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.
Above: yet another stunning image of Reiko Ike. This was made in Kyoto to promote her film Sukeban burûsu: Mesubachi no gyakushû, aka Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee Strikes Again, aka Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counterattack, in 1971. It was only her second role but she would become a huge star at Tokyo based Toei Studios and make some of the most memorable Japanese action movies of the ’70s. We’ve shared a couple of nice posters for Queen Bee’s Counterattackhere and here.
Above: another promo poster for the 1976 ninja actioner Kunoichi ninpo: Kannon biraki, aka Female Ninjas – In Bed with the Enemy. We talked about the movie a few years ago and shared its tateken poster. Shorter version: Megumi Hori, Keiko Kinugasa, and Maki Tachibana are sent on a secret mission, bad men lose pints of blood. What could be better?
We talked about the landmark Japanese roman porno drama Jitsuroku Abe Sada, known in English as A Woman Called Sada Abe, and shared an Italian poster for it, along with the standard Japanese promo. Nikkatsu Studios also commissioned the special piece above, of which you see the front and rear, painted by an artist unknown to us. This is really nice work. It used to be available for purchase on a specialty website, but sold a while back, though other nice posters remain available.
The movie, conversely, is not nice at all. It’s about real life yuujo, or prostitute, Sada Abe, who in 1939 strangled her lover, carved her name on his body, castrated him, and kept his severed organ. The crime, for which she served four years in prison, was a national sensation. In interviews Sada said she’d never experienced similar urges before, but her victim unleashed unusual feelings in her. Later, as Japanese movie studios began to explore subjects like erotic asphyxiation and bondage, films based on the crime were inevitable. Jitsuroku Abe Sada premiered today in 1975.
Italian filmmakers manage to produce an archetypal example of the male gaze.
This super poster was made to promote the Italian film La donna nel mondo, known in English as Women of the World, made by schlockmeisters Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi with leftover footage from their 1962 gross-out documentary Mondo Cane. This effort discusses women—full stop. It looks at different types of women all around the world, from Israeli soldiers to New Guinean tribeswomen to Cannes Film Festival movie star wannabes to Japanese amas, with occasional digressions into whether they’re hot and/or bedworthy.
It’s narrated by Peter Ustinov, who in his urbane and continental accent drops nuggets like this: “What are the deep rooted emotions that remove [these lesbians] from the company of men, yet at the same time cause them to emulate the masculine appearance with such pathetic results? Even though these emotions are covered up by a blasé attitude, one is still aware of their underlying sadness.” Ouch.
If we were to speculate, we’d say it’s possible that living in a repressed early-1960s society that treats you as persona non grata could cause some sadness, but in the here-and-now our lesbian friends don’t seem to have an underlying sadness about anything except not having enough time to do all the cool shit they dream up. There’s still plenty of second class treatment, but being able to exist above ground really makes a difference in one’s life. Ustinov’s narration is snobbish through most of the film, so it’s less purely anti-lgbt than anti-everything that isn’t middle ground and whitebread. You have to expect it for the period.
The movie goes on to feature drag performers, everyday cross-dressers, manages to work in insults toward trans star Coccinelle, and even briefly squeezes in a cameo from actress Belinda Lee. The title is “women of the world” and indeed, the filmmakers leave few corners of the globe unexplored. We suppose on some level that really does make it educational, if voyeuristic, so in the end we have to pronounce it worth a glance. At the very least you’ll get a primer on square-peg mid-century social attitudes. La donna nel mondo premiered in Italy in January 1963, and in Japan today the same year.
It's well known that those who keep learning into adulthood lead more fulfilling lives.
It’s been a long while since we’ve visited with Yuki Kazamatsuri. Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago, known in English as Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon, the fourth entry in the Female Teacher series, is a pretty basic roman porno movie, with Kazamatsuri playing a teacher with a difficult past called upon to help highly sexed, extremely beautiful, and emotionally problematic student Ayako Ôta get back onto the straight and narrow. All good, but when Kazamatsuri begins to suspect that Ôta’s itinerant father is a rapist from her own past, things get weird. With Kazamatsuri’s kinky problems she probably isn’t the person to offer a stable example to Ôta, but that’s kind of the point here. Let she who does not have degrading sex throw the first stone. We can’t say Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago is good, but its stars certainly are. It premiered in Japan today in 1981.
Above: the lovely Meg Flower enjoys a watery frolic in a photo made for the Japanese culture magazine Heibon Punch in 1971. She starred in many movies and even more promo shots during her career. She’s a photographer’s dream. Click her keywords below to see proof.
In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state’s economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived.
1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight
During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service.
1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe
Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane.
1965—Leonov Walks in Space
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov’s spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod’s airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit’s pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk.
1966—Missing Nuke Found
Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.
1968—My Lai Massacre Occurs
In Vietnam, American troops kill between 350 and 500 unarmed citizens, all of whom are civilians and a majority of whom are women, children, babies and elderly people. Many victims are sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies are mutilated. The incident doesn’t become public knowledge until 1969, but when it does, the American war effort is dealt one of its worst blows.
