 Jack the Ripper, with an Italian twist. 
Above, the original Italian poster for Dario Argento's horror thriller L’uccello dale piume de cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which premiered in Rome today in 1970 and has since become an iconic example of the giallo genre. We talked about the film, and shared the Spanish posters back in 2010. You can see those here.
 Don't worry, dude. I got your back. 
The BBC has an interesting report today about a man who has an elaborate full-back tattoo that, though it's attached to his body, he's sold to an art collector. Yeah, that's one's hard to wrap your head around. Let's put in another way. The man, Tim Steiner, earned $161,000 from German art collector Rik Reinking for rights to the piece. As part of the deal Steiner is required to sit shirtless in a gallery three times a year as a piece of living art, which isn't a bad way to make extra cash, we suppose. Especially when some of the exhibitions have occurred at the Louvre in Paris, Civita di Bagnoregio in Rome, the Art Farm in Beijing, and the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania. And as befits all good art, the exhibitions will continue even posthumously. After Steiner shuffles off this mortal coil, Reinking takes full ownership of his skin, which will be removed so the tattoo can be framed and displayed. Some people, not surprisingly, have called the unusual arrangement ghoulish, but those people perhaps have no idea how strange modern art can get. Steiner, who sees himself as merely a temporary mounting for the tattoo, is happy, if not exactly eager, to be immortalized on museum walls. He considers tattooing the ultimate art form. “Painting on canvas is one thing,” he says, “painting on skin with needles is a whole other story.” The creator of the piece, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, would doubtless agree. He's known in inking circles, not only for tattooing humans, but also pigs, whose skins he peddles. So Steiner's sell-off of his own hide isn't really new. The pigs may be getting the better deal, though. They get to root around in mud and slop to their heart's content until they die of old age. Steiner still presumably has to earn a living a somehow. He probably should have had the pigs' lawyer negotiate his agreement.
We like tattoo art, but this skinning business is obviously a practice that's legitimized by social status. Put someone's framed epidermis on your wall at home and you're anything from seriously weird to a psychopath/subject of a murder inquiry; hang it in a gallery and wine swilling upper crusty types call you a collector. But that's sort of an encapsulation of how the entire world works, isn't it? Rob an old lady at a cash machine and you're a thief; take away her pension and you're a politician. Heavy drug usage in the ghetto is a crime wave; heavy drug usage in suburbia is a public health problem. We can do this all day, but we'll move on.
 Xenophobia: Don't leave home without it. 
The above poster was made to promote the Japanese run of a West German sexploitation film that originally had the unwieldy title Die jungen Ausreißerinnen - Sex-Abenteuer deutscher Mädchen in aller Welt, which is sometimes shortened to just Die jungen Ausreißerinnen, or “the young runaways.” For distribution in English it was called Innocent Girls Abroad. It has nothing to do with Mark Twain's similarly titled classic, but is of course a softcore romp done anthology style, with Doris Arden headlining as the main innocent. She doesn't appear on the poster, though, save for in the lower lefthand corner. We suspect the Japanese distributors decided she wasn't boobalicious enough, which just goes to show what they know, because Arden is spectacular by any measure. Anyway, what we have here is a cautionary tale featuring beautiful young travelers and the pitfalls they encounter, slavery among them, with the various misadventures taking place in Hong Kong, London, Beirut, Paris and Rome. Arden gets the Beirut segment and it consists of her telling the local police her story: raped by her stepfather when she was fifteen, a runaway drifting from place to place, ending up in a harem where she becomes a sexual servant, enduring a year of bondage before her escape. Many sexploitation films are joyful or comical or contain messages of female empowerment—Die jungen Ausreißerinnen isn't one of those. You've been warned. After opening in West Germany earlier in the year it played in Japan for the first time today in 1972.       
 Tate gives chase in an international fortune hunting comedy about a missing chair. 
In ¿Las cual de 13?, aka 12 + 1, aka Twelve Plus One, an Italian barber played by Vittorio Gassman inherits thirteen chairs and, deeming them useless, sells them to a London antique shop. He later discovers one of the chairs contains a fortune, but when he returns to the shop he's told they've all been sold. So he offers the antique shop employee Sharon Tate half of the fortune to help him track down the chairs, which of course have scattered to the four winds. Their search takes them to Paris, Rome, and beyond, in 1960s screwball fashion with its expected pratfalls, mix-ups, and sticky situations. Gassman and Tate do reasonable jobs with the goofy script that's been made of Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov's satirical source novel, and the film is boosted by appearances from Vittorio De Sica, Mylène Demongeot, Terry-Thomas, and Orson Welles. This was an Italian production, but the poster above was painted for the film's Spanish run by Carlos Escobar, who signed his work “Esc.” This is the best we've ever seen from a very good artist. Since the movie didn't premiere in Italy until after Tate had been slain this month in 1969, and didn't reach Spain until mid-1970, the poster very likely was painted post-murder, which means Escobar probably was thinking of how to best portray someone who'd become a tragic figure. We suspect he put special effort into his work as a tribute, and if so, a fitting tribute it was.    
