Italian actress Sophia Loren gets a leg up in this photo from the set of her 1963 anthology film Ieri, oggi, domani, aka Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. The shot appeared in an unknown Russian film magazine, which we can discern thanks to the Cyrillic text at lower left. 

Here’s a colorful October 1961 issue of Top Secret, featuring cover star Sophia Loren, with text hinting that Anthony Perkins had a little thing for her. Perhaps, but Perkins was famously nervous around women, and was usually involved with men, including Rock Hudson and Rudolph Nureyev. He rebuffed advances from both Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot, before finally losing his heterosexual virginity to Victoria Principal and going on to marry photographer Berry Berenson. You also see a blurb on Yuri Gagarin, who we mentioned a few days ago. Top Secret claims the Soviets didn’t have the technical know-how to send Gagarin on a revolution of the Earth. Yet somehow, they believed the Soviets did have the know-how to send missiles raining down on American cities. You ever get the feeling they just made this stuff up?     

As long as we’re on the subject of Stanley Donen movies, here are two one-sheets painted by Robert McGinnis for the 1966 caper Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and the great Sophia Loren. Donen was trying to capture the mod magic of his earlier feature Charade, which had starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. We can’t say he fully succeeded there, but he did make an adventure romance full of joie de vivre that’s well worth seeing. The two posters differ in one fascinating aspect—Gregory Peck’s lower body has been transplanted in the bottom version. We know the dancing pose at top was the original, but we think the upright stance in the re-do is an improvement, as is the cool magenta background. It’s killer art for a killer flick, and we recommend you check it out.

This nice issue of Ilustrovana Politika, or Illustrated Politic, was published in the former Yugoslavia. During that unpleasantness known as the Cold War the country was communist ruled but non-aligned, a political stance that resulted in an influx of both Soviet and Western European influences. Movie stars such as Sofia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, and Virna Lisi were featured on hundreds of Yugoslav magazines. American stars snuck in too. This particular cover, featuring Jane Fonda, appeared forty-two years ago this month.

La Ciociara aka Two Women is another film that isn’t pulp or noir, but whose poster art is everything pulp aficionados love. It would fit perfectly on the cover of a Carter Brown book. If you’re a film lover you know director Vittorio de Sica made The Bicycle Thief, which makes this WWII drama based on a novel by Alberto Moravia well worth a screening. Sophia Loren and Jean-Paul Belmondo starred, and it opened today in Italy in 1960.