DISOBEDIENT PET

Bad girl! You stay in your kennel until you learn how to behave!


The list of great Italian movie poster artists is long. We’ve discussed many and today we have another new member of the club—Basilo Morini, who painted these two promos for Sesso ribelle, aka Questo sesso ribelle, but best known as Pets. The quality of the art is shockingly good considering how terrible the movie is. What you get here is a counterculture drama about the various misadventures of a Southern California runaway played by Candice Rialson. She meets fellow drifter Teri Guzman and is drawn into a robbery plot, becomes a nude model and sex partner for possessive painter Geraldine Mills, and finds herself pursued by woman hating sadist Ed Bishop. Morini’s art makes clear that Pets is sexploitation but the film is pretty tame by today’s standards—at least on the sex front. In other ways it’s wildly offensive. When Mills wails at one point, “It’s like a bad dream! This can’t be real!” that’s exactly what you’ll be thinking. Pets premiered in the U.S. in 1973 and reached Italy today in 1975.

Use the Force, Luke…

The neighbors always suspected there was something odd about the house on Paranormal Lane.

I love what you’ve done with the place. Late period Edgar Allen Poe?

Check out this painting I did of you. It’s what I picture you looking like after I drain all your vitality and essential electrolytes.

One can only hope.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

1965—Biggs Escapes the Big House

Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.

1949—Dragnet Premiers

NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.

1973—Lake Dies Destitute

Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.

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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