National Enquirer from the week of July 24 to 30, 1960, with cover star Jean Seberg sporting the pixie look that helped make her an international phenomenon. Seberg is a person we haven’t written about yet, but it’s no stretch to say her story is one of the most interesting in cinema history, involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panthers, and suicide. We’ll be spending a lot of time on her tragic story down the line. 

We found this weathered but legible Boxing Illustrated/Wrestling News, a magazine founded by Stanley Weston in 1958, and decided to post it because the cover features Floyd Patterson and Ingo Johansson, two interesting guys we profiled back in December. This issue is from July 1960, and in 1967, Boxing Illustrated/Wrestling News jettisoned its wrestling coverage and went on to become one of the important sports publications of its time. Boxing had been known as the sweet science for nearly two centuries, but during the 1970s larger than life personalities like Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton gave weight to that nickname, imbuing the sport with both emotional impact and intellectual veneer. Ali and Cosell were nothing less than the yin and yang of the sport, two men who seemed to orbit each other like binary stars. Meanwhile, guys like Mailer and Plimpton were the scribes, using their pens to describe unbridled savagery in terms more suited for the Bolshoi ballet. Boxing Illustrated finally folded in 1995, which is more or less when boxing itself began to lose relevance with the world public as the dynamism inside the ring and the intellectualism outside it both withered. The sport still hasn’t recovered, and with the rise of mixed martial arts, many think it never will. More Boxing Illustrated covers and info here. 

Here’s a very nice Sir! cover from July 1958, featuring a cowboy and a vaquero dueling to the death while tied together, straddling a log, and dressed like two members of the Village People. That’s supposed to be American frontiersman Jim Bowie on the left, and since he later dies at the Alamo, we know how this fight ends. And even if we didn’t know he died at the Alamo, we’d know he won the fight. Otherwise when you went into a hunting supply store and asked for a Bowie knife, the clerk would look at you really confused, and say, “Bowie knife? I never heard of a Bowie knife, but if you’re looking for top quality we’ve got these great Gonzales knives.” 

Above is another boxing-themed issue of The National Police Gazette, from July 1950, with cover stars Jack Dempsey, Joey Maxim, Eddie Cantor, Jane Russell, and Ralph Kiner, along with calendar girl Patty Fredericks. For the record, Joey Maxim was a good fighter, but his manager Jack Kearns was never able to make him into a new version of Jack Dempsey, as he promised. And Ralph Kiner, who had hit 50-plus homers in 1947 and 1949, did not break babe Ruth’s single season home run record, though he was not shy about discussing the possibility. 

Original poster for Gojira tai Hedorâ, known in the West as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster. It premiered in Tokyo today in 1971. 

Promo slick for Tie hou zi, aka The Iron Monkey, aka Bloody Monkey Master, with Kuan Tai Chen, originally released in Hong Kong in 1977. 

Thus watching Claudia Jennings in Dynamite Women is a surprise. Despite the hype about her beauty, you would never think—initially at least—that she could be a centerfold. With her long nose, sharp chin and expansive forehead, she looks more like the type you’d find serving burgers in a small town diner. But the more you observe, the more you’re drawn to her. The smile, the attitude, and the big, expressive eyes begin to weave a spell. While Dynamite Women’s tale of two female bank robbers isn’t Oscar material, the script does give Jennings a lot to work with—she’s allowed to express a wide range of emotions, is asked to getphysical, and does well with both. As in other counterculture films, Jennings’ character soon finds herself in way too deep as the police pick up her trail. She wants to stop robbing banks, but of course needs one more big score to get away clean. In the end she and her partner Ellie-Jo (played by Jocelyn Jones, who resembles Jennings so strongly they could be sisters) must somehow survive a final stand-off against the cops if they hope to escape to Mexico.

It’s reasonable to assume Claudia Jennings would never have gotten a break in Hollywood if not for her Playboy appearances, but in at least one case—trying out for a role on Charlie’s Angels—she was passed over because of her nude modeling. Jennings never got the chance to prove one way or the other whether it was her talent or Playboy’s backing that sustained her career because, sadly, she was killed in an automobile accident in October 1979, at the age of twenty-nine. She had appeared in eighteen movies, including cult favorites Gator Bait and Deathsport, but had never been given a chance to shine in a truly important role. Dynamite Women might be the closest. While not great, it is entertaining, and by the end, we understood why Jennings has an internet cult. Based on what we’ve seen, she deserves one.     

We’re back to the French pulp today, with R. M. Letenre and his 1953 thriller Carte grise pour vienne, number 18 for Editions le Trotteur’s series Espions et Agents Secrets. We also have his 1954 effort for the horror series Frayeurs, Jennifer filleule du diable. The first book is illustrated by Mik, and the second by Aslan. We found zero information on Letenre, even on the many French websites and blogs we frequent. We'll dig, as always. In the meantime, it seems like a good opportunity to mention that our pulp uploader (in the right sidebar) is working again, so how's about somebody research this Letenre for us and shoot us some data?

Above we have two striking Italian one-sheets for the French porn production La fille à la fourrure, aka I porno zombi, aka Naked Lovers, aka The Girl in the Fur Coat, aka Starship Eros, released in 1977. That’s a lot of akas, but the plot here is really simple. Aliens from planet Eros come to Earth and re-animate the bodies of the recently deceased in order to do some kinky sexual experimentation with humans. We find all this out when two newlyweds honeymooning at a secluded cabin are rudely interrupted by the groom’s former wife, who’s supposed to be six feet under. He chases her into the woods, discovers she’s actually a resurrected corpse and, well, cue the synthesizer music. As a side note, you may have noticed that the posters list an actress named Barbara Moose. With a name like that, we knew you’d want to know more, so we located a shot of the elusive Moose in her snowy habitat. These creatures can tip the scales at up to 1,400 pounds, but strangely, this one looks like it weighs less than a tenth that amount. Probably climate change has endangered her food supply. So next time you start up your SUV remember this sad photo and recognize—we’ve got to learn to share the planet. 

Cover and interior pages from Adam, July 1976.