Swedish actress Mia Nygren, seen here in a still from Francis Leroi and Iris Letans’ French softcore classic Emmanuelle IV, 1984.     

Anyway, the bit that really caught our attention was not the alleged Elvis-Carmen-Sinatra triangle, but the story about Ingo Johansson being doped. Ingemar “Ingo” Johansson was a world champion boxer who had won the heavyweight crown from Floyd Patterson a year earlier. In the March 1960 rematch, Patterson put Johansson’s lights out with a blow so vicious that Johansson was left twitching on the canvas. It was a definitive victory, just as Johansson’s earlier win over Patterson had been, but in 1960 white-black boxing matches were overtly racially divisive, and so Top Secret took advantage by suggesting that perhaps Patterson’s camp managed to slip the Swede a mickey. That question was answered in the March 1961 third match between the two, when Patterson again knocked Johansson out.

After their careers were over, Johansson and Patterson became good friends and even flew to visit each other in their native countries every year. Top Secret could well have done a story on that, but of course harmony doesn’t sell magazines. So while in the U.S. civil rights strife raged through the rest of the sixties and into the seventies, two guys who once made a living beating the living shit out of each other quietly proved that, given a chance to see each other’s similarities rather than differences, people tend to get along just fine.     

Above is a worldwide assortment of the creepiest posters we could find in honor of Halloween. Interestingly, Halloween is getting more popular internationally all the time. Where we live it was virtually ignored as recently as ten years ago, but nowadays it’s not a rarity to see both kids and adults dressed in costumes for the occasion. Trick-or-treating hasn’t quite taken hold, just because the layout of the communities don’t really allow for it, but adopting new personas or playing characters is something everyone seems to love, no matter where they live. Everyone likes a good scare, too, and these films do the job nicely. They are Halloween, Halloween again, Rosemary’s Baby, Zombie Holocaust, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Squirm, Return of the Living Dead 2, The Shuttered Room, Evil Dead 2, Hellraiser, Suspiria, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Vampire Women, The Omen, The Thing, The Shining, Backwoods, Fright Night, and Seuseung-ui eunhye. Happy trick-or-treating. 

The casting of Charlton Heston as Ramón Miguel Vargas has been thoroughly discussed pretty much everywhere one cares to look, so we don’t need to get into it except to say those criticisms are valid. However, the dual shortcomings of unauthentic accents and white men playing ethnic roles were still the norm in the late ’50s. Certainly, an actor such as, say, Ricardo Montalbán would have shone where Heston merely sufficed, but cinema simply mirrors the age in which it was produced. It’s okay to use our modern world as a prism through which to examine the circumstances around an old film, but it’s best do so respectfully, because somewhere in the future people with their own prisms will be looking upon our age, and it won’t look so good to them. Welles’ Touch of Evil is genius in any age, and it touched Sweden for the first time today in 1958.     

How times change. This Island Earth—for which you see the Swedish promo art above—was a visually stunning, convincingly scripted and well-directed 1954 sci-fi classic that got skewered by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang forty-four years after its release. But the guys at MST3K didn’t prove This Island Earth had been a bad movie all along—they simply proved they were sharp enough to make fun of anything. Watching this one last week, we realized big Technicolor space extravaganzas with matte backgrounds and guys in latex alien suits really don’t look any less believable than modern sci-fi sagas. Pacing, editing and camera movement have certainly been refined for today’s attention deficit culture, but all that moving, shaking and quick-cutting is also used because the new CGI monsters aren’t really much more convincing than the costumed stuntman who played This Island Earth’s famous Metaluna mutant. Sure, the mutant doesn’t look 100% convincing—but if you tell us Gollum, for instance, does, then we’ll give you the number of a good optometrist. We have to agree with the commenter on IMDB who said maybe he’d better watch MST3K to find out what’s so bad about This Island Earth, because from his perspective—and ours—it’s a treasure. It opened in Sweden as Rymdens Demoner, today in 1955.     

Swedish actress Christina Lindberg, who appeared in the pinku classic Sex & Fury, seen here on two promo posters for the sexploitation flick Exponerad, aka Exposed, 1971.     

Swedish actress Britt Ekland in a publicity still from The Man with the Golden Gun. Her role as the bumbling CIA agent Mary Goodnight made her one of the most popular Bond girls of all time.

Four Swedish book covers from American author Peter Cheyney, part of his famed Lemmy Caution series, circa 1940s and 1950s. The books, top to bottom, are Poison Ivy, Don’t Get Me Wrong, This Man Is Dangerous, and I’ll Say She Does.

Tsar Bomba nuclear test, Novaya Zemlya Island, Mityushikha Bay, Arctic Circle, Soviet Union, 1961. These two images show the detonation and mushroom cloud of the most powerful weapon ever built. The bomb exploded 2.6 miles above Earth, yet its fireball reached the ground, its shockwave broke windows in Finland and Sweden, and its mushroom cloud reached seven times the height of Mount Everest.

Cover art for four Day Keene thrillers published in Finland, circa 1949 to 1953. The artist on these was Swedish painter Bertil Hegland, whose work we’ll be showing you more of later. More Keene info and books here.