Above are six posters for one of our favorite Japanese movie series, Kozure ôkami, aka Lone Wolf and Cub. Starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, these are the films that introduced us to the samurai sub-genre. At the time we loved them, and over the years we learned that they are considered cinematic triumphs, second only Akira Kurosawa’s visually ingenious samurai epics. What are they about? Well, there are plenty of reviews online of both the films and the manga they were based upon, so we don’t need to bother. The first Kozure ôkami film opened in Japan in the spring of 1972. 

Over in the U.S. this is the day that makes cows tremble in fear—July 4, or Independence Day. Since moving away from the States we’ve had to get used to a whole new set of holidays, and while those events are truly amazing, none of them involve the searing of millions of hamburgers on outdoor grills. In our own way we’re trying to change that by teaching our friends what exactly goes into a great hamburger, but working one friend at a time it may be some years before we really make an impact on the local cuisine. However, we can participate in July 4 in a more immediate way by sharing a couple of images from a July 1943 Motion Picture-Hollywood Magazine of that most beloved of golden age American stars, Rita Hayworth. Other stars inside include Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald and Merle Oberon, and you also get the most famous photo of Betty Grable ever shot. Okay, our work is done. Though we can’t find a decent burger in this corner of the world (yet), we do have a wide beautiful plaza just one block away and on that plaza is a quiet bar with outdoor tables and friendly staff members that keep us well-stocked with ice cold bottles of white wine. That’s going to be the rest of our day. Enjoy the rest of yours. 

We located this July 1965 copy of the British cinema magazine Continental Film Review, and found two good reasons to post it—the great Sylva Koscina cover shot, and the adverts for London’s x-rated Compton Theater, at bottom. In between you get Ugo Tognozzi, Rossana Podesta, Luciana Gilli and more. CFR was actually one of the most serious and informed film magazines of its era, but instead of sharing scans of pages and pages of text, we posted the photos. However, in this issue are articles on the San Sebastian and Berlin film festivals, Canadian and Québécois cinema, and near-scholarly treatments on Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s award winning biblical film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Doesn't that all sound great? See a CFR with Christina Lindberg here, and Laura Gemser here.

Above is a beautiful promotional poster of Mari Atsumi for her 1970 pinku flick (and here we go again with the made up titles, but what can we do?) Night Sea Anemones, or possibly Sea Anemones at Night. We’ve explained this title thing before—i.e., for these films that never had a western release we have to come up with a title without actually understanding Japanese. We recognize some characters, and can look up others, but ultimately what we produce can be, let’s just say, fanciful. On this one, though, we think we’re pretty close. And even if we aren’t, screw it—our title sounds cool. Another Atsumi below, and more here.

Sad to say, our issues of the wonderful Aussie post-pulp mag Adam are beginning to run low. Not only that, but the prices for them online have been steadily rising and are reaching a point where we can’t really buy them economically anymore. We don’t know what the hell is going on but it truly sux. But we’ll focus on the positive, which includes this June 1976 issue, with cover art for Michael Young’s story “The Urandangie Track.” Sayeth the intro: “He stole a bushman’s wife. Surely a Nissan utility could outrun a horse?” And the answer is no it can’t, not when there are no roads and the guy on a horse is shooting at you. We have twenty-four scans below, and several issues of Adam remaining. 

The two victims never knew each other, but Heather Barnett and Elisa Claps are forever linked by their stolen lives, stolen hair, and tragic acquaintance with a third person, a strange, compulsive man neither of them suspected was capable of violence. Danilo Restivo, an Italian national who spent much of his life in the remote town of Potenza, Italy, was convicted yesterday for the 2002 mutilation and murder of Heather Barnett. The killing took place in the British town of Bournemouth, where Barnett lived and where Restivo had relocated. But the Restivo saga may actually have begun seventeen years ago, when young Elisa Claps disappeared from a church in Potenza, Italy.

The Church of the Most Holy Trinity, known in Potenza as Chiesa della SS. Trinità, is one of the few old churches in a town that was destroyed by an 1857 earthquake and again by an Allied bombardment during World War II. The town was shaken yet again in 1993 when Elisa Claps disappeared. Then sixteen, Claps had agreed to meet nineteen-year-old Danilo Restivo at morning mass, but he claimed afterward that Claps left while he remained behind to pray. A missing persons case was soon launched but Claps seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Police suspected Restivo, but there was no evidence against him, and with mass just ending there seemed too many witnesses to a potential crime for him to have harmed her. Yes, there was a cut on his hand, but Restivo claimed to have fallen at a construction site, and he was cool when questioned.

Claps, below, remained missing and, as often happens, the vacuum in the case was filled by the general public as rumors sprang up, articles and opinion pieces were published, and websites were launched. Perhaps Claps ran away with a lover. Perhaps she was abducted by Albanians and sold into sexual slavery. Maybe there was a police cover-up. Or perhapsthe church was involved—after all, the priest of della Trinità was a curious man named Mimi Sabia and he wasn’t entirely cooperative with police, having refused to let authorities disrupt his church with forensic investigations. The case wore on and the obsession about it spread from Potenza to the rest of Italy.

