It’s probably fair to say Duello dans le monde, aka Ring Around the World has been pretty much forgotten in filmdom, but maybe it shouldn’t be. With a good premise, groovy-jazzy soundtrack, and location shooting in global hotspots like Bangkok, London, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro, this was better than we had any right to expect. Richard Harrison investigates a series of seemingly natural deaths only to find that they were murders—in reality an assassin has shot the victims with pellets made of a frozen concoction that induces heart attacks. The pellets of course then melt and leave no trace behind.

Mexico’s old west mythology is as strong as the U.S.’s, probably owing to the fact that most of the old west actually was Mexico at one point. That love of western stories comes across strongly in these cover paintings made for Mexico’s post-1970s comic book market. Many of them were made for the series Sensacional de Vaquero, or Sensational Cowboy, published by Mexico City-based Editorial EJEA, which was founded by Everardo Flores. The scenes depicted are incredibly chaotic and violent—everybody that can be killed, seemingly, is killed, including horses and innocent bystanders. The backgrounds of some of the scenes are interesting, and are worth taking a close look at. The creators here have names such as Beton, Nique, and Jaime S., while others we cannot identify because their signatures, while stylish, are illegible. The art is perhaps not of the quality seen on pulp novels, but it’s certainly effective. Twenty total scans for your enjoyment, and you can see a few examples here, here, and here.

Yes, we’re doubling up on the movies today, not because we think the internet needs more amateur reviews, but because we want to show the posters. As always, it’s about the art. We have it, and it’s pointless to have it and not share it. Behold the poster. Done? Great. Okay, regarding the movie, which is called Kanno kyoshitsu: ai no tekunikku, we can sum it up by telling you there’s a scene in which a male character sticks his head in a toilet—in a nightclub—sucks up a mouthful of liquid and spits it in a gentle stream upon the chest of the woman he’s in love with. More strange yet—it turns her on. This visceral horror is counterbalanced, just barely, by a weird yet very affecting fantasy sequence where the same character sprays the object of his affection with water from a garden hose while she’s in a jail cell. Have a look at the screen grabs below.

That is a very provocative expression lead actress Mari Tanaka is wearing. Is it because the water is cold? No—it’s a male character’s fantasy, so that’s supposed to be arousal. Our girlfriends don’t make that face at us, but now we’re seriously considering ways to make it happen. At least, as long as they don’t involve spraying water all over our place. Anyway, you have the yin and yang here—two scenes involving a man drenching a woman with water, of both clean and not-so-clean varietals. Is it symbolic? Maaaaybe just a little.

The plot goes like this: Tanaka teaches at a college and several of her students collude to break up her engagement to a chemistry professor so one can have her to himself. But everything they try only seems to make the relationship between Tanaka and her chemist stronger. Finally in desperation the students rig a lab experiment to blow the chemist to constituent particles, but succeed only separating him from his prostate, leaving him impotent. Since a sizable amount of dialogue is devoted to his prodigious endowment his maiming is a tragedy not just for him, but all women (this from the character Oharu-san, who has encountered the fiancée in her brothel and is reduced to tears at the news of his injury).

Will Tanaka finally ditch her love now that he’s been turned into Jake Barnes (extra credit if you know that one), or is their relationship held together by something more than sex? We’d answer, but we swore off spoilers a while ago, which means only a viewing of this exceedingly strange movie will give you the answer. Meanwhile, below, Tanaka shows her technique for hiding her naughty bits, as required by Japanese law at the time. Kanno kyoshitsu: ai no technique, which was called Excitement Class: Love Techniques in the English speaking world, premiered in Japan today in 1972.

Above are two rare shots of an actress long overdue for some exposure here—Mari Tanaka, who appeared in numerous Nikkatsu movies, including Kanno kyoshitsu: ai no technique, aka Excitement Class: Love Techniques, and the wonderfully titled Joshidaisei: Sexy Dynamite. The photos come from a coffee table book published by Heibon Punch magazine in 1970 celebrating the muses of roman porno. The entire book is dedicated to Tanaka. We have more images of her and we also have a rare movie poster, which means we’ll be coming back to her soon.

Not long ago we showed you the cover from one installment of a French pulp series called Les aventures de Zodiaque. That was a lovely piece of art, but the series had modest beginnings. Above and below are one dozen fronts from the series’ early days, when it was being published in Montreal by Éditions PTE under agreement from the French parent publisher Éditions de Neuilly. These are all from the early 1950s.

Edit: Writing six years later, we realize now that these are not random women on these covers. They're celebrities. Or at least, we assume so, because we recognize Belgian actress Dominique Wilms on the fifth cover below, the light brown one. If we identify others we'll update this little addendum, but don't count on it, because if, like Wilms, the other women are French or Belgian, well, we're not as good on those actresses as we'd like. But we'll sure try.

In pulp and post-pulp literature, it’s a given that what we read isn’t up to the quality of serious fiction. Some might argue the point, but it’s probably true. While pulp writers have been important in creating new stylistic methods, even the best pulp novel doesn’t stand on the same level as, say, The Grapes of Wrath or Babbitt. That truth doesn’t diminish our enjoyment of pulp—it’s a literary form that leads us to places we’d never be taken in more serious writing. We tend to feel the same way about pulp art. A lot of it is quite nice when viewed from the perspective of what it accomplishes, rather than whether it is technically good. We hinted at that in yesterday’s post. So today, we chose three examples of that idea.

