In 1953 LIFE featured a number of gifts that, the magazine assured its readers, were far “better to give than to receive.” For our part, after spending a little time with these photos by Yale Joel, we’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that, with one or two exceptions (those velvet glasses acting as a hairnet are kind of cool), these items are preposterous whether one is giving or receiving.
When a sequined $7.50 fly swatter turned out to be one of the best-selling gifts last Christmas (a time of year when flies are rare), department stores were quick to turn its success into a trend. This year the country’s gift counters abound in homely household objects which have been gilded, bedecked with pearls and rhinestones and upped in price. Holiday shoppers whose main object is to pamper the recipient may now choose jeweled back-scratchers which are almost too pretty to use, velvet eyeglasses which are designed to be worn instead of a hat, time-pieces for pets who can not tell time. Here is a selection of this year’s silly Christmas gifts.
Thank goodness we’ve evolved as a society and as individuals to the point where ridiculous and overpriced presents are no longer on anyone’s wish list. Right?
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Sleep mask for light sleepers is satin-edged in gold braid, has gold eyelashes, brows and twinkling rhinestone stars.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “A back-scratcher encrusted with gilt, pearls and sea shells is an expensive adaptation of a standard 39-cent model.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Work gloves with red felt fingernails and a big ring on the wedding finger.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Velvet glasses with net lenses, based on the theory that there are women who wear spectacles to hold their hair back.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Spray gun is coated with gilt and trimmed with bee and flowers, might be used on household pests when company is around.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Swiss watch adorning gold collar, maker says, prompts wearer to bark to go out. Compass in place of watch costs $22.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Leopard print gives a frivolous look to knitted nylon pants and bra. This is a useful notion of the season, being an economical substitute for the expensive fancy lingerie many men like to give as presents. The spots, which make fabric opaque, do not change with washing.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Absurd Christmas Gifts 1953
Caption from LIFE: “Glasses have no lenses, but feature what looks to be a costume jewelry tear-drop dangling from the frame.” (Yale Joel / The LIFE Picture Collection)
In October 1966, on a mud-splattered hill just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Vietnam, LIFE’s Larry Burrows made a photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible, searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive war and, by implication, in all wars.
In Burrows’ photo, commonly known as Reaching Out, an injured Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie, a blood-stained bandage on his head appears to be inexorably drawn to a stricken comrade. Here, in one astonishing frame, we witness tenderness and terror, desolation and fellowship and, above all, the power of a simple human gesture to transform, if only for a moment, an utterly inhuman landscape.
The longer we consider that scarred landscape, however, the more sinister and unfathomable it grows. The deep, ubiquitous mud slathered, it seems, on everything; trees ripped to jagged stumps by artillery shells and rifle fire; human figures distorted by wounds, bandages, helmets, flak jackets; and, perhaps most unbearably, the evident normalcy of it all for the young Americans gathered there in the aftermath of a firefight on a godforsaken hilltop thousands of miles from home.
The scene, which might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch if Bosch had lived in an age of machine guns, helicopters and enormous, mechanized military interventions on the far side of the globe possesses a riveting, nightmare quality that’s rarely been equaled in war photography.
All the more extraordinary, then, that LIFE did not even publish the picture until several years after Burrows shot it. The magazine did publish a number of other pictures Burrows made during that same assignment, in October 1966. (Some of those photos, along with others never published, appear in this story).
It was five years later, in February 1971, that LIFE ran Reaching Out for the first time. The occasion of its first publication was somber: an article commemorating Burrows, who was killed that month in a helicopter crash in Laos.
“There is little hope,” Graves asserted, “that any survived.” He then wrote:
I do not think it is demeaning to any other photographer in the world for me to say that Larry Burrows was the single bravest and most dedicated war photographer I know of. He spent nine years covering the Vietnam War under conditions of incredible danger, not just at odd times but over and over again. We kept thinking up other, safer stories for him to do, but he would do them and go back to the war. As he said, the war was his story, and he would see it through. His dream was to stay until he could photograph a Vietnam at peace.
Larry was English, a polite man, self-effacing, warm with his friends but totally cool in combat. He had deep passions, and the deepest was to make people confront the reality of the war, not look away from it. He was more concerned with people than with issues, and he had great sympathy for those who suffered …
He had been through so much, always coming out magically unscathed, that a myth of invulnerability grew up about him. Friends came to believe he was protected by some invisible armor. But I don’t think he believed that himself. Whenever he went in harm’s way he knew, precisely, what the dangers were and how vulnerable he was.
