Last year we showed you a poster by Carlo Alessandrini, the Italian illustrator who signed his work Aller. Today seemed like a good day to bring him back, so above and below are five more posters by the same artist. We don't know anything about him but as always we'll dig. Regardless, we’ll have more from him down the line. Know anything about this artist? Drop us a line. You can see that other amazing piece from Alessandrini/Aller here.

Another great cover today for an Alan Marshall sleaze novel. This time it’s The Orgy Inspector, featuring a lecherous older swing dancer whose favorite maneuver pays high dividends when he tries it on his young partner. You get the impression that by the time she completes her revolution she might end up completely undressed. Girls, let this be a lesson that the whole room is apt to get a good look at the kitty kat if you go swing dancing without undies, so always wear a pair and— Wait. Did we say always? Er, never. That’s the word we were looking for. 

The above Special Detective-Crime from August 1972 promises tales of thrill-seeking wives and more, but how can we possibly get past the cover? Look at this poor guy. He told his hairstylist to turn him into Rod Stewart but instead she turned him into a Ukrainian field hockey player. The cops are screaming at him to let the woman go, and he’s screaming back that he wants his bangs redone. It’s not going to end well.

Above, an eye-opening photo of German actress Solvi Stubing, one of the great sex symbols of Italian cinema. Her film career began in 1964, and included appearances in Nude per l'assassino, aka Strip Nude for Your Killer, Le deportate della sezione speciale SS, aka Deported Women of the SS Special Edition, and Le amazzoni, aka Battle of the Amazons (we wrote about that one here). This photo is from the French magazine Sexyrama, 1970. 

Today we have a nice, egg-themed cover for the German lifestyle magazine Neues, with a photo-illustration of British actress Hazel Court balanced on an egg. Below are a few of the more interesting interior pages, including scans of Gregory Peck and Veronica Lake. We actually have quite a few mid-century German magazines, including some extremely interesting naturist publications featuring lots of naked men and women frolicking on beaches. So keep an eye out for those. Neues is a much tamer style of magazine, but its focus on celebs and art is something that we appreciate. This one was published in April 1949, and you can see another one here. 

Director J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear, for which you see a rare lobby card above, isn’t just a great film. Embedded in its tale of an ex-convict terrorizing a family is an examination of American attitudes toward civil liberties. And if we contrast Cape Fear with modern thrillers like Edge of Darkness or Taken, what we begin to ask is whether America has crested the hill of its own belief in high principles and is now steadily rolling down the other side. Where Cape Fear presents the legal concept of due process as inviolable, and builds tension by asking if star Gregory Peck will resort to vigilantism to protect his family from a murderous Robert Mitchum, in Liam Neeson’s Taken, the hero intentionally shoots his friend’s wife in the arm with no more worry than stepping on a bug, and zero moral hesitation at making an innocent woman collateral damage in his holy war against the villains. Of course, movies are not real life. But they can be a reflection of it, and Cape Fear shows just how much attitudes toward legal protections may have changed in America in the last fifty years. We strongly recommend this film—as both entertainment and a historical study. It opened in the U.S. today in 1962.

This rare promo piece for Steve McQueen’s 1972 thriller The Getaway was produced for the film’s run in Japan in 1973. Based on a novel by Jim Thompson, co-starring Ali McGraw, directed by Sam Peckinpah, written for the screen by Walter Hill, and scored by Quincy Jones, The Getaway delivers on multiple levels, as does this poster. 

Midnight, like other tabloids, learned quite well that a Kennedy could move product. Thus their editors splashed a Kennedy, or Jackie Onassis, on the cover of their paper at pretty much every opportunity. On the above issue from today in 1969, editors tell us that Teddy Kennedy is at the end of his rope. Apparently, after enduring the assassination of two brothers, a plane accident in which he broke his back, his wife Joan’s miscarriage, and a car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which he drove into a pond and his companion Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, Kennedy was not in a good frame of mind. Go and figure. Midnight claims to have gotten this statement out of him: “I see [Mary Jo Kopechne’s] face in my dreams and imagine her features contorted as she struggles to escape the car, death closing in on her.” And this: “I dream of Mary Jo every night and wake up in a cold sweat, scared and screaming.” Did Midnight really scoop every paper in the land and get these anguished quotes? Well, no—this is the same paper that wrote two weeks earlier that John Kennedy’s ghost was haunting Jackie Onassis. So we take their claims of unfettered access to the Kennedy clan with a grain of salt. However, we have three more issues of Midnight with Kennedy themes, so maybe they can still convince us. We’ll be sharing those issues down the line. 

In the old noirs criminal gangs are sometimes the Mafia, sometimes the Mob, and still other times the Syndicate. In this one the gang is the Combination, hence the title The Big Combo. While the film isn’t a big budget noir, it makes up in inventiveness what it lacks for dollars. Example: one thug who wears a hearing aid is about to be rubbed out. He begs for his life, and one of his executioners says, “I’ll do you a favor—you won’t hear the bullets.” He then snatches out the thug’s hearing aid and we see a silent close-up of muzzle flashes. The film is filled with visual treats like that, and as a bonus it has first-rate acting, with the lead Cornel Wilde even pulling off a crying scene. For real. He turns on the waterworks with no help from the make-up department and it’s an exceedingly rare feat for male actors during the 1950s.

Another characteristic of The Big Combo is its sexual undercurrents. One character is a stripper and during a backstage scene we get a surprising flash of her bikini-clad bottom. Meanwhile, Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman play two hired thugs who we’re supposed to suspect are gay. We’ve seen the great documentary The Celluloid Closet about the many gay characters hidden in old films, so we’re familiar with the hints screenwriters like to drop. In this case the relationship between Van Cleef and Holliman is clearer than usual, which makes us wonder if it was an accident or a deliberate attempt to push the envelope when Holliman utters the line, “I’m sick of swallowing sausage.” Shortly thereafter the two are dispatched via hand grenade, so unfortunately we don’t get to know any more about these two great characters.

As long as we’re on the subject of Stanley Donen movies, here are two one-sheets painted by Robert McGinnis for the 1966 caper Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and the great Sophia Loren. Donen was trying to capture the mod magic of his earlier feature Charade, which had starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. We can’t say he fully succeeded there, but he did make an adventure romance full of joie de vivre that’s well worth seeing. The two posters differ in one fascinating aspect—Gregory Peck’s lower body has been transplanted in the bottom version. We know the dancing pose at top was the original, but we think the upright stance in the re-do is an improvement, as is the cool magenta background. It’s killer art for a killer flick, and we recommend you check it out.