These mid-1940s covers are from Editions Nicéa’s Collection Rose Noire. The books are On a tue Madame Rose (Madame Rose was Killed) written by Maurice Lambert, aka Géo Duvic; La double vie de Lord Morton (The Double Life of Lord Morton) written by Michel Dahin, aka Michel de Roisin; and Le chaland du mystère (Mystery of the Barge) penned by an author who published only as Dominique. All three covers are anonymous, though are doubtless by the same person. While they aren’t up to the technical quality of Robert McGinnis or Alain Gourdon perhaps, we think the artist achieved exactly what he or she set out to do, not just in color and mood, but particularly in the confident use of perspective on the last cover. In our opinion, these are good. But maybe we’re wrong. Artist friends? Drop us a line. 

In December 1965 in Essex County, New Jersey, local police raided a large home on 850 Lake Street in suburban Newark where they suspected illegal sexual activity was taking place. A detective entered first and met the house’s owner, a Dutch-born former nurse named Monique Von Cleef. The two had reached the point where she had donned a leather jumpsuit and he had stripped to his boxer shorts. At that moment the cops that had been waiting outside stormed into the house. They found that the entire three-story building had been set-up to service practitioners of sado-masochism. Von Cleef had been running the place for years, and had made a nice business out of punishing submissives—among them doctors, local officials, and many New York businessmen. According to court documents, her file cabinet contained 2,000 names.

The story exploded across America—virtually nobody had ever imagined a bdsm lifestyle existed in the U.S. The house on Lake Street was given several nicknames by the media, but “House of Pain” is the one that stuck. When the above April 1966 issue of Confidential appeared, Monique Von Cleef was facing trial and staring a prison sentence in the face. However to prosecutors’ chagrin, she couldn’t be brought up for prostitution, so they opted for a raft of charges related to lewd conduct, and one charge of possessing obscene materials. Von Cleef was convicted, but saw the decision overturned on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. Many accounts of the legal proceedings suggest thatpowerful men on her client list of 2,000 (or 10,000, if you believe Confidential) exerted influence on her behalf. The truth is her conviction was overturned after justices noted that the police had neglected to obtain a search warrant. The fact that previous appeals had glossed over this fact is actually indicative of how much influence was arrayed against Von Cleef. In any case, the Supreme Court decision made every piece of evidence police had obtained inadmissible. Without those items there was no proof of lewd conduct on the premises, and Von Cleef had never touched the detective.

Von Cleef had been free during this process, using her notoriety to financial advantage. In San Francisco, billed as the Queen of Humliation, she had been giving onstage orations/performances about sado-masochism at a North Beach nightclub called Coke’s. As her case was reaching the Supreme Court, U.S. Immigration was working to deport her—a threat of which Von Cleef was well aware. Thus when she won her appeal and the order came through shortly thereafter to ship her back to her native Netherlands, she had already left the U.S. illegally. Some claim that influential former clients were involved in her deportation, wanting her out of the States where she could do them no harm. That’s possible, but telephones, teletypes, and televisions reached all the way to Holland back then, which meant that if she had wanted to expose her clients she could just as easily have done it from there. She was deported because that’s what U.S. authorities have always done to alien felons. In Von Cleef’s case, though she had won her appeal, she had overstayed her visa.

American tabloids soon moved on to other diversions, and American society followed suit, but Von Cleef maintained a high profile internationally. She opened another dungeon, became a Baroness, wrote a book, appeared in a documentary, and traveled the world promoting her lifestyle. She died in Antwerp, Belgium in 2005, a woman who had gone from nurse to dominatrix, underground to overexposed, and ridden the crazy carousel of American jurisprudence, yet in the end survived and even thrived. One might ask how it was possible, but it seems clear that within her community she was revered from almost the moment she entered it, and she probably enjoyed copious moral and financial support through all her travails. The website dominafiles.com explains best how loyal Von Cleef’s followers were: “What her antagonists didn’t realize was that once an affluent masochist heard about Monique, no matter how, he would travel almost anywhere to see her.” 

Talk about an obscure movie. F.B.I. contro i killers stars Mark Damon, Nadia Grey, Annie Gorassini, and the lovely Dominique Boschero, all of whom are known actors. It was directed by Akos Ráthonyi, a Hungarian whose résumé goes back to the 1940s. But no webpage, no wiki page, and no database anywhere gives any details on the production. After scouring our usual resources, then searching only Italy-based or Italian language pages, and finally doing both with cross-referenced data, we found only a few ad container pages that had bounced our search terms back at us, and one page that had a small version of an alternate poster from the movie. So we’ve got no info on this one. This highlights both the wonder and weakness of the internet—it disperses otherwise inaccessible information with infinitely more efficiency than any other real world medium, yet limits our observation of that world to that which has been digitized and uploaded. And now that we’ve gotten all quantum and whatnot, anyone out there with info on F.B.I. contro i killers—either the movie or the poster art—feel free to drop us a line. 

Above, a brilliant shot of French/Italian actress Dominique Boschero, who acted in about sixty films during the 1950s and 1960s, including OSS 77—Operazione fior di loto (aka OSS 77—Operation Lotus), Gli imbroglioni (aka The Impostors), and Agente 310 spionaggio sexy (we probably don’t need to translate that one, right?). This image is from 1966. 

Here’s one of our favorite old magazines, the great Continental Film Review, with a cover shot of one our favorite vintage actresses, Christina Lindberg, who you may remember from our post about Sex & Fury a while back. CFR was published in Britain and, like other magazines of its ilk, such as France’s Cine-Revue, purposely blurred the line between journalism and smut by publishing sober reviews and features, while not-so-incidentally showing acres of skin. Their wry, we’re-not-really-porn approach was a roaring success across four decades, from 1952 until 1983. We have some racy interior pages below, featuring more Lindberg, as well as Marion Forster, Gabriela Grimaldi, Veronique Vendell and others. And at bottom, in the final panel, we've located the orginal image upon which CFR based their cover image. Enjoy.