Sights, sounds, and sentiments from the thirty-four countries that made up the Europe of the time.
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.
We’ve looked at the output of Italian illustrator Jean Mascii a few times. Above you see his work again, this time on a poster for the James Bond-style adventure Plus féroces que les mâles, which first showed in France today in 1967 but had its global premiere months earlier in England as Deadlier Than the Male. Over four decades, working from the early ’50s until the late ’80s, Mascii painted almost 1,500 movie posters, hundreds of book covers, and a copious amount of print advertising. You can click his keywords at bottom to see a few more posters we’ve shared on our site, or click here to take the express lane to one of his very best.
The “deadlier” in Deadlier Than the Male refers to co-stars Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, two of the more beautiful products of the mid-century era, who play assassins. We’ve shared posters for the film from Japan—twice—and the former Yugoslavia. Returning to it yet again is mainly an excuse to share some of the many production photos we’ve found—to go along with this one, this one, and this one. Today we’re restricting ourselves to only Sommer and Koscina’s bikini shots, because the skin and smiles say summertime to us. There are drawbacks to movie stardom, so we hear, but some days surely must be just fine.
Fillette gets overheated and the final result isn't pretty.
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-Voushere and here, and more from this publication to come.
Males top the endangered species list in 1967 spy thriller.
We’ve shared a lot of art, including a previous Japanese poster, from the James Bond knockoff Deadlier than the Male without ever actually talking about the movie. Today seems like an opportune time, since we’re already on the subject of Bond clones. The film, which premiered in Japan today in 1967 after opening in the the UK earlier in the year, starred Richard Johnson, who actually came close to landing the role of Bond thanks to the interest of Dr. No director Terence Young. It didn’t happen, though, and Connery as Bond makes more sense when you see Johnson, who’s older, skinnier, shorter, and in less pristine shape. But he has panache, and that may be why Young wanted him. Instead he got Connery, and Johnson got the consolation prize of playing Hugh Drummond, a character that originates in H.C. McNeile novels from the 1920s, but who’s updated to the ’60s in order to deal with a Cold War plot to steal rockets and divert them for nefarious means.
Like the Bond films, Deadlier than the Male offers a winning combination of action, quips, exotic scenery, and lightweight sexiness, but the film never quite rises to the upper echelons. Without the Bond budget it’s hard to bring a truly thrilling vision to life. At least the filmmakers were smart enough to frontload their assets by opening the proceedings with Elke Sommer, who’s second billed, but probably more important than Johnson in terms of increasing the film’s watchability. She has a physicality that makes her a nice fit playing an assassin in the employ of the film’s ultimate villain. Sylva Koscina co-stars as Sommer’s klepto sidekick, which doesn’t hurt. The pair’s nefarious deeds eventually draw Johnson to their mountaintop stronghold, and there viewers are treated to a final throwdown with the evil mastermind involving a mechanized, life-sized chessboard. While Deadlier than the Male doesn’t manage to out-Bond Bond, watch it with friends and beers and you’ll maximize its potential.
I took an oath to first do no harm, but you know what? Oath schmoath.
Sylva Koscina prepares to dispense some bitter pills in this still from the 1970 adventure L’Assaut des jeunes loups, aka Hornet’s Nest, a World War II flick set in Italy, starring her and Rock Hudson. She plays a German physician, but sometimes you have to stop healing and start unhealing, at least when Hollywood is calling the shots. The movie came during the second stanza of Koscina’s career, which was characterized by a lot of minimally successful mid-budget fare. But there’s nothing minimal or mid about Koscina. She’s one of the most fondly remembered European actresses of her era.
Who'd like to help me perform a little experiment?
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?
Singer elopes with girlfriend and everything falls apartheid.
We’d never heard of African Story, aka The Manipulator, before seeing this Italian promo poster painted by Renato Casaro. We were hoping for another semi-comical romp in the vein of Black Emmanuelle or The African Deal (i.e. lily white visitors are magically driven to get freaky in the bush with locals), but this film goes in a different direction. A famous singer named Rex Maynard runs away to South Africa with a powerful music producer’s daughter, prompting the producer to set up a fake kidnapping to scare the crooner and simultaneously generate publicity for his career. Somehow or other a group of actual kidnappers decide to put the bag on Rexie, and mayhem soon follows. Rex may be a soft jazz kind of singer, but he’s hard rock with his fists. He even uses judo to whip ass on several of his assailants. Luckily one of them packs a gun or they’d all have ended up in intensive care. Rex is also slippery as an eel, with his escapability aided by the kidnappers’ generally lax security.
