THE LINDBERG KIDNAPPING

First the airline loses her luggage. And now this.

Above you see an incredibly rare alternate poster for Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô, aka The Pornstar Travels Around Japan, aka The Kyoto Connection. Notice how it promises SEX in big letters. That English word appeared on many Japanese promos of the era, as we’ve documented before. Basically, the movie is about a Swedish woman who visits Japan and is abducted by a wacko taxi driver. See the original poster and read what we wrote about the flick at this link.

Don't let the title fool you—this flick goes practically nowhere.

One of the elements we like about pinku films—aside from the action, the visuals, and the glimpse into a culture not our own—is that the women who have suffered all sorts of degradations at the hands of men inevitably massacre their tormentors in the last reel. When that doesn’t happen, we’re cheated of the final catharsis, which makes us party to the abuse rather than cheerleaders for the abused’s emancipation. We don’t need to be shown that the world is cruel—we just want to see something done about it, if only in the realm of violent fantasy.

Thus Sadao Nakajima’s Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô, aka The Pornstar Travels Around Japan, aka The Kyoto Connection doesn’t quite deliver for us. It’s a rather simple film, and it has nothing to do with traveling around. Quite the opposite, actually. The porn star in question is held captive in a room most of the movie and repeatedly abused by a rather disturbed taxi driver for whom she eventually develops feelings. Psychologists, so we hear, call this sort of emotional inversion Stockholm Syndrome. We call it a letdown, even though we understand there’s an attempt to make a serious point here.

At least the movie has Christina Lindberg in the title role, so that’s a substantial silver lining. The poster above is one you can find on many websites, but we suspect only we have the rare two-panel version below. Too bad the printers produced such a shitty image. We can only assume that upon seeing a nude Christina Lindberg, they printed the posters one-handed while abusing themselves. Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô, aka The Pornstar Travels Around Japan opened in Japan today in 1973.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.

1957—Soviets Launch Dog into Space

The Soviet Union launches the first ever living creature into the cosmos when it blasts a stray dog named Laika into orbit aboard the capsule Sputnik II. Laika is fitted with various monitoring devices that provide information about the effects of launch and weightlessness on a living creature. Urban myth has it that Laika starved to death after a few days in space, but she actually died of heat stress just a few hours into the journey.

1989—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Folds

William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which had gained notoriety for its crime and scandal focus, including coverage of the Black Dahlia murder and Charles Manson trials, goes out of business after eighty-six years. Its departure leaves the Los Angeles Times as the sole city-wide daily newspaper in L.A.

Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.
T’as triché marquise by George Maxwell, published in 1953 with art by Jacques Thibésart, also known as Nik.

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