John Saar, LIFE’s Far East Bureau Chief . . . often worked with Larry, and today he sent this cable:
“The depth of his commitment and concentration was frightening. He could have been a surgeon or soldier or almost anything else, but he chose photography and was so dedicated that he saw the whole world in 35-mm exposures. Work was his life, eventually his death, and Burrows I think wouldn’t have bitched.”
All these years later, it’s still worth recounting one small example of the way that the wry Briton endeared himself to his peers, as well as his subjects. In typed notes that accompanied Burrows’ film when it was flown from Vietnam to LIFE’s offices in New York, the photographer apologized — apologized — for what he feared might be substandard descriptions of the scenes he shot, and how he shot them: “Sorry if my captioning is not up to standard,” Burrows wrote to his editors, “but with all that sniper fire around, I didn’t dare wave a white notebook.”
In April 2008, after 37 years of rumors, false hopes and tireless effort by their families, colleagues and news organizations to find the remains of the four photographers killed in Laos in ’71, their partial remains were finally located and shipped to the United States. Today, those remains reside in a stainless-steel box beneath the floor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Above them, in the museum’s memorial gallery, is a glass wall that bears the names of almost 2,000 journalists who, since 1837, have died while doing their jobs.
Kent Potter was just 23 years old when he lost his life doing what he loved. Keisaburo Shimamoto was 34. Henri Huet was 43. Larry Burrows, the oldest of the bunch, was 44.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
In a defining image of the Vietnam war, the wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie (center, with bandaged head) reached toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ, October 1966.
Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
U.S. Marine in Vietnam, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Escorted by tanks and supported by air strikes that sear the jungle just ahead, troops of the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, begin a sweep.” Vietnam, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Four Marines recover the body of a fifth as their company comes under fire near Hill 484.” Vietnam, October 1966. NOTE: At right is the French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy (1945-2006); she was cropped out of the version of this photo that originally ran in LIFE.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
U.S. Marines carried their wounded during a firefight near the southern edge of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966. Photographer Larry Burrows, whose images brought home to LIFE readers in full color the horrors taking place in Vietnam’s lush countryside, was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971.
Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines aid wounded comrades during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines aid wounded comrades during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines aid a wounded comrade during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American Marine looks at the body of a North Vietnamese killed during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A dazed, wounded American Marine gets bandaged during Operation Prairie near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines, Operation Prairie, near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A wounded American Marine, Operation Prairie, near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines eat rations during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
Larry Burrows; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American Marines receive the sacrament of Communion during a lull in the fighting near the DMZ during the Vietnam War, October 1966.
In 1963, the political theorist Hannah Arendt added a chilling (and, ultimately, controversial because it is so often misunderstood) phrase to the international lexicon: “the banality of evil.” Arendt coined the provocative expression in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which in turn grew out of her reporting for the New Yorker on the trial of one of the principal Nazi officials behind the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.
In Arendt’s view, Eichmann was an at-once monstrous and pathetic creature who represented the apotheosis of the Third Reich’s unique obsession with mass slaughter on one hand, and rote, business-like documentation and organization on the other. Here was a man, after all, who entirely relied at trial on the now-infamous defense that he had merely “been following orders” when he organized the transport of Jews and other “undesirables” to Nazi death camps.
For Arendt, such reasoning was not evidence of pure, unmitigated evil, but instead showed that subsuming one’s humanity and decency in a system as murderous as the Third Reich’s was nothing more (or less) than an abandonment of morality in the face of something bigger. (Not, Arendt insisted, in the face of something better, or something more worthy of admiration but something bigger. Eichmann, after all, admitted that his ruthless efficiency in carrying out the “final solution” derived as much from a desire to further his career as from any profound ideological sympathy with the Reich’s stated aims of genocide-driven empire.)
Critics of Arendt’s “banality of evil” formulation, meanwhile, argue that her theory argued to its extreme could actually absolve war criminals of any crimes at all. “If someone like Eichmann is, in the end, just like everyone else,” the reasoning goes, “and we’re all potential Nazis, then how can we judge his innocence or his guilt?” The only problem with that proposition is that Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, preemptively scuttles it by pointing out that, while we might all be capable of Nazi-like savagery, the entire point of free will and living a moral life is that we choose whether or not to act savagely.
