| Vintage Pulp | Dec 14 2022 |
Avelli treats moviegoers to a double helping of his art.
We recently shared a poster painted by Italian artist Tino Avelli and wanted to revisit his work. He was prolific, painting great promos for such well known films as The Man with the Golden Gun and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. We also recently saw a tarot deck he painted going for $3,000 at an auction site. We predict... we won't be buying that.
Above you see two Avelli efforts for the 1975 film La bolognese. Usually we have an English title for you, but this one was never shown in the U.S. The Italian title refers to any person from the city of Bologna. We've seen the movie, and it's a comedy, so we won't get into it. Plus, it's not funny anyway. It's the type of thing where star Franca Gonella rides her bike with the wind blowing her skirt up and everyone she passes ends up in a ditch from staring too hard at her white panties. Big laughs.
Not that we're above anything gratuitous, whether nudity, violence, or whatever. Vintage genre fiction is all about adding heaping helpings of fan service to most every narrative, therefore we are too. To prove it we've uploaded a nice shot of Gonella below—without her white panties. And you'd been thinking, "Hmm... not a lot of nudity on Pulp intl. lately." Solved. We should add that Gonella made some crime and horror movies, so maybe she'll return in the future.
ItalyBolognaLa bologneseThe Man with the Golden GunThunderbolt and LightfootFranca GonellaTino Avelliposter artcinemanudity
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 12 2022 |
Sometimes it's better if you don't go all the way.
Above is another case where the foreign promo material for a film surpasses the domestic version, something that happened increasingly as U.S. studios gave up on painted art, while foreign distributors kept on with the traditional ways. These two Italian promos were made for Quando baci una sconosciuta, which was produced in the U.S. as Once You Kiss a Stranger. The film stars the lovely Carol Lynley, so the odds of ending up with a nice domestic poster were high, but Warner Brothers flubbed it. Have a look at their effort below and we think you'll agree it's almost disgracefully bad. Meanwhile the Italian promos were painted by Tino Avelli, someone whose we've highlighted before, and while these don't rise to the level as some of most magnificent posters from Italy, they're still pretty nice.
Once You Kiss a Stranger is a reworking of Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train, but with a woman in one of the leads. These days many would complain that this is evil “gender swapping,” but dramatic plotlines are finite in number, therefore freshening up old material in this way has always been attractive to Hollywood. They're doing it a bit more of late because today there are fewer new ideas than ever, and because ticket buyers—by which we mean the diverse people under age thirty who actually fuel profits—like it and put down good money to see it.
Lynley plays a deranged woman who intends to exchange murders with a golf pro played by Paul Burke. Lynley is about to be permanently committed to a mental institution, while Burke always finishes second in his tournaments to Phil Carey. Lynley offers to solve that problem by killing Carey, and expects Burke to kill her psychiatrist in exchange. Just as in the novel, as well as Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 cinematic adaptation, the key to making this plot device work is the protagonist 
not believing what he's being told. Once You Kiss a Stranger makes that part more realistic than either Highsmith or Hitchcock by simply having Burke agree to anything that gets the tanned and toned Lynley into bed. This is where casting a woman pays dividends. The entire entrapment is now in shorthand because everyone in the cinema understands the visceral need to get inside Lynley. Hell, for her we'd promise to rope the moon. We'd swear an oath while covered in goat's blood. We'd swim a lake of fire.
not believing what he's being told. Once You Kiss a Stranger makes that part more realistic than either Highsmith or Hitchcock by simply having Burke agree to anything that gets the tanned and toned Lynley into bed. This is where casting a woman pays dividends. The entire entrapment is now in shorthand because everyone in the cinema understands the visceral need to get inside Lynley. Hell, for her we'd promise to rope the moon. We'd swear an oath while covered in goat's blood. We'd swim a lake of fire.Point is, you can understand Burke's attitude being, “Uh huh... I hear you... murder... understood... can you take off your panties real slow?” However, Burke being led by his dick into trouble is the only improvement Once You Kiss a Stranger manages over what came before. The rest is a pale imitation of two scintillating sources, and done on a level dialogue-wise that Mystery Science Theater 3000 would epically mock. We can't recommend it, but speaking only for ourselves, we'll watch anything with Lynley. Full stop. Once You Kiss a Stranger, with her, Burke, Carey, and the lovely Martha Hyer aged forty-five and looking fantastic, premiered today in 1969.
ItalyQuando baci una sconosciutaOnce You Kiss a StrangerStrangers on a TrainCarol LynleyPaul BurkeMartha HyerPhilip CareyPeter Lind HayesPatricia HighsmithAlfred HitchcockTino Avelliposter artliteraturecinemamovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 24 2014 |
Sommer isn’t over quite yet.
In June we shared a Japanese poster for Elke Sommer’s 1966 comedy Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number and talked about the movie a bit. Today we have two even better Italian promos for the same film. In Italy it was succinctly retitled Un bikini per Didi, and the art is by yet another Italian talent, this time Tino Avelli, who we haven’t featured before. We’ll have more from him later.
ItalyTino AvelliUn bikini per DidiBoy Did I Get a Wrong NumberElke SommerBob HopePhyllis Dillerposter artcinema
