We’re showing you this August 1966 Continental Film Review for one reason—Raquel Welch. She appears in both the front and back of the magazine, and the latter photo was made while she was in the Canary Islands filming One Million Years B.C. That photo session featuring a blonde, windblown Welch was incredibly fruitful, at least if we’re to judge by the many different places we’ve seen frames from the shoot, including here, here, here and especially here. There had not been a sex symbol quite like Welch before, and in 1966 she had reached the apex of her allure, where she’d stay for quite a while.

On the cover of the magazine are Christina Schollin and Jarl Kulle, pictured during a tender moment from the Swedish romantic comedy Änglar, finns dom? aka Love Mates. Inside you get features on the Berlin and San Sebastian film festivals, Sophia Loren, Nieves Navarro, Anita Ekberg, and more. CFR had launched in 1952, and now, fourteen years later, was one of Britain’s leading publications on foreign film. It was also a leading publication in showing nude actresses, and in fact by the 1970s was probably more noteworthy for its nudity than its journalism. The move probably undermined its credibility, but most magazines—whether fashion, film, or erotic—began showing more in the 1970s. CFR was simply following the trend, and reached its raciest level around 1973, as in the issue here. Fifteen scans below. 

Party Selvaggio, aka The Wild Party, is an interesting attempt to capture the decadence and glamour of 1920s Hollywood. The screenplay is based on a Joseph Moncure March poem, which in turn is loosely based on the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921. In brief, Arbuckle was accused of sodomizing an actress named Virginia Rappe with a bottle, an act which led to her death due to a ruptured bladder. No such thing happened, but sensational news reports portrayed Arbuckle as a fat lecher who routinely used his bulk to overpower helpless women. These fairy tales proliferated to the extent that morality groups—which were about as restrained and reasonable back then as they are now—were calling for Arbuckle to be put to death. He was acquitted at trial, but his reputation, career, and life were destroyed. In Party Selvagggio, the Arbuckle role is played by James Coco, who decides to throw a bash for major Hollywood players in hopes of revitalizing his ailing career. Unfortunately, the shindig goes horribly wrong. Coco earned some praise for his portrayal, but the star of the film is really Raquel Welch. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she’s the draw. The poster lists her second but places her image front and center, and she gets top billing in the official trailer. This was Welch stepping away from overtly sexual roles and being given a chance to act, which we mentioned was her driving ambition during the mid-point of her career. So how did she do? Well, despite the presence of legends-to-be Merchant-Ivory in the producer-director roles, this is a party you can miss. Welch gives her all in what is essentially a musical role, but the film never strikes the right chords. Don’t you just love this Italian poster, though? Party Selvaggio opened in Italy this month in 1973. 

This March 1973 issue of The National Police Gazette sports an eye-catching color scheme cleverly copied from the dress of actress Raquel Welch, who you see at lower left. Welch discusses her early first marriage, which resulted in two children, and laments her restrictive personal/professional relationship with her manager/second husband, who shaped her into an internationally famous cinematic sexpot. As a basically shy person, Welch claims to feel trapped by her image, and says she’s reached the point where she’s fed up with it. Moving forward, she explains, she will be interested only in serious film roles, and will refuse any scripts focusing on her sexuality.

We always find it curious when actors try to make a sharp turn away from what made them famous in the first place. Both men and women do it—among men it’s often comedians and action stars, and among women it’s sex symbols. These career shifts fail far greater than nine times out of ten. In Welch’s case, she was quickly consigned to the purgatory of television movies. Later, she reversed course on whole sexuality thing and posed for Playboy, but scored roles only sporadically for the rest of her career.

But in our opinion, her failure to escape the sex symbol trap wasn't due to a lack of talent. It probably had simply to do with the fact that she had passed the dreaded thirty-year-old barrier and didn’t look like an ingénue anymore. Nowadays actresses last long past thirty, but tellingly, are still not allowed to look their age. Entire websites dedicated to bad cosmetic surgery testify to that fact. In Welch's case, her sudden relegation to second tier status just goes to show what poor taste Hollywood producers have. Because ingénue or not, Raquel is Raquel.

We’ve now posted eighteen issues of the great Australian men’s magazine Adam. But there was an American Adam too, unaffiliated with the Aussie mag (as far as we know) that published identical content during the same period. There were three major differences, though—the American Adam did not have painted pulp-style covers like Aussie Adam, it had access to more widely known actors and authors, and it showcased nude photography years earlier. For example, the above American Adam, from August 1966, has rising star Raquel Welch, famous glamour babe June Wilkinson, fiction from John Steinbeck and Harlan Ellison, and an extensive and revealing feature on burlesque. It also has a centerfold of Vicky Kennedy, aka Margaret Nolan, who appeared in Goldfinger, among numerous other films, and was one of the more popular nude models of the 1960s. We have thirty scans of all this below, and if you want you can download the issue for free here. 

Above, a fantastic poster for the 1969 western 100 Rifles with Raquel Welch superimposed over a stylized U.S. currency background. It was made for the film’s 1971 stint in what was then Czechoslovakia. Amazingly, we saw it listed on a foreign poster specialty site for $275.00, and then saw the exact same piece on a big retail site for $13.99. The lesson there is to shop wisely. See our recent write-up on 100 Rifles here.

