SERIOUSLY, GUY?

That sound you hear is a great author spinning in his grave.


Guy de Maupassant? Really? We had no idea the master of the short story form and leader of the Naturalist school also wrote smut. Shows what we know. When we looked around for Folli piaceri delle porno prigioniere we learned it was originally made in West Germany in 1980 as Gefangene Frauen, but known in English as Caged Women. And instead of the highbrow rumination we expected from a movie based on de Maupassant, what we got was director Edwin C. Dietrich pushing the far bounds of sexploitation in ways that are crude, stupid, and unrepentant. Perhaps as compensation or apology, he also offers up more nudity per screen minute than a Jesús Franco film—and that’s saying something.

Karine Gambier and Brigitte Lahaie headline a cast of bare blonde women and just-as-bare hairy eurostuds, as plotwise, a tinpot dictator worried about a U.N. sex trafficking investigation into his country’s brothels hides his trafficked European prosties in a godforsaken island prison. You get every trope of women in prison flicks, but stretched to the max. There are showers, medical exams, naked whippings, naked manual labor, naked skeet shooting, naked arena wrestling, a naked prison break (but with comfortable shoes), and more. Notice how that went from standard sexploitation fare to waaay out there? Is it satire? Edwin Dietrich doubtless would have claimed it was. But merely turning the volume up to eleven is the dumbest kind of satire.

And as far as Guy de Maupassant goes, it’s more like Guy de wishful thinking. We found no evidence the acclaimed author influenced this production in any way, regardless of what its writer (also Edwin Dietrich) said. It wasn’t the only time Dietrich claimed he was inspired by classic literature. No surprise—when you make something like forty of these flicks you intellectualize them any way you can. De Maupassant’s influence, we suspect, was merely to lend a veneer of credibility to the promo poster. If you watch Folli piaceri delle porno prigioniere, don’t be a pretender like Dietrich. Just embrace your inner horndog and admit you’re watching it for the skin.
They were so delirious they forgot their own names.

Pornodelirio was originally made in France as Les grandes jouisseuses and premiered today in 1978. The title literally means “the great enjoyers,” but Pornodelirio is a lot snappier, don’t you think? As usual with these Italian smut posters, the names are all pseudonyms made especially for the movie’s run in Italy. We don’t know why, but if if any of the stars ever needed to go there at least their hotels weren’t overrun by adoring, pornodelirious fans.

In any case, Annick Fougery, Anne Sand, Michele Perelo, and Pierre Forget are actually Brigitte Lahaie, Ursula White, Jean-Louis Vattier, and Dominique Aveline. It’s weird that two of the pseudonyms are Fougery like “forgery” and Forget. And it’s even weirder that Annick Fougery and Pierre Forget were actual French stars. But they certainly weren’t in this movie. Did they ever know their names had been borrowed? Did Europe have trademark infringement laws in 1978? When they checked into hotels were they beseiged by pornodelirious fans? 

This is all a bit of a mystery, but the only name in which we’re really interested is Mafé. He or she painted the promo poster you see above and it’s another example of his/her great work on an x-rated promo, along with this, these, and these, one of which you’ll notice is an alternate poster for Pornodelirio. We still have no idea who Mafé is/was, but as always, we’ll keep up the research. Soon as our delirium subsides. You wanna watch the film? The English dubbed version with correct credits is generally online if you look. 

There is no escape from Hell thanks to the internet.

This amazing Italian poster is for a cuddly little piece of nazisploitation called Perversion, which was originally made in France as Nathalie rescapée de l’enfer, and known in the English speaking world as Nathalie: Escape from Hell. A poster like this cries out for us to watch the film, and luckily we were able to track it down and screen it. The art pretty much nails it. A French farmer’s daughter is captured by the Nazis and sent to a castle brothel, where she endures the usual sexploitation degradations—gropings, whippings, and uninvited advances from a domineering, leather-clad queen bee named Helga Hortz. A love connection develops between Nathalie and a German officer, and when the affair comes to light Helga decides it’s time to hortz poor Nathalie. This is a really bad movie. It’s the type of flick that includes lengthy sequences of the villains going Mwah hah hah hah hah hah! All it needed was Monty Burns rubbing his gnarled hands together and intoning, “Smithers, release the hounds.” On the plus side, star Patrizia Gori gives it her all, and the supporting cast includes Barbara Moose and Brigitte Lahaie. Perversion aka Nathalie rescapée de l’enfer premiered in France today in 1978.

*sigh* How on Earth did I end up in this clusterfuck of a movie?
 
I once did Molière at the Comédie-Française. That was a great summer.
 
Oh God, who am I kidding? That was the best summer of my life.
 
This is my agent’s fault. I’m going to push him off the top of the Sacré-Cœur.
 
Shit—did I remember to put cat food in the bowl this morning?
 
Well, it’ll have a short, deeply embarrassing run in cinemas, and then maybe I’ll spend a few years in Canada, and when I get back this abomination will have been forgotten forever.
 

Wait—so this internet thing you’re talking about will be globally available and filled with every shitty old movie ever made?
 

How can so little be known about an artist so great?

Above is a fantastic poster from the illustrator Mafé for Piaceri Folli, a 1977 French porn movie originally entitled Suprêmes jouissances, released in English as Exquisite Pleasure, then later as Supreme Delights. Mafé painted two posters for the production, and though the other one is great, this effort is on a different level entirely. In fact, in our opinion this is one of the most successful posters we’ve ever seen. If the mission was to create something both provocative and striking while still being classy, this is a grand slam. Moving on to the artist himself, we promised we’d dig for more info, but when we search in Italy nothing comes up but a few auction houses, sans bios of any sort. And when we search internationally it’s our website that sorts to the top, amusingly. So we’re the online experts on this guy and we don’t know squat. A very good library might be helpful at a time like this but where we live there isn’t one. Oh well. If we’ve learned one thing it’s that the information always appears eventually. We’ll just have to wait. 

Italian illustrator Mafé shows his genius again.

We found two more Mafé one-sheets, and we’re now going to just go ahead and declare him the greatest illustrator of x-rated posters ever. He did non x-rated work too, but he flourished in porn, bringing a real elegance to the material, as you can see for yourself. He’s still a bit of a mystery to us, but we’re digging for more info. These two posters are circa mid-seventies, and you can see the other two Mafé pieces we posted here

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56

New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.

1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey

American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes

Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.

1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company’s paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs.

1933—Eugenics Becomes Official German Policy

Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage.

1955—Ruth Ellis Executed

Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.

1966—Richard Speck Rampage

Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night.

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.
Uncredited cover art for Orrie Hitt's 1954 novel Tawny. Hitt was a master of sleazy literature and published more than one hundred fifty novels.
George Gross art for Joan Sherman’s, aka Peggy Gaddis Dern’s 1950 novel Suzy Needs a Man.

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