Danilo Restivo eventually left Italy. By 2002 he was living in Bournemouth, England, where he was a neighbor of Heather Barnett. On November 12 Barnett’s two children found their mother mutilated and dead in the bathroom of their home. She was partially nude, her throat was slit and her breasts cut off. She was also holding a lock of her own hair. Local police immediately suspected Restivo. They learned that Barnett’s keys had gone missing just after Restivo had been inside the house asking about having some curtains made. When they interviewed him days later they found that he was soaking his Nike trainers in bleach. But suspicions do not a murder case make and so police did not detain him—however, unlike in Italy they decided to keep him under surveillance.

What they learned was extremely disconcerting. Restivo haunted a local park, where he would spy on single women, darting between bushes or ducking behind stands of grass. He wore gloves during these outings, and he often returned to his car to change shirts or shoes. They also learned that he had a habit of stealing girls’ and women’s hair. Two teenagers reported that someone had cut their hair while they rode in a bus. They couldn’t say for sure who did it, but they were able to identify Restivo as one of the people who had sat behind them. Police also learned that at the age of fourteen Restivo had tied up and tortured two boys whose families later dropped charges in exchange for financial compensation from Restivo’s family. And perhaps most worrying, other women had been murdered and mutilated in places where Danilo Restivo resided and passed through.

All of this was uncovered through years of police work, and though the case against Danilo Restivo was looking stronger and stronger all the time, it wasn’t until this March that police caught the break they needed. That was when two workers back in Potenza, intending to repair a leak in the roof of della Trinità, found Elisa Claps’ body in the very church where she had been last seen. Her skeletonized remains, covered by mummified skin and the rags of her clothes, had been hidden in a small tower room beneath some old tiles. In one of the corpse’s hands was a lock of hair, and subsequent forensic analysis revealed that she had been mutilated in almost identical fashion as Heather Barnett. A case that had spawned numerous articles, websites, multiple investigations and hundreds of conspiracy theories, had come full circle. British police arrested Danilo Restivo, the court tried him, and yesterday, with Barnett’s family members present, a jury convicted him.

Now all eyes turn to Potenza. Mimi Sabia the uncooperative priest had long been suspected by some of hiding something. His was the only church that didn’t ring bells on the anniversary of Elisa Claps’ disappearance. Now there was a body in that bell tower belonging to a girl who would have been found probably the very day she was killed if onlyDon Mimi had helped. During investigation into the case he claimed not to know Danilo Restivo even though Restivo had been to della Trinità and Sabia was once photographed, just above, at a birthday party thrown for Restivo. But these questions will possibly never be answered because Don Mimi Sabia died in 1998.

However there are other questions. Della Trinità's newest priest claims that Elisa Claps’ body wasn’t found in March 2011, but two months earlier by two cleaners. The priest claims he informed church officials but was told to keep quiet while they decided what to do. Two months of secret deliberations later, two more workers were called in to repair a leaky roof that in fact wasn’t leaking at all. A body that had been completely covered with tiles was now partially exposed in order to ensure its discovery. Or so the new priest says, which means the Catholic Church is accused by one of its own of operating outside the law. It would be shocking if it hadn’t happened so many times before with regard to child molestation cases, but only time will tell if these specific allegations are true. Meanwhile, all the details of Elisa Claps’ last day on Earth are set to emerge—Danilo Restivo is being extradited to Italy to stand trial for her murder. 

The most difficult piece of human anatomy for an artist to master, so we've heard, is the hand. But pulp icon Rudolph Belarski was so good at hands that they were often the central element of his covers. Below are seven examples culled from around the internet showing his proficiency—indeed, flaunting his ability—in this area. And you can see an eighth handsome Belarski here.

Below, some scans from the debut issue of the low rent American tabloid Keyhole Confidential, sister publication to Keyhole, published out of New York City, June 1972. This is pretty much the Maxim of ’70s tabs, i.e. its minimal text content is especially designed to appeal to people who hate reading. The centerfold is Uschi Digard, posing as Mabel Partree. More on this one later.

Above, Austrian-born British actress Jocelyn Lane, who appeared in numerous films and television shows during the ’50s and ’60s, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Operation Snatch, Dangerous Youth, and The Gamma People, before going on to marry Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (there’s a mouthful), relaxing here with her dog circa 1960. 

No, Whitey Bulger isn’t a thing, but a person. James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious gangster who had been on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for sixteen years and was the template for Jack Nicholson’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, was captured last night in Southern California. Bulger had once been leader of an Irish organized crime syndicate called the Winter Hill Gang, and worked for twenty years as an FBI informant in Boston. But he was dropped from the Feds’ roster in the early 1990s and dropped out of sight himself in 1995 when his FBI handler John Connolly, Jr. tipped him off that an indictment was coming down. Bulger was arrested yesterday at a Santa Monica apartment complex and now will face a full slate of serious charges—including murder, conspiracy, money laundering, narcotics distribution, and extortion.

Though the FBI has traditionally worked with criminals to help secure evidence against other lawbreakers, the agency’s relationship with Whitey Bulger was sharply criticized once it became public. At the time, the FBI was determined to cripple the Italian Mafia in Boston, and saw a partnership with Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang associate Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi as an acceptable bargain. But the relationship quickly became messy as the agency turned a blind eye to Bulger and Flemmi’s ongoing crimes. Flemmi himself testified in court in 1998 that the FBI gave him a free pass on numerous murders and attempted murders. He described it as having a “license to kill.”