We found two more Mafé one-sheets, and we’re now going to just go ahead and declare him the greatest illustrator of x-rated posters ever. He did non x-rated work too, but he flourished in porn, bringing a real elegance to the material, as you can see for yourself. He’s still a bit of a mystery to us, but we’re digging for more info. These two posters are circa mid-seventies, and you can see the other two Mafé pieces we posted here. 

Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Koyu Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue. It premiered in Japan today in 1975. 

The original King Kong took cinema by storm with its tale of a fantastic lost world, and its revolutionary visual effects. It also had the most consistently wonderful promo posters of possibly any film in history. All were great, but the best, in our opinion, is the version made for the world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, above. The numerous other versions are below, and all are stunning. King Kong, one of the most enduring movies ever made, opened in New York City today in 1933. 

Maybe the English word “sex” is to the Japanese what the French word “soirée” is to English speakers—i.e., a foreign word that carries more meaning than its indigenous equivalent. Maybe “sex” sounds really dirty to Japanese ears. Maybe it’s just conveniently short. We don’t know the answer, but below are six one-sheets using that magical English syllable. However you say it, just do it. 

Above we've posted two Spanish one-sheets for El Pajaro de las Plumas de Cristal, aka L’uccello dale piume de cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. This was horror grandmaster Dario Argento’s first film, a thriller in the Hitchcockian mode about an American in Italy who witnesses an attempted murder. The police make him stay in the country, and the would-be killer soon begins stalking him. In subsequent films, Argento would explore realms of gore Hitchcock probably never dreamt of, but in this early effort, he relies on mood to achieve his goals, and the English language version succeeds despite the distraction of some less than breathtaking dubbing. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage premiered in Italy today in 1970. The poster art is by another grandmaster, Spanish illustrator Francisco Fernandez Zarza-Pérez, who worked under the pseudonym Jano—aka Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, arches, beginnings and endings. Jano painted thousands of pieces beginning in the 1940s, and we’ve cobbled a few more together and posted them below for you to enjoy this lovely Friday. More on Jano later. 

Japanese promo poster for the American porno flick Glitter, with an image of star Shauna Grant, 1983. Grant committed suicide a year after this film was released. 

You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it. In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA. In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He wrote screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also became a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read. 

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. 

Italian promo poster for the James Bond classic Agente 007: Licenza di uccidere, aka Dr. No, starring Sean Connery. It premiered in Italy today in 1963. 

When Susanne Loret neglects to observe the classic 10-2 steering wheel position she careens into a ravine and goes up in flames like she had phosphorous munitions stashed under her seat.

The fire should have burned her badly enough to leave her smoking like a Webber grill for the rest of her life, but instead it somehow results only in facial scarring.

Rather than be at least a little philosophical about miraculously surviving to see the sun again after almost being charbroiled, she instead adopts a generally shitty outlook on life. She contemplates suicide. She cries a lot.

But then a brilliant doctor takes her to his eerie lab, restores her beauty with an experimental treatment and, in the process of looking deep into her large and soulful nostrils, falls in love with her.

But the doc is a tortured genius, which is made abundantly clear when he sits in the dark of his office dressed like Johnny Cash, muttering like the old guy camped at the end of our block who rattles a cup of centavos all day.

We soon learn that the doc is prone to transformations that make him look like he has a turducken stuffed in his collar. If he’d left the girl disfigured, they’d have been a perfect match, but he screwed the pooch on that.

He begs her to overlook his hideous deformity, and she explains that she thinks he’s a really nice guy, and she’s really grateful for his friendship and support and he’s smart and funny and she likes him—but she doesn’t like him. Plus, she already has a boyfriend.

The plot thickens, finally, when said boyfriend begins to suspect the doctor is some kind of monster. But when he speaks to the local cops about it, the police captain gives him that skeptical look cops everywhere are so good at, the one that says, “Are you yanking my dick, son?”

Before long the doctor meets up with the boyfriend. They dance a tango. The first number is Ravel’s smoldering classical piece “Bolero,” which isn’t a pure tango, but works fine for getting-to-know-you purposes. The second piece is the less-acclaimed “Choke Your Bitch Ass Out” by… well, we’re not sure on that.

The doctor fails to kill the boyfriend, and for unclear reasons (we admit we made popcorn and somehow neglected to pause the movie) the doc goes around town accosting random women like he’s Rick James, scaring the wits out of everyone who sees him.

By now even the doc’s loyal assistant is like, “Dude, you’re starting to creep me out, and I’m the guy who oils your pendulum.”

But in the end the doctor just would not chill, and his assistant was forced to kill him. And we sat there thinking about the freak in that Cher movie Mask, and how mellow he was about his deformity, and that Powder dude, who was fully stoic, and we wondered why not the doctor? Was it nurture or nature? We'll never know. We'll also never know where the vampires were in this flick. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is we’ve done the hard work of watching Seddok (el heredero del Diablo) for you, and now you don’t have to bother. The 80 minutes you might have pissed away, never to be regained, can instead be directed toward loftier endeavors. Put them to good use—cure cancer, find a Sasquatch. Just make sure to mention us in your Nobel acceptance speech.