 My dream is actually to be a singer, so I interrupt this striptease to perform Verdi's aria, “Stride la vampa.” 
This entry in Editions ERP's I Gialli dello Schedario's FBI series is a late one. It was number 259 and came in 1980, which is surprsing because we didn't realize ERP was still using painted cover art then. This one was the work of Mario Carìa, and Norman Forrest the author was actually—you guessed it—Renato Carocci, the guy who you could be forgiven for thinking wrote every Italian crime novel ever. You can check his output by clicking his keywords below, and you can see a small collection of FBI covers here.
 Life there is an ongoing domestic disturbance.  
The posters you see here were made for the French thriller Les félins. While the French posters are fine, we thought these Italian promos were a bit more interesting. The first two were painted by Enzo Nistri, the second two by Sandro Symeoni. The movie was called Crisantemi per un delitto in Italy—“chrysanthemums for a crime.” No idea why. But fine, it's lyrical, which is never bad. It's based on the imaginative Day Keene novel Joy House, which is the title the movie retained for its U.S. run. In the book a derelict is plucked from a Chicago homeless shelter by a rich widow who needs a chauffeur, but her benevolence seems likely to backfire because her new driver was in the shelter only because it offered a perfect hiding place from mobsters seeking to kill him. But she has her own secret plans, and they're as sinister as they come. Working from a screenplay co-written by director René Clément and crime author Charles Williams, the movie slightly alters the approach of Keene's book. With Lola Albright playing the widow and Alain Delon as the hunted man, the story is transplanted from urban Chicago to the Côte d'Azur. Pre-Barbarella Jane Fonda features in a co-starring  role as Albright's cousin and household helper. The two are soon in competition for Delon's affections, though he never forgets that his main goal is to escape the mobsters. While the general thrust of the plot remains a mystery as in Keene's novel, there's a heavy dose of action too, with excellent stunts. The ending differs as well.
The result is good, but also an example of both the highs and lows of French cinema of the period. Delon, Fonda, and Albright are decent actors bestowed a good script, and are all gorgeous and charismatic, but the movie spends a lot of time being cute. Even so, Clément and company pull it all together. Make sure you appreciate the production design, especially the Rolls Royce that Delon drives, with its completely transparent roof, c-pillars all. It's something we never knew existed. To us it looked like a good way to get heatstroke, but we guess it was made for rich occupants to see and be seen. We think Joy House should be seen. It premiered in France in June 1964, then opened at the Taormina Film Fest in Italy today the same year.
                     
 When you go out can you pick me up some Visine or Blink-n-Clean? My eyes are killing me. 
This is wonderful work from Italian illustrator Benedetto Caroselli, fronting Lucien Le Bossù's La zingara, which is number fifty-two in Grandi Edizioni Internazionali's series I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore. “Zingara” is Italian for gypsy, and this one has red hair and red eyes, which is not the first time Caroselli went this route with one of his women. The author here, Le Bossù was actually Renato Carocci, who wrote scores of books under too many pseudonyms to list, with this one coming in 1965. Caroselli was prolific, as well. If he didn't paint more covers than anyone else in Italy during the 1960s, he certainly came close.
 What was her real name? It's a Short story.   
Above are three photos of British-Burmese actress Seyna Seyn, who in our view has one of the greatest names in show business history. But as we asked above, could such an exotic and alliterative handle be real? Sadly, no. She was born Sylvia Short, which strikes us as a perfectly serviceable show business name, but when you come up with something like Seyna Seyn you have to go with it. Seyn's filmography includes Casanova 70, I marziani hanno 12 mani, aka The Twelve-Handed Men of Mars, Agente segreto 777 - Operazione Mistero, and Se tutte le donne del mondo... (Operazione Paradiso), aka Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. As those titles suggest, she mostly worked in Italy. We figure we'll get around to one or two of her movies pretty soon.
 Sommer and Koscina add up to one great day. 
We've looked at the output of Italian illustrator Jean Mascii a few times. Above you see his work again, this time on a poster for the James Bond-style adventure Plus féroces que les mâles, which first showed in France today in 1967 but had its global premiere months earlier in England as Deadlier Than the Male. Over four decades, working from the early ’50s until the late ’80s, Mascii painted almost 1,500 movie posters, hundreds of book covers, and a copious amount of print advertising. You can click his keywords at bottom to see a few more posters we've shared on our site, or click here to take the express lane to one of his very best.
The “deadlier” in Deadlier Than the Male refers to co-stars Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, two of the more beautiful products of the mid-century era, who play assassins. We've shared posters for the film from Japan—twice—and the former Yugoslavia. Returning to it yet again is mainly an excuse to share some of the many production photos we've found—to go along with this one, this one, and this one. Today we're restricting ourselves to only Sommer and Koscina's bikini shots, because the skin and smiles say summertime to us. There are drawbacks to movie stardom, so we hear, but some days surely must be just fine.
                                   
