For the 1967 Mario Bava directed movie "Danger: Diabolik!" with John Phillip Law as Diabolik and Marisa Mell as Lady Eva Kant the promotional department of the production company took a lot of photographs of its stars. Many of these photo's were only taken for publication in newspapers, movie and fashion magazines and had little or nothing to do with the content of the movie. This is one of those pictures that shows Marisa Mell dressed as Eva Kant in a very high fashion outfit of that time! The picture comes from the archives of "United Press International", a press agency situated originally in Chicago (USA), now in New York City. Fashion in the 60's was daring and fun. This is a prime example of that attitude from that time. The photo has hardly been seen in more than 40 years!///
The Marisa Mell Blog now closes its 3rd calender year of blogging and will return in January 2011. I wish everybody of the many thousands who have kept coming back this past year again and again to read up on the life and work of Marisa Mell a "Merry X-mas" and a "Happy New Year".
When you are a genuine fan of the Italian Western then you are certainly familiar with the excellent: Spagehettiwestern database - Il database del Western Italiano. 
Now the people responsable behind the Italian Western Database have made a documentary about their beloved movies. It took a while to complete this film but the first part of the triology is at last available.
Let's hear what they have to say about their work of love:
A few months ago, I had an entry about the life of one the best known female voice actresses in the Eurocult realm by the name of Carolyn de Fonseca. She was the English voice of almost all the known Eurocult actresses like Dagmar Lassander, Anita Ekberg, Rosalba Neri, Barbara Steele and... of course Marisa Mell in "La Belva col Mitra".
Eine Handvoll kleiner Diebe und Herumtreiber will ein Pfandleihhaus in Rom überfallen. Um in den Raum mit dem Safe zu gelangen, verschaffen sie sich Zutritt zur angrenzenden Wohnung zweier alter Damen, deren venezianische Hausangestellte mit Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), dem Herzensbrecher der Gruppe, ein Techtelmechtel hat. Doch der Coup, zum dem Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) mit eingegipstem Arm erscheint, geht schief. Statt durch die Mauer zum Safezimmer brechen die Gauner nur durch die Zwischenwand zur Küche, in der das Hausmädchen einen Topf mit Kichererbsenpasta vorbereitet hat. Statt an den Reichtümern des Leihhauses laben sie sich an der Pasta, bevor der Morgen graut und das Idyll beendet. Ein Wecker, die einzig greifbare Beute des Raubzugs, schrillt ausgerechnet in dem Moment los, als Peppe und sein Kumpel Capannelle von zwei misstrauischen Carabinieri ins Auge gefasst werden. „I soliti ignoti“, der Film, der diese Geschichte erzählt - auf Deutsch hieß er „Diebe haben's schwer“ - war der Überraschungserfolg des Jahres 1958 und ein Wendepunkt des italienischen Kinos. Er bewies, dass man die soziale Wirklichkeit der Nachkriegszeit auch mit komödiantischen Mitteln zeigen konnte - und dass Filmkomödien keine lebensfernen Schwänke sein mussten, sondern der erschlaffenden Bewegung des Neorealismus neuen ästhetischen Schwung geben konnten. Er verhalf seinen bis dahin nur mäßig bekannten Hauptdarstellern Vittorio Gassman und Marcello Mastroianni zu internationalem Ruhm. Und er sicherte seinem Regisseur, der zuvor hauptsächlich als routinierter Handwerker von Farcen und Melodramen hervorgetreten war, einen Platz unter den Meistern des italienischen Kinos: Mario Monicelli. 
Sophia Loren und Luigi Proietti in Monicellis „Mortadella” von 1971 
Claudia Cardinale in der Episode: „Gespielin Armenia oder: Zimmer frei mit Musikbox” von 1966 
Thankfully in this day and age you have the internet as a never ending source of information on everything that your heart desires. So a quick check on IMDB, Wikipedia and some specialised cult movie sites will give you a quick answer who this guy is, where he comes from and what he has done in his life at that point in time to gain a place in a movie with Marisa Mell. Mmmmm! Strange! 
There is not much to be found about this actor! Only IMDB gives him about 8 acting roles where 4 of them are roles in television movies and 4 are roles in cinema movies that hardly anybody remembers to this day. Of them all the best known film is a 1961 French western directed by Robert Hossein called "Le Goût de la Violence" with Robert Hossein and Mario Adorf in the main parts. For the rest there is not much else to be found about him. No date of birth or death, no reasons why he stopped filming around 1967, no mentioning what he did after his film career or what he is doing now! This actor is to me a complete mystery.
Dino De Laurentiis, an Academy Award-winning film impresario and producer who helped revolutionize the way movies are bankrolled and sold, has died. He was 91. The Academy Award-winning producer's daughter said her father was surrounded by family when he died Wednesday night at his home in Beverly Hills. The statement from Raffaella De Laurentiis did not give a cause of death. De Laurentiis was a legend of Italian New Wave filmmaking. His works also included "Bitter Rice," "La Strada", "Barbarella" and of course the cult movie "Danger: Diabolik!" with among others Marisa Mell as Lady Eva Kant, the partner in crime with the dark hero Diabolik. 
