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.

If you think this Cat People poster is beautiful to look at, you should see Paul Schrader’s très chic 1982 film. Unfortunately, even the atmospheric New Orleans setting and several sequences of Nastassja Kinski slinking around totalement nu failed to elevate the film to classic status. This is pretty much unforgivable in a remake, which this was. The best thing we can say for it is that, viewing it today, we realized—as we often do with these old films—how unlikely it is any modern American director and actress would take the chances Schrader and Kinski took here. So even if the film isn’t scary, or suspenseful, or even satisfactorily resolved, we give it high marks for boldness. Cat People opened in the U.S. twenty-seven years ago today.

Norwegian actress Julie Ege, in a publicity still from 1971's Creatures the World Forgot.

Start a pulp website and Marilyn is inevitable. If Pulp Intl. were nothing but Marilyn Monroe every day we wouldn’t exhaust our material for ten years. She was a 24/7 365 obsession for the global press—and a prediction of the pervasiveness of celebrity coverage in the internet age. But in a sky full of lights, she still shines brightest. Below, Marilyn beams from four covers of the Danish culture mag Billed Bladet, circa 1952 to 1957. You'll be seeing her here at least a thousand more times.

Swiss actress Ursula Andress’ performance as Dr. No’s knife-wielding skindiver Honey Ryder made her a star and set the standard for all future Bond girls. At the time of this publicity photo she was married to John Derek, but we have a feeling Sean Connery didn’t care—and rumor has it Andress didn’t either. She was delivered up from the sea on a clamshell today in 1936.

Canadian centerfold, actress and cult celebrity Dorothy Stratten in four publicity stills from the film Galaxina. She was born today in 1960, and murdered by her estranged husband in 1980.

Gilda is a film that appears on every list of top ten noirs we’ve ever seen, and still it is impossible to overstate how great the movie is. Rita Hayworth had acted in more than a dozen features before this one, but she was a revelation here. Her husband steps into her bedroom saying, “Gilda, are you decent?” And she appears with a hairflip and a wicked smile, saying, “Me?” Right away you know you’re in for a ride. You know this is a woman who is never decent. Something about the blazing eyes seems to promise unimaginable carnal adventures. She stands backlit in a nearly sheer shirt that shows the silhouettes of her breasts. After a song and dance routine she allows a stranger onstage to try and zip her out of her strapless black dress. At one point, about to ride off into the night with a suitor, she says, “Haven’t you heard, Gabe? If I’d been a ranch they’d have named me the Bar Nothing.” All this just to drive poor Glenn Ford mad with jealousy. Yes, Gilda is a femme fatale for the ages, and Gilda is a must-see piece of American cinema.

Above is a Marilyn Chambers promo poster for her x-rated film Inside Marilyn Chambers, and below that is the image used to make the poster. Chambers was a former model for Ivory Snow Soap, whose advertising slogan was “99 & 44/100% Pure”. She appeared at the Mitchell Brothers Four Star Theater in Los Angeles, today in 1975.

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.

Lupe Velez was born in Mexico, bounced from Hollywood films to the Broadway stage and back to Tinseltown, but never achieved the level of stardom she craved. She had a career, though—she made more than forty films, including the Mexican Spitfire series, which consisted of five projects over three years. But there were failed love affairs and a divorce. When an unmarried Velez became pregnant in 1944, her strict Catholic upbringing prevented her from seeking an abortion, but also caused her to believe giving birth out of wedlock would be an unbearable stigma for the child. Unable to see a way out, she took a handful of sleeping pills that killed her and her unborn baby. The suicide rocked Hollywood, and even inspired a 1965 Andy Warhol film entitled, appropriately, Lupe. She died sixty-two years ago today.