The potential for criminality is not the same as acting in a criminal way. Arendt’s critics often ignore or willfully blur that distinction.
Here, more than five decades after his May 1962 execution by hanging in Israel after a 14-week war-crimes trial, LIFE.com presents pictures of Eichmann in prison: raw, strangely intimate photographs by Gjon Mili chronicling the “arch war criminal” (as LIFE put it) engaged in the most quotidian of pursuits reading, writing, washing, eating all the while fully aware, as most of the world was fully aware, that what awaited him at the end of the trial was a noose.
But before Eichmann’s trial even began, the controversy around his capture and arrival in Israel was intense. He was snatched in May 1960 by “Israeli nationals” (translation: Mossad agents) from Argentina, where he’d been living as a fugitive for 16 years, and carted to Israel to answer for his role in the Holocaust before and during the Second World War. Eichmann’s kidnapping was criticized and is still criticized, by some, to this day as a violation of the sovereign rights of a member state of the United Nations. But when, after frenzied back-room negotiations, Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement in August 1960 laying the matter to rest, Eichmann’s fate was effectively sealed.
As LIFE reported to its readers in its April 14, 1961, issue, in which some of the pictures in this gallery first appeared:
Once in a while some great man becomes the symbol of the era in which he lived. Less often one man becomes the symbol of a quality of his era of its good or evil, its reason or madness. Such a man is Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, a symbol of the hatred and unspeakable hideousness of Hitler’s Germany.
Here he is in this dramatic study the world’s first intimate look at a man who vanished 16 years ago and who for all those years was the hunted, almost faceless arch war criminal. As head of the Gestapo office for Jewish affairs, Eichmann had organized with ruthless efficiency transport systems which carried six million Jews to extermination centers. After the war the survivors of his “final solution” of “the Jewish question” sought him all over the world. They had little to go on but memories of the arrogant gaze, the polished Nazi boots. But they found him last May, in Argentina, where Israeli agents dramatically (and illegally) kidnapped him.
Unveiled, he had the tense look of a jackal at bay. Says Webster of jackals: “They are smaller, usually more yellowish, and much more cowardly than wolves, and sometimes hunt in packs at night.” Hunt with the pack is what Eichmann says he did, in his memoirs previously published in LIFE that is, he only “obeyed orders.” Now trapped, he appeared smaller and yellower than his legend. Stripped of the trappings of the brutal system he served, he had no strut.
This week he would go into a Jerusalem court with the eyes of the world on him to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The trial, which has been attacked on legal grounds both in and out of Israel, was partly for the benefit of young Israelis to whom his crimes are so many lines in a history book. But more was on trial than Eichmann the man. It was the whole Nazi generation which condoned, participated in or didn’t want to know about it.
Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Barbed wire his victims once knew confined Eichmann’s walks.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Eichmann ate alone, but watched from outside. Most of the guards did not speak any German, and all were forbidden to talk with him.
Gjon Mili/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
His daily bath was a make-do affair but part of the prison’s strict routine.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A medical check after breakfast, watched by a guard, was part of Eichmann’s daily routine.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Doing chores, Eichmann mopped the bathroom floor in his jail near Haifa.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Eichmann draped shirts and underwear he had washed himself over bars of a window.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Reading and writing were both permitted, and Eichmann concentrated on books about Nazi regime.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Served by a guard, Eichmann cut breakfast margarine as matzo was put on his tray during Passover week, shortly before trial.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Trying to talk during the daily outdoor exercise period, prisoner Eichmann met unshakeable silence from prison guards. He was allowed to walk outside for a half hour a day, when the weather was good.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sitting around outdoors afforded plenty of time for Eichmann to think and to wonder.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Adolf Eichmann in prison, 1961.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
For almost a year while he awaited trial, he spoke to no one except Israeli police interrogators and his lawyers.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
While Eichmann slept, an observer watched and the single electric bulb overhead burned all night.
The Prohibition era in America, which lasted nearly 14 years and effectively banned the sale and production of booze in the United States, ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on Dec. 5, 1933. The time when Prohibition imperfectly reigned, meanwhile, has endured in the national consciousness and the pop-culture pantheon as a period of unparalleled violence, gangsterism and corruption.