This time Italian singers/songwriters Fabrizio Canciani and Stefano Covri tackled this subject in their song "Esci Diabolik" from their album "Delitti e Canzoni"-Il Giallo In Musica. The song is the second title on the album. The musicians used the familiar "Wa Wa Wa" title from the original movie soundtrack by Ennio Morricone to open their song. After the intro the song becomes a very likeable jazzy inspired song with a lot of musical reference and style to another Italian jazzy singer "Paolo Conti". The video is a collage of the giallo a fumetti Diabolik and the movie that it spawned. Enjoy!
It was a time of a lot terrorist attacts in both countries. This was one of the reasons why in Italy a new film genre became a runaway success called the "Poliziottesco movies". What people saw in the movies happened in real life on their streets in front of their eyes and front porches of their homes. Killings, violence, blasting bombs, car chases in city streets... you name it - it happened. The evening news was often full of those stories again and again. Sadly reality is that it is not a movie so the spiral of violence reached its peak in 1978 in Italy when on March 16th 1978 the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro got kidnapped by the Brigate Rosse.
If Marisa Mell knew this famous sentence from the movie "Forrest Gump" she would have surely thought it while modeling for this photo shoot but that was not the case since the 1994 "Tom Hanks" movie came out after her death in 1992. Nevertheless this photo is one of the most strange pictures ever taken of Marisa Mell as a model. Whenever fans are talking about Marisa Mell in relation to photographers almost always the name of Angelo Frontoni comes up. His name will eternally be linked to hers but there is also another very famous photographer who worked with her and was the brain (!) behind this picture. His name was "Howell Conant". Howell Conant (1917-1999) was a photographer mostly working for the ultra American life and life style magazine called "Life Magazine". He rose to world fame when he became in the 50's the court photographer of the Grimaldi family in Monaco when one of his best friends actress Grace Kelly became Princess Gracia after her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco.
So for the January 28th 1966 issue of this magazine the editor had the brilliant idea of making an article about the rising European female stars and starlets. Hence entered staff photographer Howell Conant. He got the assignment to shoot these beautifull women like Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac, Susannah York, Marilu Tolu, Stephania Sandrelli and many others for the article in an unusual setting. In the article you can see the ladies lying between water melons, around dogs, in the grass, between windows... and Marisa Mell was so lucky to be shot in a cow stable dressed to the hilt in a black gala dress surrounded by cows.
On March 28 1964, the "Strudel"-western "Der Letzte Ritt nach Santa Cruz" had it's German premiere. The movie was a German take on making an "American" western in Europe. The outside scenes were shot on Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands in Spain, substituting for Mexico. The movie, directed by actor-writer-director Rolf Olsen, had as main cast Edmund Purdom, Klaus Kinski, Mario Adorf, Marianne Koch (who would become in the same year world famous alongside Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's opus "A Fistful of Dollars"), and Marisa Mell as Juanita. The story is a standard revenge story, so nothing special, but what makes this movie remarkable in her career is the fact that Marisa Mell rides a horse in several scenes, what she has never done again in any of her future movies.
Not many people know that Marisa Mell was, not only classical theatre trained in Vienna's prestitious Max Reinhardt Seminar, but was also a quite good horse rider. So privately she often went horse riding whenever she got the opportunity, especially in the 60's.
This is a rare picture of Marisa Mell horse riding during the production of the French movie "Objectif 500 millions" published in a Spanish newspaper on March 23rd 1966, a few days before the French premiere of the movie. 
And then it hit me why I was so intrigued by this picture. The image of a women's eye in a blood red orchid I had seen before although not very often but the image was struck into my subconscious as a poster for a Marisa Mell giallo movie called "Sette Orchidee Macchiate di Rosso" or in French "Le Tueur à l'Orchidee" directed by Umberto Lenzi in 1972 with Antonio Sabato and Uschi Glass.
What coincidence I thought that after more than almost 40 years the same image was used for an ad campaign to promote the newest perfume of fashion house Dior. The only thing missing in the Dior campaign was a tear of blood dropping from the eye but that was maybe to much even for Dior. A little more research learned that the man responsable for this image was make-up master for Dior for more than 30 year called "Tyen". He started his job at Dior as a make-up artist and then in later years became their fashion photographer and stylist for their ads. And as you can see on the picture below he puts more on women's faces than just orchids.
I wonder if he is a giallo fan or even an Eurocult fan? It could be possible while living in Paris, France that he came across the poster of "Le Tueur à l'Orchidee" and that the image has struck him one way or the other. So when one day the new ad campaign for the Dior perfume was needed this image of an eye surrounded by orchid petals came back to him. Who knows? Nevertheless it makes for a strong image and a beautiful campaign.
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