 Upon examination this movie is really bad. 
We suspect 90% of women—if not more—would assume this poster is for an obscure Japanese horror movie. They'd be wrong, though, because it's actually for a lighthearted made-in-West Germany erotic film called Obszönitäten, aka Obscenities, aka Confessions of a Male Escort, which premiered today in 1971. The promo art, which is completely different from the European or U.S. art, is symptomatic of the Japanese penchant for violent imagery in erotica. We've talked about it before, and we're still trying to figure it out. The movie, though, isn't violent, at least not until the end, briefly. It's a slapstick comedy about a gynecologist who is rendered impotent, and offers a gigolo named Johnny the kingly sum of 100,000 DM for his penis, which the doctor has the ability to transplant to himself. 100,000 DM was about $27,000 back when this film was made. Would you take an offer like that? No, neither would we. Plus our girlfriends would kill us if we suddenly turned up with tiny, uncircumcised dicks. No offense to the uncut but the girls have made their preferences clear. Getting back to the movie, the only real obscenity is how bad it is. Please skip it.           
 Giovanni Simonelli was a virtual one-man industry in Italian cinema. 
It’s been too long, so today we’re back to the incomprable Benedetto Caroselli, with a cover he painted for L’incubo scarlatto, aka “The Scarlet Nightmare,” by Simon O’Neil for EPI’s I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore, 1970. O’Neil would have been an Italian writer working under a pseudonym, and in this case it was Giovanni Simonelli, who wrote about seventy-five screenplays between 1958 and 1998. Some of those gems include L’uomo dalla pistola d’oro, released in English as Doc Hands of Steel, Dos pistolas gemelas, aka Sharp Shooting Twin Sisters, and Agente 3S3: Passaporto per l’inferno. L’incubo scarlatto is set in London and involves a woman who thinks she might be a vampire because men around her keep turning up violently killed. Considering one was her potential rapist and another was a sadistic drug lord, they both deserved it, but she needs to know the truth and pairs up with a psychiatrist to get to the bottom of the mystery. Simonelli did more than write macabre books and scripts. He also directed, composed music, and even acted in two movies, appearing in 1966’s Kommissar X - Jagd auf Unbekannt, aka Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, under the name Sim O’Neill. Quite a career. We wouldn’t be surprised to run across his work again. Meantime, you can see plenty more art from Benedetto Caroselli here.
 Working in Bardot’s shadow. 
Thea Fleming, aka Thea Fammy, née Thea Catharina Wihelmina Gemma Pfennings, is a Dutch actress who was packaged as “The Brigitte Bardot of Holland.” We don’t know if that was because of her talent or looks, but in any case she actually spent most of her career not in Holland but in Italy, working under the stage name Isabella Biancini. She was never a big star, no Bardot by any measure, but she made some memorable movies, including Salome ’73, Asso di picche—Operazione controspionaggio, aka Operation Counterspy, and Il nostro agente a Casablanca, aka The Killer Lacks a Name. This great shot is from around 1970.
 If I can’t have you, nobody else can. 
The above photo shows Ruth Ann Steinhagen in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where she was being held after shooting Chicago Cubs baseball player Eddie Waitkus at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Steinhagen had invited Waitkus to her hotel room after a Cubs game, first via a note telling him she had an urgent matter to discuss with him, and later by phone. When he finally went to her room she told him (though accounts vary), “If I can’t have you nobody else can,” and shot him in the chest with a .22 rifle she had grabbed from a closet. Steinhagen was an early example of a new breed of psycho—the celebrity stalker. The story of Waitkus’s shooting would later be used by author Bernard Malamud for his 1952 novel The Natural, which was in turn made into a truly excellent 1984 movie with Robert Redford. The jail photo was made today in 1949, and the shooting had happened two days earlier.
 Good day sunshine. 
So, did you notice that server switch yesterday? The one where our site went down for about twelve hours? Well, we’re making it up to you with this 1971 photo of German actress Doris Arden. She falls squarely into the b-movie category, having appeared in such amusing efforts as Graf Porno und seine Mädchen, Der Sex-Agent, and Eros-Center Hamburg. Hopefully she appeals to your Eros center, as well. We also hope our new server arrangement ends our problem with periodic website outages. That’ll mean fewer posts like the one above where we try to ingratiate ourselves with you, but hey, with the good always comes some bad.
 Whisper dishes dirt from Sukarno to Lollobrigida. 
