Promo photo of Austrian actress Maria Perschy from the West German action flick Die Pagode zum fünften Schrecken, aka Five Golden Dragons, 1960. 

German poster for Mario Bava’s 1968 camp masterpiece Diabolik. We’re a little surprised how few people actually get this film, which pushed the swinging sixties thriller to its illogical extreme. The lead character—played by John Phillip Law—was a thief, and a rather Machiavellian one at that, who didn’t mind innocent people getting hurt if it meant more profit. Sounds a bit like a Goldman Sachs executive, right? But where investment bankers are typically balding math majors pretending to be swashbucklers of high finance, Diabolik was 100% stud, complete with a secret identity, a high tech underground lair, and a female sidekick always ready for some down and dirty. We recommend you check this one out next time you’re in the mood for a laugh. Diabolik premiered in West Germany today in 1968. 

Liliana Cavani’s controversial drama Il portiere di notte, aka The Night Porter, is a landmark of Italian cinema, and another of those seventies films that could never be made today. It involves the sado-masochistic relationship between a concentration camp survivor, played by Charlotte Rampling, and a former camp officer, played by Dirk Bogarde. The camp is eventually liberated, but the Nazi manages to escape the Allies. Postwar he builds a normal-seeming life but must carefully hide his former identity. Meanwhile, the woman builds a normal-seeming marriage, but conceals her psychological scars. In Vienna years later, the woman is shocked to encounter the Nazi again, and soon their destructive codependency is rekindled. The amazing promo poster above uses a frame from the movie’s pivotal scene, a flashback in which Rampling performs a striptease wearing an SS uniform, after which her captor rewards her á la Salomé with the head of a prisoner who has been tormenting her. Il portiere di notte is dark, slow, and deadly serious, but for the true film buff it’s probably a must-see. It was generally well-reviewed upon release, but there were also slams from a few major critics. In the end, you’ll have to make your own decision. Il portiere di notte premiered in West Germany yesterday, 1974. 

Could this be the greatest poster ever? Were drugs involved? This little beauty was made for the Christmas 1956 West German premier of This Island Earth, and it gives the film’s famous Metaluna Mutant—one of moviedom’s greatest monsters—the starring role it amply deserves. The “science” part of this sci-fi epic involved iterociters, voltarators, astroscopes, and lots of other made-up devices. The fiction part involved the usual Earthly takeover plot, headquartered on an alien planet where the weather outside was truly frightful. But in our humble opinion the movie is all about the monster. True, the creature had its flaws. It moved kind of slowly. It had claws like a lobster where hands would have been so much more useful. Oh, and it didn’t have a skull. Which is all well and good, as long as you’re adept at ducking, which, alas, it wasn’t. But flawed or not, this monster, and this film, are what mid-century sci-fi was all about. Glory, glory Metaluna!     

Mandingo has a reputation as a piece of campy blaxploitation, but we just watched it today and it’s clear that reputations and reality sometimes don’t connect. The film has its flaws—some of the acting is less-than-scintillating, and ex-heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton is ponderous as the lead character Mede—but overall Mandingo is a brutal and realistic depiction of the antebellum American south’s slave culture. The provocative poster you see above was produced for Mandingo’s West German run, and while it wrongly presents the film as mainly sexual in nature, it’s still a stunning piece of art. Mandingo tends to polarize audiences, but those who hate it generally cite its upsetting language and subject matter. While those are legitimate reasons to refrain from watching a film, they aren't valid criticisms once you have watched it. We recommend the movie, but we warn you it’s no Gone with the Wind—it’s a lot more historically accurate. Mandingo premiered in West Germany today in 1975.     

Today we have a beautiful promo poster for Von der Polizei gehetzt, aka Crime Wave, starring Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk. This is truly great ’50s noir for various reasons, not least of which is director Andre de Toth’s extensive usage of L.A. exteriors as backdrops to the action. For that reason, this isn’t just a great movie, but a document of mid-century Los Angeles in which we see places that are gone and a time that has faded into history. We mentioned back in January when we commemorated the U.S. release of this movie how Hayden got caught up in the American commie hunts of the 1950s and capitulated to HUAC investigators, but we didn’t talk about his acting. This is the film to view if you want to see him in full, type-A, supermacho mode. It’s hard to imagine Hayden—a real-life tough guy who parachuted behind enemy lines in WWII—meeting his match in a bunch of oily HUAC politicians, especially after seeing him burn up the screen in this role, but that’s exactly what happened. Just goes to show everyone has a tipping point. Von der Polizei gehetzt was released in West Germany and Austria today in 1954.

Inspired by French author Pierre Boulle’s novel, Planet of the Apes is one of those films many can quote, but surprisingly few have seen. The premise—a group of astronauts crash land on a distant planet where apes are ascendant and humans are jungle-dwelling primitives—sounds like one-note cinema, but Planet of the Apes is an ambitious film that comments pointedly upon religion, nuclear proliferation, and the arrogance of man. Most know Charlton Heston as either a Biblical hero or a gun advocate, but in his day he was capable of creating compelling moments on film that didn’t involve the Old Testament or Michael Moore. Not that he was a master of his craft—but certain roles seemed almost constructed for him. In Planet of the Apes, Heston’s astronaut George Taylor is calculating, physical and, most importantly, stubborn. That stubbornness drives him toward a hard won freedom, but also prevents him from truly understanding cryptic warnings about what he’ll find in the Forbidden Zone. What follows is one of filmdom’s great shock endings. Planet of the Apes premiered in West Germany today in 1968 as Planet der Affen. As a bonus we’ve included the great French poster below.