Elke Sommer front and center on a vintage poster claiming she's “almost too hot”? Sign us up. Sweet Ecstasy was originally made in France as Douce Violence—“sweet violence”—and fits loosely into a cycle of films characterized as nouvelle vague, or the French new wave. Director Max Pécas, however wasn't a new wave director. He was better known for his work at the forefront of the cinéma Z style, also known as the nanar sub-genre, films loosely equivalent, we gather, to eroticized b-movies, meaning sex and stupidity. Pécas is also remembered for a trilogy of 1970s Saint-Tropez erotic comedies. But for Douce Violence he's an art director, trying to make a significant statement in the same broad category as La dolce vita or À bout de souffle, aka Breathless.

Above: the uncredited front cover, plus the rear cover, of the very first issue of Ecstasy Novel Magazine, November 1949, with Trudy Hamilton's A Body To Own inside. We added the rear just to show how digest novels self-promoted their output. Readers typically bought their first in a bus station or drugstore, but thereafter were prodded to buy by mail, discreetly, to get their rocks off. Not that these novels were in any way pornographic. But they did get racy at times, depicting women who definitely weren't waiting for marriage before hitting the sheets. Often, the heroines even bedded two or three men. There was hardcore literary porn around, but it was harder to find and as a rule terribly written. Digest publishers employed competent authors, though they would never be mistaken for masters of the craft. Some, though, such as Jed Anthony, N.R. De Mexico, and Val Munroe, wrote good books. We have plenty of digests sitting around, so you'll continue encountering them on our site. You can see a couple more examples from Ecstasy Novel Magazine here, here, and here.

This poster is just a quick u-turn back to the landmark Czech movie Extase, which gave the world eternal star and electronics genius Hedy Kiesler, better known as Hedy Lamar, and treated moviegoers to the first orgasm ever put on the big screen. The poster is from Sweden, where the film was called Extas and opened today in 1933, about nine months after the Czech premiere. 

Above is another great paperback digest cover by Howell Dodd, this time for 1951's Free and Easy by Luther Gordon—no relation to June Wetherell's Free and Easy. Thinking about seeing a book rack with this kind of material for sale can only make you regretful to have missed out on the era. Though to be honest, you couldn't pay us to live in 1951—no offense to those who did. We love the promo art, the fiction, and the movies, but everything that has to do with real life... we wouldn't have done so well with that. So we're happy here in 2021. We'd like to own more of these old digests, but they aren't free or easy either. Our collection grows monthly, though. We have no idea to what end, but it does. But this one did not add to the clutter, because we borrowed it from online. More digests to come. 

We featured a Charles Rodewald cover last year and loved it, so we're bringing him back today, this time on the front of Ecstasy Novel Magazine, which is showcasing Paula Has a Price!, written by Perry Lindsay, aka prolific pulp author Peggy Gaddis. There's confusion online about the copyright on this, but it was published in January 1949. Top effort from Rodewald, and you can see another here. 

This Japanese poster was made to promote the run of the West German sexploitation movie Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern, which translates to “curse of the black sisters,” but which for its English release was titled The Devil's Plaything, as well as Plaything of the Devil and Vampire Ecstasy. Last time we saw Swedish sex symbol Marie Forså she was using a giant zucchini for something other than nutrition. Here phallic items prove useful yet again. Forså and three other women are stranded in a castle by a storm. The workers in this gothic pile are secretly priestesses intent upon engineering the rebirth of their vampire mistress who was put to death 400 years ago.

The details don't really matter. Here's what you get: naked dancing girls, continual bongo drumming, dick shaped candles, and lots of softcore lezzie action, with occasional token guys mixed in for variety. It's of course tender young Forså who seems the most susceptible to the ancient vampiress. Can she escape with her soul intact? Only a viewing will answer that question for you. We won't recommend the movie but we'll say this much—it's ludicrous, but very sexy. Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern opened in West Germany in October 1973 and premiered in Japan today the same year.

Above, an excellent George Gross cover, plus the original art, for Bed-Time Angel written by Norman Bligh, aka William Arthur Neubauer, for Ecstasy Novel Magazine, March 1951. 

The above poster is the original promo Kôyû Ohara’s motorcycle gang roman porno Shiroi mesuneko: mahiru no ecstasy, aka White Female Cat: Ecstasy at High Noon, and as you can see star Hitomi Kozue is completely flouting the mandatory helmet ordinance. Well, the point of riding a motorcycle is to feel the wind blow through your… er, hair. We haven’t screened this one, but we love the poster so we thought we’d show it to you anyway on its premiere date, which was today in 1975.