 Your usual server won't be with you tonight. She's come down with a small case of murder. 
The Swinging Barmaids, which splashed across U.S. screens for the first time this month in 1975, is one of those movies with a deliberately misleading title. Rather than the breezy erotic romp you'd expect, it's a thriller about an insane serial killer who stalks a group of waitresses working in a Los Angeles go-go bar. The problems commence when Dyanne Thorne (yes, she made movies aside from the Ilsa atrocities) is stabbed to death, setting off an inept police investigation, while the killer sets his crazy sights on more victims. He's the classic maladjusted loner you find in ’70s grindhouse filcks. You know the type: “You're the first girl I ever met that wasn't dirty underneath.” What type of woman wouldn't immediately leave town after hearing something like that? Answer: a woman in a bad movie. Eventually, to facilitate his homicidal efforts, Mr. Maladjustment gets a job as a dishwasher at the bar. More killings eventually lead to the unveiling of this wolf in the fold, and his inevitable perforation with 12-gauge buckshot. That isn't a spoiler. His death is the entire point of the film. Well, that and boobs. But the problem is that this is all mounted perfunctorily, is poorly written, visually lackluster, narratively sluggish, and devoid of actorly charisma. In fact, if not for the nudity, you'd think The Swinging Barmaids was a minor television movie. The best thing going for it is the above poster art by the incomparable John Solie. Check, please.
        
 Have you ever had a visitor that refused to leave? 
Above and below are two posters for Bewitched, a movie we decided to watch because its title stood out when we saw it. Why? Well, we're still watching the entire run of television's Bewitched. Could this be about the supernatural, we wondered? If that sounds silly, remember, we try not to read synopses of these movies. It's just better, if possible, to go in knowing little or nothing. Obviously, we already know generally about all the more popular films we haven't yet seen, but this one is obscure.
Turns out it's a no-budget melodrama, written and directed by Arch Oboler, about poor Phyllis Thaxter, who suffers from a split personality, or more accurately a histrionic form of cinematic schizophrenia, that sees her taken over by an evil alter ego. This mental invader is named Karen, and she'a a bitch. She forces Joan to commit murder. We thought: Wait—if Joan is imprisoned or executed what does Karen get out of it? Well, Oboler tries to finesse that by suggesting Karen knows Joan will be acquitted because she/they look innocent and an all-male jury will think she's too pretty to kill. Okay.
Joan has never told anyone that she hears an evil voice. She doesn't break the pattern at trial, refusing to take the stand in her own defense. It looks bad, but surprise—that scheming Karen is right. But the moment the jury is about announce an acquittal, Joan realizes that if she's freed her evil side will make her do more bad things, so she stands up and screams: “Stop! I did it! I killed him! I'm guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” And... dissolve.
She ends up on death row. But a mere five hours before she's due to ride old sparky, she finally admits to her lawyer that she has a split personality, and the wheels of deus ex machina lurch into motion. It's as cheesy as it sounds. There's really nothing in the film but a good example of what a b-feature was like during the mid-century era. Sloppy. Slapdash. A baritone voiceover brackets the film, and though it's meant to hammer the movie's point home for viewers, there really is no point. None at all. Bewitched premiered in the U.S. today in 1945.
 Do I want to stab my fiancée? Or maybe it's too harsh a method for breaking an engagement.
 In the end, I guess it was really more of a rhetorical question.
 Cross country train thriller never quite reaches its destination. 
Our interest in Peking Express was wholly due to Corinne Calvet, who we've seen in promo images, but never speaking and moving. The movie, which was an update of 1932's Shanghai Express, is an overcooked spy adventure with cheesy, anti-commie filling, making for a creation that's hard to swallow. Joseph Cotten arrives in Shanghai as a World Health Organization specialist on a mission to operate on some bigwig general. On a Peking bound train he encounters two complications—his ex-flame Calvet, and attempted murder. The latter has to do with the smuggling of contraband inside WHO crates. Soon both Cotten and Calvet are held prisoner by ringleader Marvin Miller (playing a Chinese military officer named Kwon) who wants to engineer a hostage exchange. The movie ultimately portrays Miller as a money-grubbing bandit willing to betray wife, party, and country for personal gain. Threats and torture are his methods of persuasion, along with a hefty dose of general sneakiness. He spouts some of the worst dialogue ever, often starting with, “We Chinese...” But he doesn't get the worst line. We just about upchucked on this, spoken about Miller by a saintly priest played by Edmund Gwenn: “If only he had as much devotion to God's cause we would never have to worry about the world.” Really? Is that so? History says otherwise. To add insult to cognitive dissonance, the soundtrack contains some of the worst villain music imaginable. Composer Dimitri Tiomkin must have worn out an entire brass section recording it. We're fine, in principle, with the main plotline. The seemingly contradictory idea of a villain driven by a mix of entrepreneurial greed and communist doctrine is fertile. The crosscurrent of the WHO trying to save lives in a country where many are suspicious of its mandate struck us as relevant. But the operatic dimensions of the characters backfire to infantilise the movie's messages. We suspect that the average Christian would find Gwenn's missionary priest a pompous cardboard cut-out. The average communist would laugh the entire enterprise off as delusional b-grade propaganda. And the typical thief would judge Miller to be an incompetent boob. What would the typical Chinese person think? We can't say, but our special consulting critic Angela the sunbear, whose native habitat includes China, might be able to enlighten us. And finally, what do fans of Corinne Calvet think? We thought: What a waste.
