Portrait of the actress as a young woman.
This Warner Brothers promotional portrait of U.S. actress Jane Fonda was painted by Italian master Angelo Cesselon for her 1960 film Tall Story, which premiered today in 1960 and later played in Italy as In punta di piedi. It's an amazing piece, and we especially like the green hair and eyebrows. Cesselon produced several of these featuring various stars of the period. We may share those later. We've already shown you plenty of his posters and paperback covers. To see those, just click his keywords below.
Okay, happy thoughts, Jean! Give us a smile! Puppies and balloons! Use those face muscles. Please? Pretty please?
Jean Harlow actually smiled plenty, and was photographed that way numerous times. But for intensity she couldn't be topped, as this smoldering Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promo image from 1930 shows. It was made when she was filming The Secret Six. Want to see Harlow smile? There's a good photo in this post.
Sometimes you want your house to be a little dirty.
The thing about Japanese promos for U.S. adult films—and we've mentioned this before—is that they usually have rare images of the lead actresses. Such is the case with the above item, made for Trashy Lady, featuring x-rated legend Ginger Lynn alluringly wrapped in a silk or satin sheet. In Japan the movie was titled ジンジャー・リンの赤い唇, which means, “Ginger Lynn's red lips.” The plot is simple—Harry Reems, playing a big city crime kingpin, decides to make smalltown Ginger his girlfriend, but since she's too innocent, he needs her to be retrained into the type of woman he prefers—a trashy lady. You know, of course, what sort of activities the makeover involves.
It's cute when porn folks try to make a period movie, and this one, which is set during the Great Depression, comes complete with fancy costumes, a couple of nice sets, and even a high quality opening credit sequence. In the end it's still sort of like low rent community theater with oral sex, but it's all in good fun. As a side note, every website you look at says Reems plays real-life gangster Dutch Schultz, but guess what? We actually watch these flicks, and the character he plays is the fictional Dutch Seigel, not Dutch Schultz. Who cares, right? Well, we do. Originally released in 1985, Trashy Lady opened in Japan today in 1987.
Looks like neither of us values tidiness or organization, so that's cool.
Ben Ostrick, who signed his work J. Oval, painted this 1963 Pan Books cover for Sloan Wilson's 1960 novel A Sense of Values. Ostrick was an amazing artist, with a colorful and harmonious style that Pan used to good effect on scores of covers. We wrote way back that he was British, but a few online sources say he was actually Australian. We'll dig into that at some point and see if we can figure it out. In the meantime, we have two small collections of his work, here and here. You should have a look.
Gemser always makes sure a fun time is had by all.
Above is another Japanese poster for Laura Gemser's Italian sexploitation flick Emanuelle nera, which premiered in 1975 and reached Japan today in 1976. The art shows Gemser getting frisky poolside with French actress Isabelle Marchall, who made numerous sexploitation and giallo movies. The title of this in Japanese means “love of Emanuelle,” and we echo that sentiment—which is to say, though Gemser's Emanuelle films are abysmally bad, we love them as products of an era of freewheeling, guilt-free erotic cinema. Watching the films on cable television during our youth, they somewhat affected our views on travel and sex, neither of which we had experienced yet. We explained this influence in our write-up on Mia Nygren's Emmanuelle IV way back. At their best, Gemser's Emanuelle movies (yes, it's spelled differently than Nygren's) were straightforward celebrations of sex, while at their worst they were influenced by horror and action movies, such as the one where she takes on cannibals, and the one where she smashes a ring of snuff filmmakers. Emanuelle nera has few pretensions—Gemser goes to Nairobi and gets laid. You can see everything else we have on the movie here, here, and here. Gemser will be back. Probably sooner than you think.
Who needs a good script when you have Mitchum and Russell?
Above is a surpassingly lovely poster for the thriller Macao with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, reunited by RKO Studios after the previous year's His Kind of Woman. It's always interesting how old movies introduce the romantic leads to each other. In filmmaking parlance, these encounters are sometimes called “meet-cutes.” But it isn't very cute for the man to have to save the woman from a sexual assault. It's also not cute when the price for being saved is an uninvited kiss, but this is the early fifties and in movies you have to expect that stuff. Nonconsensual wrestling match—bad. Nonconsensual kiss—okay. Mitchum goes in for his reward and Russell doesn't mind.
