Italian artist Sandro Symeoni painted posters for all genres of film, from zany comedies to spaghetti westerns, but we like him in thriller mode best. Above are five examples of his work promoting 1950s and 1960s crime and horror movies. Their English titles are, top to bottom, The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll, Deadly Inheritance, Scandal Incorporated, Grisbi, and The Revenge of Frankenstein. Plenty more Symeoni to see—just click his keywords below. 

Here’s a rare promo shot from the 1933 pre-Hays Code musical Roman Scandals, an interesting film about a guy from West Rome, Oklahoma who has a vivid dream that he lives in ancient Rome. If you can deal with the sight of Eddie Cantor cavorting in blackface, it’s probably worth a rental. The movie was produced by the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and starred Sam Goldwyn’s dance troupe the Goldwyn Girls, whose most famous ex-member is Lucille Ball. And in fact, that’s Lucille Ball above, on the right, though it may be hard to believe. Trust us, though. The Hays Code, by the way, was actually enacted in 1930 but ignored until 1934, which is why cinema historians consider Roman Scandals to be a pre-Code production. The Code was finally ditched in 1968, but unfortunately in favor of the almost equally arbitrary MPAA rating system. Below, just for the fun of it, we’ve posted the back of the photo because with its writing and tape marks it strikes us as a pretty nice piece of abstract art. And at bottom we’ve posted a much clearer shot of Miss Ball.

Above we have a well-worn On the Q.T. from November 1963, with Christine Keeler on the cover. Keeler, at upper right and below, was a London showgirl who had a brief relationship with Britain’s married Secretary of State for War, a man named John Profumo. The two met at a party in Buckinghamshire, in a mansion owned by Lord Astor, and though Keeler wasn’t a full-time prostitute, she occasionally made herself available to wealthy and powerful men and they sometimes gave her cash gifts.

She and Profumo were involved only a few weeks, but that was long enough for people to notice. When Profumo was paraded before the House of Commons and asked to answer to the rumors, he claimed there had been no impropriety between him and Keeler. It wasn’t just the lie that sank him—members of the government were alarmed because Keeler’s many acquaintances included Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. With the Cold War in full swing, officials feared Keeler was working Profumo for nuclear secrets on behalf of Ivanov and the Russkies.

The mess cost Profumo his job and reputation, and also may have brought down conservative Prime Minster Harold Macmillan, who resigned six months later for “health reasons.” It was the scandal of the century in Britain, and really, it still is. Never since have sex, politics, and state secrets been fused in such a way. There are many detailed retellings of the story, but for people interested in an inside account, Keeler published an autobiography in 2001 that sparked an outcry because she wrote that actress Maureen Swanson was one ofthe girls who attended private orgies arranged by Dr. Stephen Ward (in sunglasses on the magazine cover). Ward was an osteopath who dabbled in pimping, and his orgies were infamous. Open only to the rich and powerful, they featured not only beautiful girls, but the occult, sadomasochism, interracial sex shows, and so forth. Maureen Swanson later became the Countess of Dudley through marriage to Lord Ednam, so Keeler’s naming of her as a participant caused quite a bit of embarrassment to British nobility, for which she sued and won a settlement.

We could go on, but life is short and history’s intrigues are many. For cinematic types, the 1989 film Scandal, starring Joanne Whalley and Bridget Fonda, is an entertaining way to learn more about the event. We watched it, and, while Whalley is fine in the lead role and Fonda is good as always, only reading Keeler’s own words can convey the sense of ’60s liberation and breeziness that was such a large part of her personality, and which the British public reacted to with such revulsion. More than one writer of the period observed that when Britain crucified Keeler, they were really trying to destroy a part of themselves. Keeler said it herself: “I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really.”

It’s difficult to imagine Anthony Perkins in any role save that of Norman Bates, but he made a number of post-Psycho films, several in France, including this oft-maligned effort by directorial legend Claude Chabrol about murder and mayhem among the feckless Parisian bourgeoisie. Perkins continued to land serious roles through the rest of the sixties and seventies, before the 1983-to-1986 triple whammy of Psycho II, Crimes of Passion and Psycho III entrenched him as cinema’s all time greatest (and twitchiest) madman. In Le Scandale he wasn’t what you’d call clinically mad, but he wasn’t exactly playing with a full deck either. Le Scandale, aka The Champagne Murders, premiered in France today in 1967.