunisia by photographer Eliot Elisofon in 1943, as the campaign was nearing its end. The number of dead, wounded and missing in North Africa didn’t come close to the millions lost in Europe and the Pacific during the war but neither side got off easy. Close to 100,000 troops were killed, the grim total split almost evenly between the Allies (British, American and Free French, for the most part) and Axis powers (Italian, German and Vichy French). Among the Allies, the British were the hardest hit, with more than 200,000 men killed, wounded, captured or missing.

In May 1943, LIFE noted to its readers:

The Allies’ final push caught the Germans completely off base. Thousands of German officers and soldiers were obliviously promenading the streets of Tunis when four British armored cars rolled into the city on May 7. When LIFE’s correspondent Will Lang entered Tunis’ Majestic Hotel to register for a room, German officers were still drinking at the bar.

Allied pressure never relaxed. Audacious columns streamed to the coast from all directions, cutting the enemy into hundreds of hopeless, helpless units. The disintegration was complete. German motorized elements simply decorated their vehicles with white flags and drove into the Allied lines. Gasped one British general: “These last three days have been fantastic, unbelievable. The Germans may have witnessed scenes of wholesale surrender like this, but we never have.”

After North Africa, Allied eyes in the Western hemisphere were trained on Europe: by July 1943 American, British and Canadian troops had landed in Sicily and had begun the long, brutal push toward Mussolini’s Rome, Nazi-held Paris and ultimately, two years later, Berlin.

A tank-artillery team stood on alert. Expers said this kind of unit—a 105mm. howitzer mounted on a half-track— was well-suited for ground warfare in Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Camouflaged American artillery fired on German positions during Allied campaign in North Africa.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American forces in Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Soldiers covered a two and a half ton truck with netting after arriving at an ammo dump near the front.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Douglas A-20 intruders in formation, about to bomb an enemy position in Tunisia during the Allied campaign in North Africa, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia, 1943, from the LIFE archives.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Desert scene, World War II, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Three soldiers took refuge during a bombing attack.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers charged into a wall of smoke during a raid on German positions at Sened in the North African campaign, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bespattered with blood and oil after a strafing attack by nine Messerschmitts on first day of battle, a wounded half-track gunner vainly tried to swallow a sulfa tablet. The attending officer subsequently flushed it down his throat with water.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A wounded German soldier was captured during the Battle of Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

C-rations, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George S. Patton, then a lieutenant general, in North Africa during WWII, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American troops, North Africa, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

American soldiers in North Africa during the Allied Tunisia Campaign, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographs and clipped contact-sheet images (uncharacteristically glued to paper) from Tunisia.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A barbed wire enclosure held Axis prisoners taken during the Allied assault on German positions near Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Italian prisoners playing cards, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

These Axis prisoners were taken during the Allied assault on German positions near Sened, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A cactus-camouflaged half-track guarded an armored division command post in North Africa.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An American M3 tank was disabled in Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Airplane wreckage in the desert, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A shelled building behind an Italian gun position, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

German cemetery, Tunisia, 1943.

Eliot Elisofon/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE Goes to a Cat Show, 1952

August 11, 2021September 26, 2013 by

During National Cat Week in November 1952, Los Angeles hosted more than 300 felines and their owners from all over the country for America’s biggest cat show of the year. “One couple from Wyoming,” LIFE magazine informed its readers in an issue published a few weeks later, “arrived in grand style in a big green Cadillac with six highly pedigreed cats.”

Other exhibitors brought less aristocratic cats on the trolley [i.e., the now-defunct Los Angeles Railway streetcar system]. Many cages were festooned with ribbons and equipped with castles and thrones and with pans filled with an absorbet deodorizer called Kitty-Litter.