These photos were made in a number of New York speakeasies by Margaret Bourke-White. Most famous for her work as a LIFE photographer along with Peter Stackpole, Thomas McAvoy and Alfred Eisenstaedt, she was one of the weekly’s original four staff photographers Bourke-White was for years an editor and photographer at FORTUNE; the pictures in this gallery were shot for that storied Time Inc. monthly, three years before LIFE began publishing.
Bourke-White’s photos ran in the June 1933 issue of FORTUNE, under the simple and evocative title, “Speakeasies of New York.” It also included some the below text in which the locations of these places were not, of course, specifically revealed.
The speakeasy [FORTUNE told its readers, betraying a bit of hauteur] has flowered successfully only in New York. In San Francisco it is dull and obscure; in Chicago, tough and noisy; in the South almost nonexistent. In most cities, drinking, like eating, is done at home or in the country club. In New York alone has the speakeasy become the instrument of a civilized social life, something between a pre-prohibition restaurant and a coeducational club. There are, therefore, in New York, speakeasies for every taste and purse. . . . The pictures on these pages present a fair cross-section of the reputable ones.
Liz Ronk, edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
At the Hunt Club in the theatre district, you could find perhaps the best whiskey in town
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
At luncheon half a dozen dogs ate amicably at their mistresses’ sides. This bar is chromium, rose and black.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
No speakeasy was as popular with off-duty aviators as this quiet place. Its proprietor was himself an expert pilot.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In the heart of a business section Thomas kept this speakeasy on the second floor. Drinking would start at 8:30 A.M. when contractors tended to drop in for a glass or two of rye.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Champagne from right to left, on mantel: half nip, nip, pint, imperial pint, magnum, jeroboam, rehoboam, methuzelah, salmanazar, balthazar. This popular place had 29 waiters and eight chefs.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The social atmosphere crested the popularity of this speakeasy, which is full of gay chintz, red and white awnings, indirect lights. The barroom is gold and Victorian-green.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Inside a New York City speakeasy during Prohibition, 1933.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
With the great historical crossroads of Crimea and, indeed, all of Ukraine still dominating world headlines, LIFE.com takes a look back at another, long-ago conflict in the same area through a singular lens: namely, that of the very earliest war photography.
The Crimean War of the 1850s, after all, was arguably where the genre was born, with British photographers like Roger Fenton (1819 – 1869) and James Robertson (1813 – 1888), the Italian-British Felice Beato (1832 – 1909) and the Austro-Hungarian Carol Szathmari (1812 – 1887) making what most historians consider the very first photographs of a major military conflict. Their pictures might lack the often-brutal drama of modern war photography, but they nevertheless serve as compelling documentation of the look and, in a sense, the logistics of mid-19th century warfare. Within a few years, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others would document the American Civil War more thoroughly and graphically than Fenton, Robertson, Beato or any others managed in Crimea — a clear indication of how rapidly photography took hold as a critical method of reportage.
Incidentally, some readers might recall Errol Morris’ epic three-part Opinionator column in the New York Times several years ago, when the filmmaker and essayist delved deep into two particular Roger Fenton photos from the Crimean War. If you’re not familiar with it, read the whole thing. It’s astonishing. Here’s one of the Fenton photos Morris examined — with his customarily obsessive, wry and deeply intelligent eye.
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Crimean War c. 1855
Mansell Collection The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a few other notable modern works, Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, helped shape the look and feel of American drama for decades to come. But nothing that occurred during the play’s original Broadway run eclipsed the emergence of a young Marlon Brando as a major creative force and a star to be reckoned with. Decades after the original Broadway premiere on Dec. 3, 1947, LIFE.com presents photos — some of which never ran in the magazine — taken during rehearsals by photographer Eliot Elisofon.
Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, the 1947 production remains a touchstone in American drama, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for the year’s best play, as well as a Best Actress Tony for Tandy for her seminal performance as the unstable, alcoholic, melodramatic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Despite all the accolades it earned, however, the 24-year Brando’s galvanizing turn as Stanley Kowalski — in both the play and in Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation — was what really seared the production into the pop-culture consciousness.
Gritty, sensual, violent and bleak, Williams’ great play remains one of a handful of utterly indispensable 20th-century American dramatic works, while the sensual ferocity of Brando’s Stanley can still shock, seven decades after he first unleashed the character on a rapt theatergoing public.
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Kim Hunter (left), Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and others in rehearsal for the original production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ (Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tennessee Williams on the set of Streetcar Named Desire
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