We joked about these two being the best looking pair you can find in vintage cinema, and they're both in top form here. The honchos at RKO knew they had a dream pairing. Placing them in an exotic port, giving them an obstacle to overcome, writing them some quips, and hiring a respected director like Josef von Sternberg and charging him with capturing Casbalanca-style magic was a no-brainer. The adventure involves Mitchum coming across a stolen diamond, then trying to sell more gems to a local criminal kingpin. Little does he know that it's all a scheme hatched by an American police lieutenant to capture said kingpin, leaving Mitchum stuck in the dangerous middle. Russell plays a lounge singer and seems ancillary to all the intrigue, but as the plot evolves she becomes central to the caper.
Macao has its moments, and we certainly enjoyed it, but objectively speaking it's a middling effort, with too many narrative holes and too much boilerplate dialogue to offer any real thrills. The caper isn't compelling, and the villain—played by Brad Dexter as if he's on Quaaludes—has no real sense of menace. So the movie has the exotic port, the obstacle, and the quips—but no magic. Mitchum gets the girl, though, so that's something. Or maybe Russell gets the boy. However you prefer. What we'd prefer is more of this pairing, but sadly this was the last time the two starred together. While both their collaborations are watchable, they never made the blockbuster their onscreen chemistry deserved. Why not? Probably because Macao flopped so hard. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1952.
She doesn't actually have any super powers. But then again she doesn't need them.
In this image, Japanese action star Reiko Ike, seated before a platter of lemons, oranges, and tomatoes, has just been told tomatoes are really fruits instead of vegetables, and now nothing about the world makes sense anymore. We still struggle with that one too. The photo appeared in the 1972 Weekly Playboy calendar, which we've been documenting each month. In thirty days we'll see if Reiko has gotten past this tomato thing.
Alexa please find alternate route to redemption.
You wouldn't think a movie titled One Way Street would be set almost entirely in rural Mexico, but that's exactly the case with this obscure oddity that's like a film noir wrapped around a South Seas drama. Veteran thief Dan Duryea and his henchman William Conrad stage a bank heist, get away with $200,000, and hole up in an apartment. But medical attention is required, and a doctor is called. You've heard of mob lawyers. This is a mob doctor.
Played by James Mason, he's 100% crooked, bent by years of treating gangsters and hiding evidence of their crimes. But he's tired of scratching out an existence, so after he gives Duryea a couple of supposedly helpful pills, he reveals that they were really poison and walks out with the bank loot, using the antidote as his guarantee of safety. And he doesn't only steal the money. He also steals Duryea's girlfriend Märta Torén.
The duo charter a small plane to Mexico City, but the aircraft has mechanical trouble and makes an emergency landing, after which they're stuck in a remote village somewhere in the jungle east of Guadalajara. Mason gave up practicing real medicine a long time ago, but he's drawn to idyllic life off the grid and takes an interest in the villagers and their health issues, in the process regaining his medical ethics and self respect.
But renewed ethics and healed self respect also cause him to—you guessed it—decide to make good with the gangsters from whom he stole. Why? Because he can never be free unless he does, and so forth. The fool. He could have just mailed the money back, but no—he had to face them for the sake of his own integrity. Sometimes you need someone to tell you you're going down the wrong road, but that technology wouldn't show up for many decades. In the end One Way Street, despite its talented cast, is lightweight, unimpressive, and has an ending meant to shock with irony, but which merely comes across as lazy. We can't recommend it. It premiered today in 1950.
Most guys would sell their soul for someone this hot.
The 1965 horror novel L'urlo di Satana, the title of which means “the scream of Satan,” is number twenty-five in Rome based publisher Grandi Edizioni Internazionali's series I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore. It's credited to René du Car with a translation from French by Renato Carocci, but when GEI made such attributions what it really meant was that the translator wrote the book under a pseudonym. So this was actually written by Carocci, just one of scores of novels he produced under a long list of names. The art on this is another brilliant effort from Benedetto Caroselli, who we've documented extensively over the years. To see everything you can click his keywords below, or, if you're pressed for time, you can skip to our favorites here, here, here, here, and here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1962—Marilyn Monroe Sings to John F. Kennedy
A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's breathy rendition of "Happy Birthday," which does more to fuel speculation that the two were sexually involved than any actual evidence. 1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family.
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