 This version is not for kids. 
This unusual photo shows Italian star Gina Lollobrigida paired with an aquatic foreground painting, and was made for a 1963 cover of the New York City based arts magazine Show. We took the liberty of removing the magazine's logo so you could enjoy 100% pure Lollo, and we think you'll agree it was worth the effort. This is a very cool idea for a promo image. We especially like the baffled expressions on all the fish. We're baffled too when it comes to mermaids. How in hell do they..? Well, never mind.
 Strindberg, Tamburi, Bisera and company wip it good in Italian sexploitation drama. 
We ran across this poster for a movie we watched years ago, the exploitation drama Diario segreto da un carcere femminile, which premiered in Italy today in 1973 and is known in English as Women in Cell Block 7. Such films, for the uninitiated, are thought of by b-movie fans as belonging to a sub-genre known as women-in-prison or WiP. In honor of today's post we've gone back through the website and keyworded for them, so you can see what we've done on this unusual style of cinema by clicking “women in prison” at bottom.
The art on the poster is by Enzo Nistri, which makes it worth a share. The movie is sort of interesting too, though perhaps not exactly good. However, we've never been able to forget Olga Bisera's naughty correctional facility finger. You can see her using it in a couple of the production photos below, and following those are some of the stars, who comprise a who's-who of 1970s European exploitation cinema: Anita Strindberg, Eva Czemerys, Jenny Tamburi, Paola Senatore, Maria Pia Luzi, Gabriella Giorgelli, Olga Bisera, and Valeria Fabrizi.
                        
 Bad fast food. A random shooting. And now an aquatic theme park. On my trip to the U.S. I'm experiencing all the most American things. 
Mario Ferrari returns with this nice cover for 1965's Grossi guai per Tony Hunter, written by Perry Landers for Edizioni Wamp's series Narratori Americani del Brivido (Thrilling American Storytellers). And of course Landers wasn't American, but Italian, working under a pseudonym. Most likely he was Mario Pinzauti, and we say most likely because we can't be 100% sure other authors didn't borrow the same pen name, as often happened. But we don't read Italian anyway, so we're focused on Ferrari's art. It's excellent as always. Click his keywords if you want to see what we mean.
 Her Majesty the Queen of the Jungle is unavailable—she's gone hunting today. 
Several years ago we talked about the lost world adventure Luana la figlia delle foresta vergine and showed you its Italian poster. Today we're showing you the much cooler U.S. promo, which was painted by Frank Frazetta, one of the kings of fantasy art. His work was used for numerous promos, but this is one of our favorites. It wasn't made specifically for the movie. It was adapted from one of his many earlier pieces, below. You can see a little more Frazetta here, as well as here, where we talked about the novelization of the movie.
 At least we're still in love after all these years, honey. You're in love with a waitress, and I'm in love with a cabana boy. 
We're back to Italian illustrator Sandro Syemoni today, who we consider a genius in his field. Above you see his cover for Ace Books' 1958 edition of Alberto Moravia's The Time of Indifference, which was originally published in 1929 as Gli indifferenti. We gather it was quite a racy book and it sold out in weeks. Ace, as we've mentioned before, repackaged a lot of literary fiction with newly provocative covers. If you're going to go that route, Symeoni was close to the best. See what we mean here and here. And check some of his poster work here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family. 1918—U.S. Congress Passes the Sedition Act
In the U.S., Congress passes a set of amendments to the Espionage Act called the Sedition Act, which makes "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces, as well as language that causes foreigners to view the American government or its institutions with contempt, an imprisonable offense. The Act specifically applies only during times of war, but later is pushed by politicians as a possible peacetime law, specifically to prevent political uprisings in African-American communities. But the Act is never extended and is repealed entirely in 1920.
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