 Thanks for throwing that China question my way, boys. I disliked the movie, and I extend an invitation to any who want to understand the complicated reasons why to discuss it with me over grubs and beetles.
        
 In an L.A. minute anything can be stolen. 
The now-cult movie Gone in 60 Seconds is remembered partly because the 2000 Nicolas Cage remake rekindled interest, but also because a man named H.B. Halicki is famous for being the producer, writer, star, director, and stunt coordinator. He's a classic example from an earlier era of Hollywood of a guy with knowledge specific to an industry who dreamt up a story then cobbled together the funds to put his vision on the screen. He was a car mechanic who for years had been owner of a Southern California junkyard. In his work life he'd conceived or learned of a foolproof method for stealing and reselling cars. It involved boosting cars that were identical to wrecks, then swapping vehicle identification numbers and other elements so the stolen car disappeared and the wreck was reborn as a new ride. The technique became well known eventually, but back then it wasn't. That idea provided Halicki's entree into the world of moviemaking.
You see a Japanese poster above, with one more plus promo shots below. The movie opened in the U.S. in 1974, and premiered in Japan today in 1975. It's what some people these days like to call car porn, as audiences get to see formula one cars, custom sports cars, limousines, and a customized Ford Bronco owned by Parnelli Jones, who has a cameo in the film. The centerpiece (really more like the endpiece) is a forty minute chase sequence that in order to film allegedly resulted in ninety-three wrecked cars. Storywise, it's about an insurance investigator who moonlights as a professional car thief, who accepts a contract from a South American drug cartel to provide forty-eight luxury cars by week's end. The task seems impossible, but failure isn't an option. Several complications arise. Halicki, playing a character named Maindrian Pace, is called upon to investigate the very thefts his ring is perpetrating. When one of his crew steals a car packed with heroin things start to get really complicated.
That's all fine and fun, and Halicki's personal Hollywood success story is an inspiring one, but the movie does still have the touch of amateurism about it, particularly in the acting. That's to be expected with a quickly mounted production, starring a first-timer who also cast various family members and amateurs in small roles. In the writing area, the characters are mere sketches, which worked fine in other indie flicks from the period like Two-Lane Blacktop, but somehow doesn't quite come to fruition here. The great director John Huston once said Hollywood had a bad habit of remaking good movies. They should remake the bad ones, he advised. Since the remake wasn't as good as it could have been either, Gone in 60 Seconds could probably still use a revamp, but until that time comes audiences will have to make do. Halicki thought outside the box (did we mention the forty minute car chase?) which means his original Gone in 60 Seconds is the only one to watch.          
 Sinatra and his band of merry men hit movie screens in streamlined form. 
In 1960 the amusing self-promotional film known as Ocean's Eleven hit cinemas with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in the starring roles. Four years later the Pack—minus Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford—assembled for another crime comedy with another numerical title—Robin and the 7 Hoods, which premiered today in 1964 (and came after the Sinatra/Dean Martin vehicle 4 for Texas). You see the movie's insert style poster above. It's a period piece set in Chicago during the gangster era, and deals with Sinatra and his cohort waging a crime war against wannabe kingpin Peter Falk, along the way becoming like the Robin Hood of legend by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Ocean's Eleven is a very famous movie, perhaps even a landmark, as we discussed a while back, but we didn't love it. We thought Robin and the 7 Hoods would be worse, but we have to confess we liked it better. After we forgave ourselves for such heretical thoughts, we decided it's just possible that without the entire Rat Pack to apportion screen time to the writing is actually a bit better. Have you ever seen rats fight over food? Scripts, being made of paper, are particularly fragile. Could be, too, that fewer Rat Packers meant a bit less extemporizing.
But the main improvement over Ocean's Eleven is in the ancillary casting. Barbara Rush doesn't rise, perhaps, to the level of Angie Dickinson, but casting Falk as the villain was a masterstroke. He already had that Falk thing down pat, which meant that his screen time was engaging from beginning to end. An Edward G. Robinson cameo never hurts, either. Having him open the film as an aging Chicago capo was also a nice choice. Even so, we're not going out on a limb and claiming that Robin and the 7 Hoods is exactly a good movie. But in the end, whatever its flaws, it has Sinatra. And that's always enough.                 
 The French know how to put on a show, and the Japanese know how to put on a poster. 
Here's a fantastic poster we've had sitting around for a while made for the Japanese run of the French film Ah! les belles bacchantes!, which was changed here to Hadaka no megami, or “the naked goddess,” and in English was known as Ah! The Beautiful Priestesses of Bacchus, Peek-a-Boo!, and other titles. Basically it follows a provincial morals cop played by Louis de Funès who decides to take a close look at the local cabaret revue expecting to shut it down, but due to a series of wacky events during the rehearsals he ends up appearing in the show.
