Above is the cover of the July 1967 issue of Continental Film Review, a magazine produced by London based Eurap Publishing, which updated readers on the latest developments in European cinema. This issue focuses on the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Greece, Italy, and the Cannes Film Festival.

Here's an interesting quote from within: An indication of Italy's mammoth production appeared in an Italian trade journal a few weeks back which listed thirty-eight films premiered in the previous few weeks, seventy-six ready to be premiered, twenty being edited, forty-four in production, twenty-one about to start shooting and thirty-one being prepared, making a total of 230 films (including, of course, co-productions).

You probably think that's an enormous number, but last year Italy released 356 films. It's amazing how much there is to see from other countries if you care to look, and that's largely what Continental Film Review was about. We have twenty-plus scans below, and other issues scattered here and there in places around the website.
 

Montreal based Le Rendez-Vous is one of the more interesting mid-century tabloids. It faithfully catalogued celebrity, crime, and nature's misfortunes and atrocities—the classic tabloid formula—but did so with an extra layer of brutality that's amazingly raw for a Canadian publication. Was it that way because Canada was such a safe country and its readers liked to walk on the dark side? We think that could be a factor, though it's true to an extent for all tabloids that their readers seek exotic thrills. But as if to prove our point about Le Rendez-Vous, the crime stories in this issue from today in 1969 all come from outside countries: Mexico, South Africa, and the good ole USA. Canada seemingly wasn't a good source of chaos and killing.

The editors first pump up the sex factor with British actress Margaret Lee on the cover, then, to the right, you see a stack of text about a “fillette de 16 ans.” No, it's not about a dry-aged steak. It says: 16-year-old girl kills her sister... Because she stole her lover father. Lover father? That sounds ominous. And indeed, turns out a Mexico City girl named Amalia Martinez, her sister Cristina, and father Ernesto, were in an incestuous love triangle. Amalia solved this family beef by shooting her sister in the head. “That little silly girl,” she said after being arrested, “got what she deserved.” Clearly she still hadn't quite worked through her anger. Probably she always had to share everything with her sister, and usually got the short end of the stick. It's quite a story from Le Rendez-Vous—100% prime tabloid journalism.

Elsewhere in the issue readers get a feature on circus performers, including a photo of a contortionist that brings to mind the time we saw a woman in Marrakech crawl through a tennis racket (we were searching for a cursed monkey's paw, but seeing that feat was a worthy consolation prize). Also inside is Croatian actress Sylva Koscina on the Côte d'Azur, Italian actress Antonella Dogan in the centerfold, ex-first lady Jaqueline Onassis in Greece, and our old friend, model and actress Donna Marlowe, in a bikini. We have plenty of scans of those items and more below, two other issues of Le Rendez-Vous here and here, and more from this publication to come.

We've been seeing a lot of Sylva Koscina lately, haven't we? Well here's one of the biggest sex symbols of the 1960s again, this time on the front of an issue of National Enquirer that hit newsstands today in 1959. She says American men are boobs as lovers. Since she studied physics at university, we can only assume she used the scientific method to come to this conclusion—observation, measurement, experimentation, and repetition. We're sure there was no shortage of volunteers, and she was willing to revisit her conclusions, apparently, since after this cover appeared she hooked up Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, and—it's rumored—Robert Kennedy. Who says science is boring? 

Above and below you see some Yugoslavian promo cards for Opasnije od muškaraca, aka Deadlier Than the Male, a film we’ve talked about a few times before. The text is in Serbian, and you’ll notice it describes the movie as “Američki." Actually, it was British. But Brits, Americans, who can tell them apart, really? We imagine the Yugoslavian distributors of the film knew quite well it came from Britain-based Greater Films Ltd., but that they labeled it Američki to make it more marketable. As if Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina aren’t sufficient. See more from the film here.