 Look who's all grown up. 
Above, a promotional photo of Iowa born actress Sue Lyon, who played Dolores Haze in the film version of Lolita. In Vladimir Nabokov's shocking but excellent book Haze was a pre-teen, but for Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation the character was made into a teen. Lyon was fourteen at the time of shooting, but this nice shot was made when she was twenty-one in 1967. She went on to good parts in Night of the Iguana and Tony Rome, but managed only about a dozen cinematic roles before leaving movies behind for good in 1980.
 It's a hard job but they make it look easy. 
What better way to complement the collection of paperback covers above than with photos of actual dancers doing what they do best—making their strenuous and often unglamorous work look easy and fun? We present assorted burlesque dancers, showgirls, and strippers from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, both onstage and off, photographed in such hot spots as London, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, New Orleans, and of course New York City. Among the performers: La Savona, Lilly Christine, Lynne O'Neill, the gorgeous Misty Ayres, Patti Cross, Tina Marshall, Carol Doda, Nejla Ates, Barbara Köckritz (we know, we know) fully nude, Lili St. Cyr, Wildcat Frenchie, and more. If you like these, check out our previous set of dancers here.
                                
 In search of the perfect O. 
  There's nothing special about this poster for Mado kara Roma ga mieru, aka Roma dalla finestra, aka Rome from a Window, other than perhaps that it's double-sided, as you see at right. But the movie does feature Kimiko Nakayama, which is no small thing. Shot in Italy by a Japanese director with a mostly Italian cast and crew, it's the story of a photographer named Carlo, his wife, Nakayama's character O, and the various sexual entanglements these three experience, both between themselves and with others. This being an erotic movie made by Shochiku-Fuji Company but modeled after Nikkatsu Studios' very popular roman porno flicks, it's in no way a surprise that the photographer meets O because he comes across her peeing. She happens to be doing this at the monument marking the site where Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in 1975, beaten to death by an assailant or assailants then run over several times with his own car. When Carlo and O get together later for fun and games she comments upon the prodigious size of his member, to which he responds that he is of normal Italian size. As a joke, it can cut both ways, as can many aspects of the movie. In general, it's all very weird, possibly because director Masuo Ikeda, who also wrote the screenplay, was foremost a painter, sculptor, ceramist, printmaker and award-winning novelist who only dabbled in film direction. The sense of artistic freedom, in terms of not being concerned with following norms, really shows. With an atmospheric soundtrack from Paul Mauriat that's better remembered than the actual movie, Mado kara Roma ga mieru, aka Roma dalla finestra premiered in Japan today in 1982. And just because we had it laying around, below is a shot of Nakayama to go along with one we shared several years ago.
 The city never rests and neither does she. 
This cover featuring a beautiful nocturnal vision of Paris and an overheated femme fatale could have fit into two of our previous cover collections—either the group featuring Venetian blinds or the Eiffel Tower set. If you have a moment you should take a look at those. You’ll see amazing cover art. The book above comes from Rome based Edizioni MA-GA and was written for their FBI Story series by Georges H. Bosckero, a pseudonym used—along with Joe H. Bosk, Kriss Leclerc, Georges H. Boskero and possibly other variations—by Giorgio Boschero. The year on this is 1960 and the artist is, sadly, unknown.
 Getting it is hard. Keeping it is even harder. 
This rare Japanese poster for the Italian caper flick 7 uomini d’oro, aka Seven Golden Men, tells you at a glance everything you need to know—men with guns, a pile of gold bars, and Rossana Podesta in a lace catsuit. The movie is about a group determined to rob a gold depository in Switzerland, and stars Podesta along with Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Tinti, and an Ocean’s 11-style cast of others. All the elements here are ones you've seen before—the impenetrable underground vault, the international hotshot thieves, the hi-tech gizmos and gadgets, and the haute couture costume changes from the leading lady. Breezy direction from Marco Vicario and a winning performance from Podesta make everything, familar though it all may be, work like a charm. We also liked the music, the cool exteriors in Geneva and Rome, and the fact that the heist has already begun as the movie opens. The thieves’ plan is clear pretty quickly; how they’re going to pull it off as obstacles proliferate is what becomes the crux of the fun. 7 uomini d’oro is well worth the time. After opening in Italy in 1965, it had its Japanese premiere today in 1966.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war. 1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown. 1921—Chanel No. 5 Debuts
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, the pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired styles, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion, introduces the perfume Chanel No. 5, which to this day remains one of the world's most legendary and best selling fragrances. 1961—First American Reaches Space
Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard completes a sub-orbit of fifteen minutes, returns to Earth, and is rescued from his Mercury 3 capsule in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard made several more trips into space, even commanding a mission at age 47, and was eventually awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
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