Sometimes when classic literature was remarketed for mid-century audiences the pulp style makeovers were stretches. But in this case it works. Le amicizie pericolose is a 1964 Italian translation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 French epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, aka Dangerous Liaisons. The story features one of history's greatest femmes fatales—Marquise de Merteuil, whose pride and sexual vanity is the seed of an unspeakable tragedy. There's also an homme fatale—the serial seducer Vicomte de Valmont, whose dick eventually gets him in a crack so tight he can't escape. 

Two issues of Adam to share—one from Australia and one from the U.S.—proved too much work for one day, so we posted Aussie Adam yesterday, and today we’re on to the American Adam. These magazines have no relationship to each other apart from coincidentally sharing a name. U.S. Adam relies on photo covers rather than painted art, shows a dedication to cheesecake photography that far outstrips its Australian cousin, and also has less fiction. However, what fiction it does offer extends beyond Aussie Adam’s adventure and crime focus, such as the short piece from counterculture icon Harlan Ellison called, “The Late Great Arnie Draper.” We’ve scanned and shared the entirety of that below if you’re in a reading mood.

The striking cover model here goes by the name Lorrie Lewis, and inside you get burlesque dancer Sophie Rieu, who performed for years at the nightclub Le Sexy in Paris, legendary jazzman Charles Mingus, and many celebs such as Jane Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Sharon Tate, and the Rolling Stones. There’s also a feature on the Dean Martin movie Murderer’s Row, with Ann-Margret doing a little dancing, and blonde stunner Camilla Sparv demonstrating how to properly rock a striped crop-top. We managed to put up more than forty scans, which makes this an ideal timewaster for a Monday. Enjoy.

When we shared a poster for Roger Vadim’s Il sangue e la rosa way back in 2009 we didn’t talk about the movie. But since we found this beautiful alternate promo to show you, we thought we’d watch the film again to refresh our memories. It’s an ethereal gothic drama about a woman caught in a love triangle who is subsequently possessed by a vampire after an accidental explosion opens the monster’s centuries buried tomb. It feels like a supernatural version of Emily Brontë, but the source material was actually from Sheridan le Fanu, whose vampire story Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than twenty years. Long on lustful gazes, lingering fog, and lilting harp music, short on chills and thrills, Il sangue e la rosa is more of a Vadim art piece than a conventional film, but it has some charms, personified by Elsa Martinelli and Annette Vadim, aka Annette Stroyberg. Il sangue e la rosa premiered in Italy today in 1961. See the other poster here.

An idyllic scene on the French Riviera is revealed in these three photos, as Danish actress Mirette Stroyberg and her sister Annette Vadim—who was married to director Roger Vadim and had starred in his film Les liaisons dangereuses, aka Dangerous Liaisons—walk on Pampelonne Beach one afternoon in 1959. Remember—the good life is as near as the next sunny day. 

On this Confidential from February 1965 the publishers give their cut-and-paste artists a month off and grace the cover with a simple portrait of Brigitte Bardot and her famed pout. Inside the editors air out her love life in a way that today would be called slut shaming—pretty much stock-in-trade for Confidential. The suggestion is she won’t come to the U.S. to act because she’s busy Morockin’ around the clock with Moroccan-born producer Bob Zaguri. Elsewhere in the issue you get Romy Schneider, Jean Harlow, Alain Delon, Peter O’Toole, love behind the Iron Curtain, and an outraged report on pharmaceutical companies marking up medicines 200%, 500%, even 7,000%. Yes, medicines cost too much in the U.S. even back then. But don’t take our word for it. Take Confidential’s—their story ends by declaring that drug companies have Americans by the balls and the only way to avoid the drug price racket is to not get sick.

But moving on, as we mentioned last week, we wanted to look at tabloid attitudes toward  gay culture, and this issue has two articles along those lines. The first involves gay cruises off the Florida coast, an activity Confidential informs readers was devised as a way to avoid Dade County vice cops. Once the boats were in international waters therewas no law, local or federal, which could be applied against shipboard activities. We’ll come back to that in a sec. The other story involves what Confidential describes as the middlesex—i.e. people who lack strong masculine or feminine characteristics. The story is concerned with this only as a social issue and makes no mention of physically intersex persons who genetically are neither male nor female.

The story on gay cruises is a bit more typical of mid-century tabloids—it’s just a takedown piece. Gay men are blithely described as “lavender lads,” “minces,” and other words we wouldn’t dare dirty our website with. The effusiveness of the magazine’s hateful and sneerful terminology suggestsjust how certain Confidential editors were that homosexuality was completely beyond the pale. And yet, nearly every issue harped on the subject, either directly or indirectly. For instance, here we get full reportage on a maritime cabaret show featuring drag queens, followed by detailed descriptions of music, dancing, and gambling. You’d almost think the writer Gaye Bird—nice, right?—was actually there.

This is one of the cooler posters you’re likely to see. It’s a West German promo for Brigitte Bardot’s 1961 comedy La bride sur le cou, aka Please, Not Now! A production image from the movie was used on one of the Goodtime Weekly calendar pages we shared last July, which you may want to have a look at. Basically, La bride sur le cou is a screwball comedy about Bardot's broken love life. It starts with an amusing sequence of her driving through Paris leaving chaos in her wake, and the rest of the movie continues in the same vein, with a gas explosion, a bobsled hijacking, a waiter who levitates, and more. All of this starts when Bardot realizes her boyfriend is cheating. She follows him to a restaurant and hits him in the face with a cream pie bought especially for the purpose, and for this act earns the attention of a persistent suitor who spends the rest of the movie trying to get her in bed. But Bardot is interested only in exacting revenge against her ex, which she intends to achieve by shooting his new girlfriend. La bride sur le cou is completely silly, but it has great direction, comedy that works on both subtle and outrageous levels, and an overwhelming aura of good-natured fun. It’s also very sexy. Highly recommended. It premiered in West Germany today in 1961.

Elizabeth Taylor nude! Those sneaks at Whisper raised the hopes of millions of readers who bought this March 1965 issue, but inside revealed that the whited-out silhouette on the cover with Richard Burton is in reality a wooden statue of Taylor made to promote her role in The Sandpiper. It was to be unveiled at a party aboard the Queen Mary, but producer Joseph E. Levine connived a way for the sculpture to be stowed below decks so his star Carroll Baker wouldn’t be upstaged. In the end, nobody at the party saw the Taylor statue and Carroll Baker—once again wearing that amazing dress, by the way—ruled the day.

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.