Somehow, among many casual cinema fans, Barbarella is thought of as Jane Fonda’s starmaking role, if not her debut. It wasn’t. She had debuted eight years earlier and had already earned three Golden Globe nominations and a BAFTA nomination for her acting. The fact that she was so established makes her decision to play Barbarella all the more remarkable, though there's little doubt the film's director, her then-husband Roger Vadim, had some influence. This shot, a centerfold from Photoplay magazine, is from 1968, and below you see a shot that is aaaalmost identical, but, if you look closely, not quite.

Above, a poster for Akira Kurosawa’s seminal samurai movie Rashomon, with Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, and Masayuki Mori. We could tell you this flick is great, but there’s no point. Information abounds, written by people far more expert than us, and it all says the same thing—this is one of the top films ever made. It was admired in its time, winning the Leone d’Oro at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and 1952 Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film, and it has weathered the last sixty-two years proudly. Watch it. Rashomon premiered in Japan today in 1950.

We’ll tell you right now that we are not neutral when it comes to John Huston’s Beat the Devil. We love it. It has Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Gina Lollobrigida, and the exquisite Jennifer Jones, so we loved it immediately. If only audiences had felt the same. The movie was such a flop that not only did it lose money, but its copyright went unrenewed, causing it lapse into public domain. But keen observers, after they got over being misled by the promotional campaign into thinking the movie was a standard Hollywood adventure, soon realized that what they had on their hands was something new—a camp satire bringing together some of the most distinct voices of 1950s cinema.

And we mean voices literally. You have Humphrey Bogart with his famous lisp, Gina Lollobrigida with her vampy Italian drawl, Jennifer Jones trying on an English lilt, Peter Lorre with his trademark Germanic accented sniveling, and more. The accents are your first clue that the movie is going to be all over the place.

The 1960 melodrama BUtterfield 8—the capital BU being a phone exchange in New York City—was probably one of the most contentious productions in which Elizabeth Taylor was ever involved. Because she had just gotten her name splashed all over every tabloid on the planet for stealing the husband of America’s sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, and because her contract with MGM was ending and she wasn’t coming back to the studio, the suits decided to capitalize on her freshly ruined reputation by casting her as the promiscuous Gloria Wandrous. If the last name feels like a mash-up of “wondrous” and “wandering,” that’s an apt description for the character, who’s a home-wrecking maneater. But the studio suits weren’t done. Just to make sure the scandal rags were all over the story, they cast the man Taylor had stolen in real life—Eddie Fisher—in the film as well. Their goal seemed to be to generate attention and they succeeded. BUtterfield 8 was a success and Taylor snagged an Academy Award for her efforts, but she hated the film. The story goes that she threw her shoes at the screen the first time she saw it. The Japanese posters you see above are exceedingly rare. The first has never appeared online before, we're pretty sure; the second version, in pink with the unusual capital BU in the title, we found at an auction site. We can’t help but think even Elizabeth Taylor would have liked them. 

Update: Oops, we forgot we had a third vesion of the poster. An unusual all black edition. We've uploaded it below, butter late than never. Heh. Um...

These two gorgeous promo photos of Jan Sterling, née Jane Sterling Adriance, were shot for her role in Columbia Pictures’ drama Women’s Prison. Sterling also appeared in Johnny Belinda, Mystery Street, Appointment with Danger, and was Academy Award nominated for her role in The High and the Mighty. Women’s Prison was released in 1955, and these images date from the year before. 

Above is a March 1943 cover of the American cinema/celeb magazine Movie Show featuring Deanna Durbin, an actress who is little known to people who don’t watch old musicals, but who was a well-regarded performer in her day. She even won an Academy Juvenile Award in 1936 for her role in Three Smart Girls. Although that particular category of Oscar has been discontinued, Durbin hasn’t—she’s still around at age eighty-nine. Though her film career only spanned twelve years, her success was great enough to merit a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Movie Show also features Hedy Lamarr, Maria Montez, Ann Miller, all of whom you see below along with a pretty tasty Chesterfield ad. We’ll have more from this publication later.

Above, a promo shot of legendary beauty and two-time Academy Award-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor. She was one of the last stars to emerge from Hollywood’s old studio system, and one of the first true modern celebrities in terms of her relationship with the press and the public’s obsession with her. Famously frail throughout her life, she died today at age seventy-nine. 

Above is a National Enquirer from the week November 12—18, 1961, with cover star Sal Mineo. Mineo had been a major Hollywood presence who had scored two Academy Award nominations, one of which was for his bravura performance as Plato in Rebel without a Cause. But by 1961 the roles had dried up. The problem was his boyish appearance: he had made his reputation playing volatile youths, but now he was older and studios didn’t believe he could play other types of roles. At the time of the Enquirer cover, Mineo hadn’t worked for eighteen months. The article was simply another variation on the troubled youth theme, riffing on how Mineo had the world at his feet but had no real friends and nobody he could trust.

Soon it became clear Mineo did not have the world at his feet. He languished on the fringes of Hollywood, managing only eight roles—some of them mere bit parts—in the next ten years. However, by 1971 he had begun to make a mark on stage, starring in the gay-themed Fortune and Men’s Eyes with a young Don Johnson, and in 1976’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. Both plays were well-reviewed, for the most part, and Mineo seemed to have reached a point where he might vault back into the Hollywood mainstream. But his comeback was cut short when he was murdered behind his L.A. home in February 1976, stabbed in the heart. We looked  for a better version of the above shot of Mineo on a Vespa, to no avail. But we’ll keep our eyes open—it’s out there somewhere.