 To reach your full potential in life you need to stretch yourself. 
Maria Grazia Buccella is a former glamour model, a Miss Italy contestant, and a screen actress with numerous movies to her credit. Some of her appearances include in Le gentleman de Cocody, aka Ivory Coast Adventure, and Vittorio De Sica's Il Boom. The photo above appeared in the Japanese magazine Road Show around 1968.
 She upgraded from broomsticks and black capes a long time ago. 
This promo photo was made for the Italian anthology movie Le streghe, aka The Witches, and shows Italian actress Silvana Margano in costume as Giovanna, a bored housewife who imagines herself in elaborate fantasies. This particular fever dream, in the segment called “Una serata come le altre,” or “An Evening Like the Others,” lasts mere seconds, but Margano still makes an impression in her futuristic femme fatale garb. The segment is also memorable because it was directed by Vittorio de Sica and featured Clint Eastwood, but Margano was the star of the movie, appearing in all five witch-related portions as different characters. We may get back to it at some point. This photo is from 1967.
 She doesn't meet the Vatican dress code but she does meet the man of her dreams.  
We have two great posters to share today for Piero Costa's La ragazza di piazza San Pietro, aka The Girl of San Pietro Square, starring famed director Vittorio De Sica along with Walter Chiari, Susana Canales, and Mary Martin in the tale of a widower and his three children. The setting is in and around St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, where the main characters are souvenir sellers, and a chance meeting results in romance. The movie is widely available, including on YouTube, but our primary interest is in the art. It has a nice femme fatale look to it. The first poster is signed Crane, and the second, using the same elements, is unsigned but obviously is by the same person. Both are top efforts. We'll dig for more on this Crane character and see what we can find. La ragazza di piazza San Pietro premiered in Italy today in 1958.
 Cut, cut, cut! Wardrobe! Make-up! Somebody! Can't you come up with any way to make her look average? 
Above, a rather awesome image of Sophia Loren printed from the negative from Vittorio De Sica's 1960 drama La Ciociara, aka Two Women. Even when she looks bad she looks good.
 Tate gives chase in an international fortune hunting comedy about a missing chair. 
In ¿Las cual de 13?, aka 12 + 1, aka Twelve Plus One, an Italian barber played by Vittorio Gassman inherits thirteen chairs and, deeming them useless, sells them to a London antique shop. He later discovers one of the chairs contains a fortune, but when he returns to the shop he's told they've all been sold. So he offers the antique shop employee Sharon Tate half of the fortune to help him track down the chairs, which of course have scattered to the four winds. Their search takes them to Paris, Rome, and beyond, in 1960s screwball fashion with its expected pratfalls, mix-ups, and sticky situations. Gassman and Tate do reasonable jobs with the goofy script that's been made of Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov's satirical source novel, and the film is boosted by appearances from Vittorio De Sica, Mylène Demongeot, Terry-Thomas, and Orson Welles. This was an Italian production, but the poster above was painted for the film's Spanish run by Carlos Escobar, who signed his work “Esc.” This is the best we've ever seen from a very good artist. Since the movie didn't premiere in Italy until after Tate had been slain this month in 1969, and didn't reach Spain until mid-1970, the poster very likely was painted post-murder, which means Escobar probably was thinking of how to best portray someone who'd become a tragic figure. We suspect he put special effort into his work as a tribute, and if so, a fitting tribute it was.    
 Holding on for dear life. 
La Ciociara aka Two Women is another film that isn’t pulp or noir, but whose poster art is everything pulp aficionados love. It would fit perfectly on the cover of a Carter Brown book. If you’re a film lover you know director Vittorio de Sica made The Bicycle Thief, which makes this WWII drama based on a novel by Alberto Moravia well worth a screening. Sophia Loren and Jean-Paul Belmondo starred, and it opened today in Italy in 1960.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1910—Duke of York's Cinema Opens
The Duke of York's Cinema opens in Brighton, England, on the site of an old brewery. It is still operating today, mainly as a venue for art films, and is the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain. 1975—Gerald Ford Assassination Attempt
Sara Jane Moore, an FBI informant who had been evaluated and deemed harmless by the U.S. Secret Service, tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Moore fires one shot at Ford that misses, then is wrestled to the ground by a bystander named Oliver Sipple. 1937—The Hobbit is Published
J. R. R. Tolkien publishes his seminal fantasy novel The Hobbit, aka The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Marketed as a children's book, it is a hit with adults as well, and sells millions of copies, is translated into multiple languages, and spawns the sequel trilogy The Lord of Rings. 1946—Cannes Launches Film Festival
The first Cannes Film Festival is held in 1946, in the old Casino of Cannes, financed by the French Foreign Affairs Ministry and the City of Cannes.
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