Christine Boisson, whose last name is French for “drink”, broke into cinema at age eighteen in 1974’s softcore classic Emmanuelle. She parlayed that appearance into a film and stage career that earned her the 1984 Prix Romy Schneider for most promising actress, and to date she has appeared in more than thirty films, as well as more than twenty stage productions. This image of her finishing the last few bites of a melon is from 1975. 

Swedish actress Mia Nygren, seen here in a still from Francis Leroi and Iris Letans’ French softcore classic Emmanuelle IV, a movie that represents the pinnacle of the enjoyable sub-genre of high budget erotic cinema. We'll revisit it later. The photo is from 1984.     

American B-movie actress, singer, and muse Radiah Frye, veteran of such films as Goodbye Emmanuelle and Spermula, seen here in a shot used for the cover of the French magazine Lui, 1973.     

April 1975 issue of Screen from Japan, with cover star Sylvia Kristel. If this shot looks familiar, it’s because we already showed you the version used for the Japanese Emmanuelle promo poster, but the bright colors of Screen’s graphics makes this slightly different version well worth a viewing.

The image above was painted by Spanish artist Ana Miralles, and is the cover of book 1 in a series of graphic novels called Djinn. Created in 2006 by venerable Belgian writer Jean Dufaux, the Djinn saga tells of Kim Nelson, a young woman who travels to Istanbul seeking clues to her grandmother’s mysterious past. She soon learns that during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire her grandmother was a harem girl, the beautiful favorite of the Black Sultan. As more clues pile up and the mystery deepens, Kim finds herself dealing with shady characters and persistent paramours in bookshops, baths, and bedchambers all over the old city. These sorts of comics always remind us of Black Mask and other vintage mags that sometimes mixed romance with foreign adventure, but if you aren’t familiar with 1930s pulps, think of Djinn as Romancing the Stone crossed with Emmanuelle. We’ve posted some fantastically illustrated interior pages below from our copy of Djinn 1: The Favorite. We recommend this series highly.

Bitter Moon is typically dark Roman Polanski, starring Peter Coyote, Kristen Scott Thomas, Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner, and a young Hugh Grant. There are several posters for the film, but we like this noirish German version. The movie isn’t really noir, though—it’s a mix of erotic drama and suspense, with some fairly disturbing misogynist interludes. It’s a polarizing film, and critics disagree on its merits. It certainly isn’t as good as Polanski’s Chinatown, but what is? It isn’t as good as Rosemary’s Baby either, but again, what is? One thing is clear—Polanski has a lot on his mind, and some of it isn’t pretty. Bitter Moon opened in Germany today in 1992.

So there we were in Madrid, digging for pulp gems at the outdoor market on the Prado, when we spotted Valentina au Débotté by the immortal comic artist Guido Crepax. Since this was a French translation, rather than an original Italian edition, we figured to score it for a song. After some expert negotiations that served to lower the asking price exactly 0.0 percent, we paid fifteen euros. But at least we got the book, and what a book it is.

Crepax began the Valentina series in 1965, and nurtured it into an international sensation that ran until 1995. Basically, it was erotica, but delicately drawn and infused with a 60s insouciance and dreaminess that somehow made it both titillating and highbrow. Crepax published other famous series, and drew adaptations of Emmanuelle, The Story of O, Justine and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but the Valentina series was his crowning achievement.

Reading any of the Valentina stories is like stepping through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, but Valentina au Débotté is Crepax at his psychedelic best, deftly immersing his heroine in typically bizarre adventures, including riding a broomstick and having sex with an octopus. Crepax died in 2003, but not before amassing many awards and seeing his work translated into multiple languages. The book we found would have lasted at most another ten minutes at the busy Prado market, but we had gotten there early, which means we’re the lucky ones who now own this treasure. We found some scans online from the same book and posted several below for your enjoyment.

We showed you the American promotional art for Emmanuelle a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the poster for the Japanese premiere, which was today, also in 1974. The image illustrates an interesting characteristic of mid-20th century promotional art: even when the product advertised was raunchy, they usually tried to portray it in artful fashion. Mission accomplished.

It’s hard to believe a film as artful as Emmanuelle, with its soft focus cinematography and ethereal music, was rated X when it was released, but then you reach the halfway point and see a stripper smoking a cigarette without using her mouth and you understand why. Based on a character created by author Emmanuelle Arsan—aka Marayat Bibidh aka Marayat Rollet-Andriane—the first Emmanuelle movie was produced unsuccessfully in Italy in 1969. But five years later a ravishing Dutch actress named Sylvia Kristel, below, brought the role to life with a mixture of smoldering sexuality and angelic innocence. She and director Just Jaeckin helped make Emmanuelle into a French franchise, and a role actresses lobbied for the honor of playing. Despite seemingly nine-hundred sequels that resulted—including a Cinemax stint inhabited by bombshell American actress Krista Allen—the original remains the best. It is one of the highest grossing films in French cinema history. The poster was designed by Steve Frankfurt, and the U.S. version of the film opened today in 1974.