This will be the first time this poster has ever been online, but it isn't the first time we've talked about the movie. We wrote about it eight years ago and shared a different, equally rare promo. You'll notice that the Japanese title is different, but the French title in the upper right corner is the same. Ah! les belles bacchantes! is an extremely interesting historical curio, effervescent and sexy, evidencing how much more advanced the French were concering the human body than puritans in the U.S. It premiered in France the autumn of 1954 and reached Japan today in 1955. We also have two other posters in the same beautiful style that you can see here and here.
 Mount Naomi erupts with deadly consequences in pinku revenge opera. 
The Japanese appetite for pinku films was unquenchable. Conversely, ours is mostly quenched, but when we see a poster this striking we have to share it, and that means glancing at the movie that spawned it. Oryu joen: shibari hada, which premiered in Japan today in 1975, was known in English as Oryu's Passion: Bondage Skin, and it came from Nikkatsu Studios as part of its specialized roman porno line, with the so-called Queen of S&M Naomi Tani in the lead role.
Plotwise, the head of a yakuza clan is assassinated and Tani, his loyal charge, vows revenge. Her search for the killer doesn't go according to the blueprint, and after a betrayal she ends up in a dank bdsm dungeon along with her sister Terumi Azuma, subjected to rope discipline and forcibly dildoed and dp'ed with yam batter as a lubricant. Yam batter. You know how it goes in those pinku dungeons. Note: for novices, roman porno films are not porn. The term is short for “romantic porno,” and they're r-rated, equivalently. Or more likely, they'd not be able to obtain ratings at all under the U.S. system. Just thought we'd reiterate that.
Anyway, Tani eventually slips her bonds with assistance, and her long delayed revenge occurs, bloodily. No spoiler there. You knew it had to happen. We can't recommend this flick. There's really nothing worthwhile about it unless you're a fan of the form. Even then it's middling. Yes, Tani was the Queen of S&M, but she made more than one hundred films, so some will have the feel of going through the motions. Even so, you do get several of the expected roman porno tropes. Like action movies offer gunfire and romance movies offer kisses, it's what you sign up for. Knock yourself out.
             
 Shishido and his last line of defense. 
Jo Shishido fronts this poster for Koroshi no rakuin, aka Branded To Kill, flanked by armed and dangerous sidekicks Mariko Ogawa and Annu Mari. This serves as a second alternate promo to the original, which we showed you years ago. See that here, and the tateken promo here. Koroshi no rakuin premiered in Japan today in 1967.
 I'm conflicted. You strangled my husband, but you're the first man who does what I want without me nagging him.   
Above: a U.S. six sheet poster and zoom followed by an insert poster for the all-time film noir classic Double Indemnity. If you don't like this one, you don't like movies. It premiered in the U.S.—at a special event in Norman, Oklahoma of all places—today in 1944. We shared its West German poster here, joked about one of its classic sequences here, wrote about its modernized remake Body Heat here, and shared its Australian poster and covered the film in detail here.
 People get topless, bottomless, legless, headless—anything goes. 
This fun Italian poster, which is uncredited, was created for the monster movie Spiaggia di sangue, which was originally filmed in the U.S. and released as Blood Beach in 1980, before reaching Italy today in 1981. We riffed on it many years ago because it's nothing more than a left coast remix of Jaws on a frayed shoestring budget, not really deserving of a proper review, in our opinion. The producers were even sued by the Jaws franchise for using a catchphrase—Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water you can’t get to it—just a little too similar to that for the previous year's Jaws 2—Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. We said last time that you never really see the monster. Actually, you do, briefly, at the end, in all its papier mâché glory. Total. Letdown. Don't visit Blood Beach. Instead, look at the lobby cards below and call it a day.       
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1945—Churchill Given the Sack
In spite of admiring Winston Churchill as a great wartime leader, Britons elect
Clement Attlee the nation's new prime minister in a sweeping victory for the Labour Party over the Conservatives. 1952—Evita Peron Dies
Eva Duarte de Peron, aka Evita, wife of the president of the Argentine Republic, dies from cancer at age 33. Evita had brought the working classes into a position of political power never witnessed before, but was hated by the nation's powerful military class. She is lain to rest in Milan, Italy in a secret grave under a nun's name, but is eventually returned to Argentina for reburial beside her husband in 1974. 1943—Mussolini Calls It Quits
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini steps down as head of the armed forces and the government. It soon becomes clear that Il Duce did not relinquish power voluntarily, but was forced to resign after former Fascist colleagues turned against him. He is later installed by Germany as leader of the Italian Social Republic in the north of the country, but is killed by partisans in 1945. 1915—Ship Capsizes on Lake Michigan
During an outing arranged by Western Electric Co. for its employees and their families, the passenger ship Eastland capsizes in Lake Michigan due to unequal weight distribution. 844 people die, including all the members of 22 different families. 1980—Peter Sellers Dies
British movie star Peter Sellers, whose roles in Dr. Strangelove, Being There and the Pink Panther films established him as the greatest comedic actor of his generation, dies of a heart attack at age fifty-four.
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