If you know anything about Christina Lindberg, you may be asking yourself how on Earth a poster designer ever decided it was a good idea to cut the most famous breasts of the era in half. Well, don’t judge too harshly—Lindberg didn’t become known as “The Girl with Them” and “The Sensation Girl” until her debut outing Rötmånad, aka Dog Days, aka What Are You Doing After the Orgy? earned an English-language release in 1971. Like many of the sexploitation stars, Lindberg wasn’t an expert actress, but she personified the sexual liberation that had swept the West. Sex was suddenly acknowledged as a healthy part of being human, and it was acceptable to explore erotic themes in the open via cinema. By the time the seventies were over video would take depictions of sex to places undreamt of, all of them fetishistic, and mainstream cinema would begin to shy away from the subject of even romantic, loving sex. But for a while Christina Lindberg was the muse of international erotic cinema, and it all began when Rötmånad premiered in Sweden, today in 1970. Pretty soon we’ll share some Lindberg images that have never appeared on the internet before. 

Here’s a new tabloid in our collection—Pic, which like Whisper and a few other publications evolved from a pin-up magazine into a scandal sheet during the 1950s. The cover star on this November 1958 issue is Marisa Allasio, and the photo is one that originally appeared in the Italian magazine Il Borghesi and landed the publishers in court on obscenity charges. As anyone who has ever been to a beach can attest, there is a big difference between almost falling out of a bikini and actually doing it, and that difference is where all the fun lies. But the shot was nonetheless deemed too sexual by Italy’s moral watchdogs, and all the newsstand copies of Il Borghese were confiscated. In the end, the magazine was able to prove that the image was a promo still from Allasio’s forgettable 1956 film Poveri ma belli, aka Poor but Beautiful. Since Il Borgese was not responsible for the image, charges against the magazine were dropped. If you’d like to read a scathing contemporary review of the film, we found one by Bosley Crowther at the New York Times, and just because it’s Saturday, we have the almost-obscene bikini photo below, in its original unreversed state. We’ll have more from Pic later. 

American actress and model Edy Williams, who featured in such amusingly titled films as I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Rented Lips and Dr. Minx, seen here circa 1972. 

Above are selected pages from an October 1972 issue of The National Police Gazette, with cover star Solvi Stubing, who appeared in many films, including Strip Nude for Your Killer, Pussycat Pussycat I Love You, and Yearning for Love. You also get Norwegian beauty Julie Ege in the centerspread. The Ege shots are handouts, part of a larger set that had appeared a year earlier in the Swedish magazine FIB Aktuellt leading up to her starring role in Creatures the World Forgot. To prepare for the movie she supposedly spent a weekend on a deserted island, alone save for a photographer documenting her experience—i.e., here’s Julie gathering wood while wearing only a loincloth, and here’s Julie gnawing on some hearts of palm she’s managed to forage, etc. All in all, we think it was one of the cleverest publicity stunts ever. Producers of Survivor take note—loincloths for everyone. But we digress. We’ve re-posted clearer versions of some of the Gazette’s borrowed images below, and perhaps down the line we’ll even post the entire FIB Aktuellt shoot. In the meantime, you can see one more Ege photo here. 

Summer is dwindling in the parts of the world that have actual seasons. As a reminder of everyone’s favorite time of year we’ve searched the internet and cobbled together a collection of thirty vintage images featuring some of yesteryear’s fittest femmes and hommes enjoying the sun, and sometimes each other. If you haven’t had a summertime moment like one of those below, there’s still time. Get to it.

We’re back folks, and what a lovely trip it was—at least, the parts we remember. Above you see three Japanese posters, each advertising Deep Throat and Deep Throat Part 2, which we gather ran as a double bill in Japan sometime in the mid-1970s. Deep Throat and its sequel starred Linda Lovelace as a woman whose clitoris was in her throat, and the first installment was the first truly mainstream porn film. 

Above are the cover and several interior pages from Spain’s Triunfo, with Swiss actress Ursula Andress, who according to the magazine was the most beautiful woman in the world. Andress was starring opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in the French action adventure Les tribulations d’une Chinois in Chine, based on Jules Verne’s Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, and released in the U.S. as Up to His Ears. The article discusses among other things how Andress injured herself during the first week of the physically demanding shoot, and you can see a scab on her knee and calf, as well as a bandage on her thigh. While she perhaps didn’t have a gazelle’s grace, she did seem to possess a siren’s allure—her rumored affair with Belmondo supposedly ruined her marriage to John Derek, and this may not have been her first affair. However, it seems possible that the marriage failed for reasons other than fidelity, since John Derek did not seem to be a possessive husband (if his willingness to share his fourth wife Bo is any indication). Anyway, not be overlooked is Pamela Tiffin, who appears in the centerfold. We’ll have more on Tiffin later. 

Above you see burlesque queen Lilly Christine (here referred to as Lily), on the cover of Folies de Paris et de Hollywood issue 80, looking amazingly beautiful, yet positively radioactive, the latter thanks to some overzealous photo retouching, common at the time, 1956. More below.

Yes, it’s Marilyn Monroe again. She turns up everywhere. We even saw her face in a satellite image of the British Petroleum oil spill. Today, here she is on the cover of a June 19, 1953 Motor World, comparing her chassis to that of a British-made Singer SM 1500C. Marilyn endorsed, directly or indirectly, everything from diamonds to lipstick, but in the case of the Singer, even her stamp of approval was not able save the car from cancellation. Six years after the Singer went away, Marilyn herself disappeared from the scene.