Competition was fierce, with both the cats and owners displaying tempers. The cats caterwauled, clawing at the judges and spitting at each other, while owners muttered charges of bias and politics. . . . Some of the cats were petulant because their owners starved them to make them look lean and svelte, and one judge stopped the show twice to urge exhibitors to feed their pets. “These poor kitties are hungry,” she said, “and we judges are not so stupid that we don’t know the difference between a fed cat and a fat cat.”

In the end, the best cat in show was a blue female longhair called Bentveld Rosemary, the pride of San Antonio, Texas. No word, alas, on the reception she received upon returning home. We can only assume it was commensurate with her achievement.

Los Angeles Cat Show 1952

George Silk Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE at the Movies: When 3-D Was New

December 10, 2020September 26, 2013 by

In the early 1950s, when Milton Gunzburg, a scriptwriter at MGM, and his brother Julian, a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist, developed a process that would allow moviegoers to watch the dominant entertainment medium of the age in what came to be called “3-D,” they figured Hollywood studios would leap at the chance to take advantage of their brainchild.

But movie studios, broadly speaking, are notoriously cautious creatures, and only one person—the remarkable and now largely forgotten screenwriter, director, producer and radio pioneer Arch Oboler—showed enough interest in the Gunzburg’s “Natural Vision” process to actually use the technology in one of his productions. When his 1952 movie, Bwana Devil, was released (a based-on-true-events story about man-eating lions written, produced and directed by Oboler himself), Natural Vision was a huge part of the promotional campaign.

“The World’s First Feature Length Motion Picture in Natural Vision 3-Dimension,” Bwana Devil posters proclaimed. The movie’s tagline, meanwhile, offered the striking, near-poetic promise of “A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!”

The striking J.R. Eyerman photo above made during the Nov. 26, 1952, opening night screening of Bwana Devil at Hollywood’s Paramount Theater has been reproduced so many times, and is now so famous in its own right, that it’s difficult, today, to appreciate just how strange and enticing the idea of three-dimensional viewing really was.

As a seemingly surefire draw to get people in the seats, 3-D had been around since well before Oboler and the Gunzburgs unleashed it on the Paramount crowd. Stereoscopic pictures both the still and the moving variety had enthralled viewers for decades; but no one had taken the concept as far as Arch Oboler, producing and distributing a full-length 3-D feature film, in color, for a mass audience.

As visionary as Oboler’s effort might have been, the movie with which he introduced 3-D motion pictures to the world, while profitable, was destined to be remembered for agitating a good number of the men and women in the audience, rather than entertaining them.

In its December 15, 1952, issue the issue in which Eyerman’s famous photograph of the Paramount audience first appeared LIFE magazine summed up the evening thus:

These megalopic creatures are the first paying audience for the latest cinematic novelty, Natural Vision. This process gets a three-dimensional effect by using two projectors with Polaroid filters and giving the spectators Polaroid spectacles to wear. The movie at the premiere, called Bwana Devil, did achieve some striking three-dimensional sequences. But members of the audience reported that the glasses were uncomfortable, the film itself dealing with two scholarly looking lions who ate up quantities of humans in Africa was dull, and it was generally agreed that the audience itself looked more startling than anything on the screen.

Dull or not, the movie produced for an at-the-time stratospheric $400,000 made more than $2.5 million at the box office to become one of the biggest hits of 1953.

In the years since Bwana Devil enticed (and then let down) thousands of movie fans, the technology of the medium has changed, the fashions worn to the theater have changed, everything about going to the movies has changed—except for one vital, enduring quality that has always defined the experience: a collective suspension of disbelief and a disappearance into wonder.

And that’s something worth embracing, in any dimension.

Audience members sport 3-D glasses during the first screening of “Bwana Devil,” the first full-length, color 3-D movie, November 26, 1952, at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood.

J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

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James Dean in the Rain: The Iconic Photo of Hollywood’s Most Enigmatic Star

LIFE in WWII: Rare and Classic Photos From North Africa, 1943

LIFE Goes to a Cat Show, 1952

LIFE at the Movies: When 3-D Was New

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