Something pretty for you now, a Japanese poster (or actually a two-sided flyer which they call chirashi) for the Italian sexploitation flick La fine dell’innocenza, known in English speaking countries as Annie, and in the U.S. mainly as Teenage Emanuelle. Why not just translate the original title and call it “the end of innocence”? That’s a good question. Maybe the U.S. marketers thought “teenage” was the ticket. In Japan it was called 愛の妖精, which means “love fairy.” See the difference?
Anyway, this starred the beautiful French pixie Annie Belle, aka Annie Brilland, who was twenty years old at the time. She made more than thirty films, largely in this Eurogirl-in-the-tropics vein, and posed for magazine and book covers. We have some production images below that will get your exotic juices moving, we have have another Japanese poster for La fine dell’innocenza here, and we have a write-up about the actual movie here. It premiered in Japan today in 1977.
The above tateken style poster with Reiko Oshida looking through her own legs for some reason will for now complete our coverage of the 1970 pinky violence thriller Furyô banchô: Ikkaku senkin. The standard promo for the film is here, and the bo-ekibari is here. We’ll probably never find the actual movie to watch, but if we do we’ll update this entry.
Admittedly, I was caught unaware by the weather. I thought warmer days were here to stay.
Last time we saw a promo image of Japanese actress Natusko Yashiro—co-star of action films such as Kyôfu joshi kôkô: Animal dôkyôsei, aka Terrifying Girls High School: Animal Courage, and roman porno films such as Hirusagari no onna: chohatsu!, aka Woman of the Afternoon: Incite!—she was wisely contemplating the snow from an indoor perch. Sadly, she didn’t get to stay there. Again, it’s amazing what pinku actresses did for their photographers, but the results were always striking.
When you get in the mood for seafood nothing else will do.
Above: an interesting promo image and zoom of Rie Nakagawa from her 1973 roman porno film (Maruhi) jorô seme jigoku, aka The Hell-Fated Courtesan, aka Prostitute Torture Hell. What’s she doing with the carp? She’s about to let it suck her boobs. Considering the genre of the film, it’s pretty tame behavior. We wrote about the movie several years ago, and you can read that here.
The 1927 German sci-fi film Metropolis was based on Thea von Harbou’s novel/treatment of the same name, which is about an advanced society divided between skyscraper dwelling haves and subterranean have-nots, the latter of whom do the difficult and dirty work of powering the city. The movie was brought to the screen by Fritz Lang a dozen films into his long and storied career. The above poster was made for a 1984 re-release, and prominently features the robotic character Machinemensch, who is played by German actress Brigitte Helm both as a robot and a human. We suspect the movie falls into the category of well-known-but-seldom-watched. We’ll get back to it a bit later.
Remember way back when we shared a shot of Japanese actress Maria Mari from a Weekly Playboy layout featuring women paired with sports gear and said we’d share more? Well, we forgot. Until today. So above you see Ayako Ôta, from such films as Sekkusu hantâ: Sei kariudo, aka Sex Hunter and Kairaku gakuen: Kinjirareta asobi, aka Pleasure Campus, Secret Games, perched on an Italjet off-road bike which we’re going to say is the MC5 model that runs about 50 cc’s. But don’t quote us on it. We aren’t bike experts. Quote us on this, though—we have another rare shot of Ôta that’ll make you blow an o-ring. We’ll share that soonish.
Jet lag isn't the only problem with traveling from west to east.
A long time ago, at least as website time is reckoned, we wrote about the 1973 Christina Lindberg sexploitation kidnap flick Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô, which was known in English as The Pornstar Travels Around Japan, or sometimes The Kyoto Connection. Above you see the tateken style poster for the film. Despite the title, Lindberg doesn’t travel much. She’s mostly imprisoned by a crazy cab driver. It was Toei Company’s attempt to make a pinku flick with a Western star, but the result wasn’t all that good. If you’re interested you can read we thought here.
The poster you see here isn’t much different than the standard and bo-ekibari posters we shared, but the reconfigured dimensions always make these versions worth a look. This also gives us a chance to circle back to Lindberg. Because she didn’t appear in many movies, and several of those are not available anywhere, there isn’t more we can post on her aside from her always brilliant promotional photos and magazine shots. We have plenty of those, and dutifully, another appears below. Hope it brightens your day.
