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. 

Above, a poster for the Italian giallo Diabolicamente sole con il delitto, also known as Nell buio del terrore, and retitled The Great Swindle for its U.S. release. The movie stars two of the great European trash cinema icons, Marisa Mell and Sylva Koscina, both of whom died prematurely from cancer. You can’t say either of them was ever in a truly great movie, but both graced several cult classics and they shine in this potboiler as lesbian lovers whose relationship is complicated when one of them marries a man. There’s much more to the plot, but when you get Jordan and Gretzky on the same team, why pay attention to anything else? Good for a laugh, and some minimal thrills, Diabolicamente sole con il delitto premiered in 1971. See more Mell here, and more Koscina here. 

We located this July 1965 copy of the British cinema magazine Continental Film Review, and found two good reasons to post it—the great Sylva Koscina cover shot, and the adverts for London’s x-rated Compton Theater, at bottom. In between you get Ugo Tognozzi, Rosanna Podesta, Luciana Gilli and more. CFR was actually one of the most serious and informed film magazines of its era, but instead of sharing scans of pages and pages of text, we posted the photos. However, in this issue are articles on the San Sebastian and Berlin film festivals, Canadian and Québécois cinema, and near-scholarly treatments on Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s award winning biblical film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Doesn't that all sound great? See a CFR with Christina Lindberg here, and Laura Gemser here. 

That’s Sylva Koscina on a June 1969 cover of Filmski Svet, aka Movie World, from the former Yugoslavia. The photo would be what publicists call a “handout”, which is simply an image given upon request to a publication planning a story or photo essay on a certain celeb. All the second tier publications are given handout photos, and similar images from the same photographic series will often appear in other publications. Obviously, second-tier magazines prefer to look as though celeb photos were taken just for them, so in this case Filmski Svet cleverly solved that problem by superimposing and reversing Koscina onto a new background, with nice results. Once we figured that out, we were able to locate another shot from the same session. It’s hard work, all this sleuthing, but if we don’t do it, who will? 

Assorted frolicsome images from Japanese celeb magazines, with “Sharlon” Tate in panel four and Sylva Koscina in panel eleven.     

It’s traditional for publications to make predictions about the upcoming year. The highly respected National Bulletin, for instance, suggested in 1968 that all Americans would be born bastards by the year 2000. We can’t attest to the veracity of that, but we can tell you most of the people we meet over here seem to think it happened long before 2000. We were in a bar just last week and this Belgian guy put his finger down his throat and pretended to purge when he found out we were from the States. Our first thought, since we American bastards are all so overreactive and warlike, was to call in a massive airstrike on his face. But instead we laughed, because it really was pretty funny, and he was so impressed by our mellow reaction he bought us shots. So there’s a free lesson in diplomacy for you. But we digress. Getting back to predictions, we aren’t going to make any ourselves, except that Pulp Intl. in 2010 will be bigger, better, and more colorful than it already is. Less a prediction than a hope is that someone takes the ad space we created. We redesigned the whole frickin’ site to fit that in, so it would be a shame to have done it for nothing. Let’s see, what else is there? Oh yes, we’ll have more gratuitous nudity, because people like that. Anyway, thanks for reading the site. Our readership has gone up quite a bit in the last six months, which is really gratifying, considering how much we enjoy doing this. Everyone have a happy and safe New Year. Below is a photo of Sylva Koscina from the Bulletin for no reason whatsoever. See you in the dos mil diez.     

Publicity still of Croatian actress and model Sylva Koscina from the film Deadlier than the Male, 1967. She was paired in the movie with Elke Sommer, who we featured as our very first femme fatale with a photo from the same shoot.