Paris Hollywood #108 gets playful its cover text where it says “derrière le rideau,” which means “behind the curtain.” If you glance below at Roger Brand's pin-up déshabillable, she’s behind a curtain, showing her behind. So, derrière le rideau is sort of a cute way of... Er, or maybe they didn’t mean it that way at all. Anyway, more scans below, including the rear cover featuring a cabaret dancer with the great name of Nilka. Sounds like a chocolate drink, don’t you think? 1951, on all of this. See more wonderful Roger Brand pieces by clicking his keyword below.

Somehow, the fact that this original Star Wars promo photo is filled with pinholes and dings adds to its charm, since it mirrors the condition of Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder. There are some who would say the franchise drowned in cynicism, that it collapsed under the weight of fast food tie-ins, and fuzzy toys, and ill-considered digital revisionism. Those people would be right. Like this photo, and like Skywalker’s landspeeder, the original Star Wars had some scratches and dings, but cinematic believability derives from a well-known viewer psychology aptly described as willing suspension of disbelief. The key word is willing. You can’t bludgeon people into acceptance, no matter how slick the fx are. People willingly believe because the story and characters work. And in Star Wars, the simple story of a boy rising from his dusty roots to battle impossibly powerful galactic foes—and yet win—worked on every level. It still works. That’s why people who loved it as kids still watch it today as adults. Anyway, we’re just going to go ahead and call this photo one of the coolest artifacts we’ve ever found. 

Above is an excellent Barye Phillips cover for Carter Brown’s 1961 thriller The Ever-Loving Blues, which is a re-write of Brown’s 1956 novel Death of a Doll. The re-work made a few plot changes, and replaced a main character named Barney Slade with the running Brown character Danny Boyd. We can’t be certain why that happened, but since Brown wrote and published in Australia, perhaps when U.S.-based Signet acquired the rights to Death of a Doll for its first American printing the company urged Brown to make it more commercial by folding it into the Danny Boyd oeuvre. Three-plus years working on this site and we finally get to use the word “oeuvre”. We feel so complete now. 

This cool image features American actress Pamela Tiffin, who appeared in films such as Harper with Paul Newman, Kill Me My Love with Farley Granger, and the Italian production I protagonisti with Pulp Intl. fave Sylva Koscina. This photo session, from 1968, also produced the image below, which you see on the cover of the Japanese cinema magazine Movie Information/Movie Pictorial. See another Tiffin shot at the bottom of this post. 

It's been a while since we've had any Bettie Page on the site, so we were pleasantly surprised yesterday to have found some shots of her in a 1953 issue of Carnival magazine. Actually, there were about forty great images of various people, but rather than try to scan all of them, we decided to break the issue into two or more posts. So today, we're uploading only the below shots of Page demonstrating for readers the various legal constraints on disrobement for strippers in different states, with Kansas being the most conservative and Louisiana being the least. We'll have more from Carnival later.

This fun cover of Kate Nickerson’s 1952 novel Street of the Blues, is by Herb Tauss, who wasn’t just a painter, but also a sculptor, and was inducted into the Illustrator’s Hall of Fame. He was self-taught, but even without a pedigree earned assignments with magazines as diverse as National Geographic, Good Housekeeping and The Saturday Evening Post. Later in his career, he moved into fine art, and did some teaching. His work is hard to find, but below is a small collection. Thanks to all the original uploaders on these.

Below, a small selection of Peter Driben covers featuring his trademark full-bodied beauties, which he painted for six Robert Harrison-owned imprints, 1940s and 1950s.

Maybe he doesn’t look so impressive getting his face flattened by Joe Louis on this National Police Gazette cover form this month in 1950, but Billy Conn is actually one of boxing’s legendary figures. His final record of 64-12-1 was quite good, but it was his two losses to Louis that were enshrined in boxing lore. The first time they fought, in 1941, Conn stepped up in class from light-heavy to heavy without actually putting on any extra weight. It was an unheard of move, but it paid off. During the fight, his superior mobility helped him get ahead on points, and he sustained the lead the entire bout. But when he got greedy in round thirteen and tried to knock Louis out, a few counterpunches from the Brown Bomber put Conn on the canvas. Following the fight he quipped, “I lost my head and a million bucks.” After both men served a stint in the army during World War II, they met again in 1946. Conn was still the more agile of the two, and before the fight a reporter suggested to Joe Louis that Conn might stay out of reach and try for a victory on points. Louis responded with a line that people repeat to this day, but most likely with no idea where it came from: “He can run, but he can’t hide.” Louis won that bout too. The Gazette cover is from their first battle. We’ve posted the original photo they used just below, along with others. 

Above, French actress François Dorléac, who was the older sister of Catherine Deneuve. Dorléac appeared in sixteen films in the 1960s, but died at age twenty-five when she lost control of a car she was driving and crashed near Nice, France. She was alive immediately after the accident, but trapped in the wreckage, burned to death. That was June 1967. This photo showing her on the famous stairs at Montmartre in Paris dates from 1965. 

This excellent vintage poster is for the Italian nunsploitation flick Interno di un covento, which was known in English as, alternately, Within a Cloister, Within the Convent, and Behind Covent Walls. So, what exactly goes on behind convent walls? Well, they have lots of sex. With each other and with whatever men happen to be around. And they exercise naked a lot. Well, almost naked. They never take off those cornettes, no matter what, but everything else is on display, including some really lovely bushes. All of this depravity is the work of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, working from a novel—a novel!—by the French writer Stendhal, aka Marie-Henri Beyle. But we’re giving Borowczyk most of the credit, er, blame here, because we don’t think Stendhal had a scene in his book where a nun devirginized herself with a Jesus-faced dildo. What’s the plot here? It isn’t important. The question is, what’s the point? Well, we’re talking about a movie made in Italy, so the point seems to have been to annoy the very powerful Catholic Church. Mission wholly accomplished, we suspect. We gotta say though, we have never gotten this fascination with nuns. But if that’s your thing, then this is your movie. It premiered in Italy today in 1978. We have a few screen shots below, and if you just can’t get enough nunnage, check out this amusing post.