We’d file this movie in the terrible-but-fun category, with Stephen Boyd, who played the rugged Messala in Bur Hur, here putting on his evil capitalist pants, beautiful Sylva Koscina playing the femme fatale, and Michael Kirner expending far more physical energy in the role of the pursued singer than you’d think possible for a guy with his body fat. African Story has virtually no Africans of the black variety in it, but then again this is the apartheid era we’re talking about. Blacks need not apply—particularly for speaking roles (except for those two fisherman guys who you’ll miss if you blink). In fact, you see very few blacks even in the backgrounds of shots. With sequences set in offices, hotels, nightclubs, pools, and at a *ahem* race track, their conspicuous absence reveals the reality of how all good things in South Africa were reserved for whites. And some bad things too, if you count the movie. African Story premiered today in 1971.
Sex Stars System uncovers erotic cinema around the world.
Here’s a little treat for Monday, because Mondays are universally acknowledged to suck. Above is the cover and below are a ton of scans from the cutting edge cinema magazine Sex Stars System, which billed itself as “Le Magazine du Cinema Erotique.” It was published out of 55 Passage Jouffroy, in Paris, France, and for a while it was the top magazine with reviews and features on the new, sexually liberated mainstream cinema of the early 1970s, and the new pornography of the same era. Because porn was taken seriously as an art form back then (hard to imagine, we know) certain magazines discussed and critiqued the films and regarded the performers as equal with those in mainstream cinema. We talked about this phenomenon with Cine-Revue a few years ago. Sex Stars System was similar, but much edgier, as you’ll see.
On the cover and in the centerfold you see Croatian born star Sylva Koscina (a mainstream actress), and elsewhere you get Emmanuelle Parèze (porn), Dany Carrel (mainstream), Valérie Bosigel (mainstream), Karin Schubert (both), Catherine Spaak (mainstream), Ornella Muti (mainstream), Chesty Morgan (porn, obviously), Marilyn Monroe (mainstream, though some scam artists claim she was the other too), et al. They don’t make magazines like this anymore, because they don’t make cinema like this anymore. Sex in U.S. movies is strictly taboo, unless, generally speaking, the actors keep their clothes on. You do see it on cable television, however, though such shows generate reams of online criticism about how terribly wrong it is (we agree, however, that more sex and nude scenes need to be filmed from the vantage point of the female gaze). In Europe, as always, things are a bit more liberated.
We aren’t sure how long Sex Stars System published. It debuted in 1975. Also in 1975, or possibly 1976, a magazine called simply Stars Systemappeared. Stars System had a softer editorial approach and featured solidly mainstream cover celebs such as Jane Fonda and Romy Schneider. At some point it changed its name slightly to Star System and, thus rebranded, published at least as late as 1982, which seems to be longer than Sex Stars System was on the scene. The information online about these magazines is, as you can probably guess, a jumble, but we’ll keep looking into it and maybe have something more concrete to report later. There’s also a Star System celeb magazine around today, but it’s Canadian and presumably unrelated. Many scans below, and we have a few more issues we’ll post later.
It’s a Dino de Laurentiis production, so you know it’s going to be bad. Filmed in black and white, Cadavere per signora, aka Corpse for a Lady deals with a wealthy woman, played by the transcendent Sylva Koscina, who is blackmailed and calls her three childhood friends for help. The four of them arrange a deal with the blackmailer, but he ends up dead and they’re stuck with the body. Hilarity ensues as they try to get rid of it. Not recommendable, but we love the poster. Cadavere per signora premiered in Italy today in 1964.
Making the world a safer place one skewered man at a time.
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 “AmeriÄki.” 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 AmeriÄki to make it more marketable. As if Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina aren’t sufficient. See more from the film here.
A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.
1918—Sgt. York Becomes a Hero
During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.
1956—Larsen Pitches Perfect Game
The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.
1959—Dark Side of Moon Revealed
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).
1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.