Whisper features a political figure on this cover from March 1964, namely Indonesian ruler Kusno Sosrodihardjo, later known as Sukarno, who we’re told was offered twenty prostitutes while visiting his country’s embassy in Copenhagen in 1961. In fact, the magazine goes on to claim that the embassy housed a brothel. Though it sounds like a typical tabloid tall tale, it’s actually true. Time magazine had written about it in its October 1963 issue, stating: A diplomat may be only a cookie pusher, but the kind of cookies pushed by Indonesia’s charge d’affaires in Copenhagen tumbled, not crumbled. Last week Danish police announced that Gustin Santawirja not only ran his country’s embassy, [snip] but was also a procurer on the side. Santawirja got into the tart trade    in 1961 when Indonesia's President Sukarno showed up in Copenhagen on an unofficial visit. Amiably, he rounded up some girls for the visiting entourage. So successful was the venture that he decided to supplement his entertainment allowance by running a fulltime poule hall. “Poule” is French for “hen,” by the way, and Whisper was correct, but it was also late to the party. We give no credit for publishing what was already widely known. The magazine moves on to the subject of sexual shenanigans at Harvard University, Carol Lynley’s divorce, Sonny Liston’s world, Roland Gilbert’s bed hopping, and George Bernard Shaw’s love child. The latter is a curious story, since Shaw had died in 1950. But the woman in question, whose name was Patricia Joudry, claimed to have conceived spiritually. In addition to Shaw apparently transmitting his seed from the netherworld, Joudry claimed he transmitted a treasure trove of written material to her, explaining, “There are eighteen full length stage plays, a dozen TV plays, two full length novels and essays. At first George and I worked out an alphabet so we could speak, but now I am a clairvoyant and clairaudient. Now I can see him and hear him.” We actually believe this story because our entire website is transmitted to us by Rodney Dangerfield. Lastly, Whisper offers up an exposé of Gina Lollobrigida’s complicated personal life. For years she had been protesting that she was not a sex symbol (as if she’s the one who actually gets to decide that), but rather a nice girl. She tells an interesting story from her early career about Howard Hughes’ efforts to romance her, which were fruitless but led to her being stuck in a hotel “for six weeks like a prisoner.” In the end,   
she fled back to Italy and, because Hughes owned her American contract, she was unable to make movies in the U.S. She became an international star just the same, acting exclusively in Europe, but having attained celebrity claimed it was difficult for her. She complained: “When I am with people I am constantly watched, and I can’t get used to this sort of thing—that they look at me as a chimpanzee in a zoo.” Sounds bad, but she eventually learned to enjoy it. In 2000 she commented to Parade magazine, “I’ve had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled.” So it seems even the worst parts of celebrities’ lives aren’t really all that bad. Assorted scans below.
         
 The man with the Midas touch.  
The Japanese weren’t the only ones who produced amazing 45 sleeves for James Bond music. Above you see art for Shirley Bassey’s Bond theme “Goldfinger,” released by Columbia Records and EMI in Italy in 1965, with Sean Connery and gold plated Shirley Eaton caught during a moment between takes on the set. In Italy the movie was called Agente 007, Missione Goldfinger, which is why the title on the reverse differs from the front. Check out those Japanese Bond sleeves here.
 Confidential gets out its trusty airbrush. 
 We like this fun blue cover of Confidential from January 1968, but it’s just a bit misleading. The image of Nancy Sinatra is doctored to imply that she's naked. The original, which you see below, was shot around the time she was filming her 1966 comedy caper The Last of the Secret Agents? In the movie there’s a scene in which her dress gets snagged on something and accidentally torn off. The moment is played for laughs, in a public setting. The ensemble she wore in that scene is exactly what she has on in the photo, which suggests it was probably shot to promote the film.
Nancy in her undies could not save The Last of the Secret Agents? from bad reviews and an underwhelming run, but while the movie was a dud, the undies photo became quite famous and was used on many magazines, including a cover of The National Police Gazette that we showed you a couple of years ago. Leave it to Confidential to suggest that more came off during the filming of Secret Agents than ended up in the final version of the film, but as far as we know, Sinatra never appeared fully nude in any medium until 1995, when she was 54 years old and did a layout for Playboy. Before that she had shot a promo photo in which she appeared to be bare, but with arms and legs arranged to hide the naughty bits. The Playboy spread, by contrast, hid nothing. And Confidential? It hid the truth. 
 Never known a girl like you before. 
Above, a brilliant shot of French/Italian actress Dominique Boschero, who acted in about sixty films during the 1950s and 1960s, including OSS 77—Operazione fior di loto (aka OSS 77—Operation Lotus), Gli imbroglioni (aka The Impostors), and Agente 310 spionaggio sexy (we probably don’t need to translate that one, right?). This image is from 1966.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1945—Germany Announces Hitler's Death
German radio in Hamburg announces that Adolf Hitler was killed in Berlin, stating specifically that he had fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany. But in truth Hitler had committed suicide along with his mistress Eva Braun, and both bodies were immediately thereafter burned. 1960—Powers Is Shot Down over U.S.S.R.
Francis Gary Powers, flying in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane, is shot down over the Soviet Union. The U.S. denies the plane's purpose and mission, but is later forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produces its remains and reveals Powers, who had survived the shoot down. The incident triggers a major diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. 1927—First Prints Are Left at Grauman's
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established. 1945—Hitler Marries Braun
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia's Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden. 1967—Ali Is Stripped of His Title
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon.
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