Sinatra gets into deep and deadly water in Lady in Cement.
Above is a Japanese poster for Lady in Cement starring Frank Sinatra and Raquel Welch. We mentioned the movie a long time ago and shared a Japanese soundtrack sleeve, then later also shared the covers of the source novels featuring the title character Tony Rome. The movie’s Japanese title セメントの女 means “cement lady,” which doesn’t have the same ring as the original, but okay, since it had Frankie it’s worth a watch. Or rewatch, actually. We saw it on DVD years ago during a movie night with friends. We’ll get around to rewatching it at some point, and share our thoughts. But preliminarily, since we don’t remember it very well, we either got hammered that movie night or weren’t impressed with the film. We shall see. Lady in Cement premiered in New York City in during the fall of 1968, and reached Japan today in 1969.
Whenever blue teardrops are falling, and her emotional stability is leaving her, there's something she can do.
Japanese distributors, working largely in the realm of photo-illustrations, were adept at movie poster design during the 1960s and 1970s. To promote Western films, emblazoning the English word “sex” on the art was a common technique, which we’ve explored before in collections here and here. This poster was made for the 1969 Italian arthouse flick Nerosubianco, which starred Swedish beauty Anita Sanders. The title is a portmanteau of “nero” for black and “bianco” for white—“black on white.” That should tell you what one of the central themes is. The Japanese title 白/黑 means basically the same thing. In the U.S., though, the film premiered as Attraction, and was also promoted as The Artful Penetration of Barbara.
Despite its x rating, artful would be the key word with this Tinto Brass directed vehicle, which via only the thinnest narrative thread follows an upper class wife played by Anita Sanders through a disjointed series of vignettes as she challenges the constraints of her unsatisfying life, an exploration symbolized by her interracial attraction to co-star Terry Carter. Brass flexes his avant garde muscles, using montages, still frames, ironic juxtapositions, comic book art, single-word dialogue, historical footage, assorted voiceovers of sociological, political, and religious nature, and a psychedelic rock soundtrack from Freedom, performed onscreen by the band at intervals in Greek chorus fashion.
What’s it all ultimately about? It’s an indictment of social control, especially of the sort brandished by the church and political establishment. He makes a good point. Holy texts were written by men who thought the Earth was flat, the sun moved over it, the stars were holes in a dome or sheet, meat spontaneously produced maggots, bloodletting cured illness, good health derived from balanced humors, and hundreds of other ideas that are objectively wrong. So it’s easy to decide they were also wrong about how humans should treat each other or feel about sex. Yet beliefs dating from that time still rule societies around the planet and serve as useful tools for political control.
The point of Nerosubianco is crystal clear: love, nudity, and sex aren’t obscene no matter the race or gender of those involved; hatred and violence are the real obscenities. Those who are fearful of the former and embrace the latter are profoundly sick. Brass, now aged ninety-one, must be incredibly disappointed that this lesson still hasn’t been learned. But he did his part to help. You sort of get the sense of actors participating in a project with only a fuzzy idea of what he had gotten them into, but they more than served his purpose. Nerosubianco has no premiere date for Japan. It opened in Italy today in 1969.
I have wonderful news for you. You've done such a good job as mailboy I'm promoting you to footrub boy.
The priceless Faye Dunaway, virtuoso performer in all-time classics like Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde, Network, and Barfly, is seen here in a promo for the 1969 movie The Arrangement. This comes from the Japanese cinema magazine Screen, which used it in 1974.
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.
1989—Soviets Acknowledge Chernobyl Accident
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
1945—Mussolini Is Arrested
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.
1933—The Gestapo Is Formed
The Geheime Staatspolizei, aka Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established. It begins under the administration of SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police, but by 1939 is administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Main Security Office, and is a feared entity in every corner of Germany and beyond.
1937—Guernica Is Bombed
In Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica is bombed by the German Luftwaffe, resulting in widespread destruction and casualties. The Basque government reports 1,654 people killed, while later research suggests far fewer deaths, but regardless, Guernica is viewed as an example of terror bombing and other countries learn that Nazi Germany is committed to that tactic. The bombing also becomes inspiration for Pablo Picasso, resulting in a protest painting that is not only his most famous work, but one the most important pieces of art ever produced.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise featuring such leads as Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Robert Pattinson, and Christian Bale.
1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves.
