We found two more Mafé one-sheets, and we’re now going to just go ahead and declare him the greatest illustrator of x-rated posters ever. He did non x-rated work too, but he flourished in porn, bringing a real elegance to the material, as you can see for yourself. He’s still a bit of a mystery to us, but we’re digging for more info. These two posters are circa mid-seventies, and you can see the other two Mafé pieces we posted here. 

Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Koyu Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue. It premiered in Japan today in 1975. 

We love Bond stuff here, as you’ve probably figured out already. So we were pretty excited to find this Japanese advert for Imai’s scale model Aston Martin DB-5, a car which appeared in the James Bond films Goldfinger, Thunderball, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Casino Royale. The painting is a lot more impressive than the actual model, but we could be convinced to buy it anyway, as long it’s equipped with a tiny ejector seat. 

American actress Debra Feuer seen here in a promo still from one of our favorite movies, Leben und Sterben in L.A., aka To Live and Die in L.A., 1985 

The original King Kong took cinema by storm with its tale of a fantastic lost world, and its revolutionary visual effects. It also had the most consistently wonderful promo posters of possibly any film in history. All were great, but the best, in our opinion, is the version made for the world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, above. The numerous other versions are below, and all are stunning. King Kong, one of the most enduring movies ever made, opened in New York City today in 1933. 

Sleeve of Italian pop performer Fabrizio Ferretti's 1966 single "Operazione Tuono", aka "Thunderball", with a flip side of "L'amore" by Memo Remigi.

Maybe the English word “sex” is to the Japanese what the French word “soirée” is to English speakers—i.e., a foreign word that carries more meaning than its indigenous equivalent. Maybe “sex” sounds really dirty to Japanese ears. Maybe it’s just conveniently short. We don’t know the answer, but below are six one-sheets using that magical English syllable. However you say it, just do it. 

Above we've posted two Spanish one-sheets for El Pajaro de las Plumas de Cristal, aka L’uccello dale piume de cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. This was horror grandmaster Dario Argento’s first film, a thriller in the Hitchcockian mode about an American in Italy who witnesses an attempted murder. The police make him stay in the country, and the would-be killer soon begins stalking him. In subsequent films, Argento would explore realms of gore Hitchcock probably never dreamt of, but in this early effort, he relies on mood to achieve his goals, and the English language version succeeds despite the distraction of some less than breathtaking dubbing. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage premiered in Italy today in 1970. The poster art is by another grandmaster, Spanish illustrator Francisco Fernandez Zarza-Pérez, who worked under the pseudonym Jano—aka Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways, arches, beginnings and endings. Jano painted thousands of pieces beginning in the 1940s, and we’ve cobbled a few more together and posted them below for you to enjoy this lovely Friday. More on Jano later. 

Japanese promo poster for the American porno flick Glitter, with an image of star Shauna Grant, 1983. Grant committed suicide a year after this film was released. 

You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it. In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA. In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He wrote screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also became a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read.