When we saw these Japanese posters for the 1969 western 100 Rifles, we made a special point to watch the film just so we had a good reason to share the art. So there you go. Now as for the actual film, there’s a moment about halfway through where mega sex symbol Raquel Welch says to black ex-NFL football star Jim Brown, “Do you want me?” That’s about as rhetorical a question as has ever been asked on a motion picture screen. Of course he wants her—who wouldn’t? But this being an American movie, the real question is, “What will the consequences be?” Because after all, even though interracial romance works just fine for millions of real life couples, in Hollywood that simply can’t be. Especially when you’re talking about heterosexual black males. So we know someone’s going to end up dead. We could have prefaced that last statement with a spoiler alert, but we all know it wasn’t really a spoiler. As moviegoers, we’ve been trained to know happily-ever-after isn’t a component of these black/white love affairs. When 100 Rifles was made in 1969, it may have seemed America was on the way—if perhaps a bit turbulently—to a post-racial future. But forty-two years later we bet youcan’t think of three other instances where a top tier white starlet had a love scene with a black man. So even though 100 Rifles offers up a reasonably compelling tale of guerilla warfare on the Mexican frontier, and Burt Reynolds co-stars in a role perfectly crafted for his special brand of smarmy brilliance, and you even get an unforgettable nude minute of cult siren Soledad Miranda, what you come away with is yet another reminder of how creatively bankrupt modern Hollywood has become. We don’t mean in terms of race, per se, but in terms of reality. Despite modern cinema being awash in CGI and 3D and THX sound and obscene budgets, as well as dozens of edgy stars, along with teams of clever writers and yachtfuls of execs who all claim to be mavericks, the movies are overwhelmingly soulless. 100 Rifles is not a great film, but it reflects a 1969 reality of racial mixing, social struggle and serious introspection about the worth of warfare. It is honest about the time from which it sprang. In comparison, if post-millennial movies are honest about the time in which we now live, then the message seems to be: just don’t make us think. 

This issue of National Bulletin published today in 1972 tells readers about lesbo communes, pervert athletes, sex clinics, and hooker conservationists. The cover story concerns rapists decrying the newly permissive culture in America that made it impossible for them to find women who actually minded being raped. Pretty twisted, but it's complete fiction, of course. Each week, Bulletin editors simply collected whatever handout photos they could from various modeling agencies, and made up stories to go with them. We don’t get their best work this time out (that would be here), but it’s still an interesting collection. Sixteen more scans are below. Enjoy. 

This January 1974 issue of The National Police Gazette gives shape to every actress’s worst fear—natural aging. Editors slapped the header: “Oh my God! What’s happened to Ava?” above a photo of fifty-four year-old Ava Gardner, and the collective shiver that ran through Hollywood women probably resulted in a 4.5 Richter Scale earth temblor. Interestingly, Gazette editors don’t actually slam Gardner in the accompanying article, but they don’t have to because the message is clear in that header and the accompanying photo—Holy shit, look at this hag that just fell out of the ugly tree! There’s no doubt show business was and is a brutal field for women, but at least in Ava’s case you don’t have to feel too bad. She had become a millionaire thanks to cinema and was living in comfort in her favorite country Spain, sipping rioja and perfecting the siesta. The presumed gasps of horror from fans that remembered her as an ingénue would have been the flipside of a Devil’s bargain that allowed her to achieve that life. We doubt she gave a toss what the Gazette thought anyway. Elsewhere in this issue editors treat you to Raquel Welch, Muhammad Ali, UFOs, test tube babies, bikini bombshells of 1974, and much more. Okay, see you tomorrow—we’re off for our Botox injections. Hey, we never said we were as strong as Ava. 

One thing you can say about Hammer Studios is that they’ve always been opportunistic. After the success of their 1966 Raquel Welch adventure One Million Years, B.C. the big brains in the front office decided to double down on sexed-up whitewashed primitivism. This time they tapped British hottie Martine Beswick, who had co-starred in B.C., to headline a new lost world production called Slave Girls, aka Prehistoric Women. It’s the tale of a great white hunter in Africa who’s projected into a parallel dimension and finds himself in the middle of a struggle between a cruel queen and her downtrodden subjects. Add to this mix the obligatory Raquel Welch-style fur bikinis, a hundred gallons of skin bronzer, a few “tribal” dance numbers, a heavy dose of blood curses, and a sprinkling of animist mythology and you’ve got yourself a movie. As tempting as it is to say the results are bad, it just wouldn’t be true. Slave Girls works, more or less, despite the limitations of being shot entirely on a British back lot. Beswick really chews the plastic scenery to pieces. She preens, poses, snarls, shrieks, flares her lovely nostrils and flaunts her six-pack—and that’s just during her dance number. When allowed to speak she tosses off some memorable lines. To the great white hunter: “You see! Already you want to impose your will! You want to dominate me!” And in the next instant (parenthetically hinting at an emotional wound in her past): “I’d be a fool to let any man do that again.” Aww, she has a heart after all—it’s been broken is the problem. But then she’s back to evil queen mode: “But you will want me. And on my terms!” Well, she’s right about that. You will want her—on any terms. Slave Girls, with Beswick, Edina Ronay and Michael Latimer, premiered in the U.S. today in 1967. 

This National Police Gazette from January 1970 features bombshell sex symbol Raquel Welch on the cover photographed from an odd up-the-nose angle you don’t often see. This was also, we are almost certain, the first Gazette to feature a full color cover photo, as the magazine was trying to upgrade its staid image. Inside you get Linda Harrison, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Graziano, Grace Kelly and a dubious report on the 200,000 legally insane teachers working in America’s schools. Welch’s bikini shoots were always a major event, and images from this particular session ended up on or inside scores of publications, including an issue of the Japanese film magazine Screen we shared last year. We have several more frames from the shoot, and we’ll get around to posting those soonish.