There, isn't that better? You'll save a few cents on your electricity bill.
It's never a bad idea to save money on your utilities, as U.S. actress Laraine Day demonstrates above. Day had a long and busy career, appearing in films such as The Woman on Pier 13, Foreign Correspondent, Tarzan Finds a Son!, Fingers at the Window, and The Locket, for which the above promo was made. It dates from 1946, and you can see another photo from the film here.
You don't know jack-o'-lantern.
How many people have made jack-o'-lanterns without knowing anything about them? Plenty, we bet. The term comes from an Irish myth about a man named Stingy Jack (sometimes Jack the Smith, Drunk Jack, or Flaky Jack), a folkloric deceiver whose lies and tricks resulted in him having to wander the world after his death, admitted to neither Heaven nor Hell, lighting his way with an ember inside a hollowed out rutabaga. We don't know if rutabagas were ever used for jack-o'-lanterns, but if they were the switch to pumpkins was a good one. Rutabagas aren't scary. Unless you have to eat them.
Posing with en enormous plaster jack-o'-lantern is U.S. actress Anne Nagel, whose Hollywood career spanned about twenty-five years. She acted in (including uncredited appearances) about a hundred films, among them the crime dramas Bungalow 13, Escape by Night, Armed Car Robbery, and The Trap. Nagel is a good femme fatale choice for this time of year because her personal life was even scarier than these photos. Her first husband committed suicide, she allegedly had problems with alcohol, she never accumulated much money despite her many screen performances, and she died of cancer at age fifty.
Here's the most frightening story of all. In 1947 she filed a $350,000 lawsuit against a surgeon who she claimed removed some of her reproductive organs in 1936 without consent when he performed an appendectomy on her. Could you even imagine? Nagel said she had no idea until shortly before filing suit more than a decade later, but the surgeon countered that Nagel knew exactly what he was going to do. We don't know how the case turned out, but given the era we bet she didn't win. These photos, no longer very scary after hearing that story, are from 1940.
Movie stars were always willing to give each other a hand.
Once again we've been struck, so to speak, by the sheer number of cinema promo images featuring actors and actresses pretending to slap each other. The just keep turning up. The above shot is more about the neck than the face, but it still counts, as Gloria Swanson slaps William Holden in 1950's Sunset Boulevard. Below we have a bunch more, and you can see our previous collection at this link. Since we already discussed this phenomenon we won't get into it again, except briefly as follows: pretend slaps, film is not reality, and everyone should try to remember the difference. Many slaps below for your interest and wonder. Diana Dors smacks Patrick Allen blurry in 1957's The Long Haul.
Mob boss George Raft menaces Anne Francis in a promo image made for 1954's Rogue Cop.
Bud Abbott gets aggressive with Lou Costello in 1945's Here Come the Co-Eds.
Jo Morrow takes one from black hat Jack Hogan in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley.
Chris Robinson and Anita Sands get a couple of things straight about who's on the yearbook committee in Diary of High School Bride.
Paul Newman and Ann Blyth agree to disagree in 1957's The Helen Morgan Story.
Verna Lisi shows Umberto Orsini who gives the orders in the 1967 film La ragazza e il generale, aka The Girl and the General.
What the fuck did you just call me? Marki Bey slaps Betty Anne Rees loopy in the 1974 horror flick Sugar Hill.
Claudia Cardinale slaps (or maybe punches—we can't remember) Brigitte Bardot in the 1971 western Les pétroleuses, known in English for some reason as The Legend of Frenchie King.
Audrey Totter reels under the attentions of Richard Basehart in 1949 Tension. We're thinking it was probably even more tense after this moment.
Anne Baxter tries to no avail to avoid a slap from heel Steve Cochran in 1954's Carnival Story.
Though Alan Ladd was a little guy who Gail Russell probably could have roughed up if she wanted, the script called for him to slap her, and he obeyed in the 1946 adventure Calcutta.
Peter Alexander guards his right cheek, therefore Hannelore Auer crosses him up and attacks his left in 1964's Schwejk's Flegeljahre, aka Schweik's Years of Indiscretion.
Elizabeth Ashley gives Roddy McDowall a facial in in 1965's The Third Day.
Tony Anthony slaps Lucretia Love in 1972's Piazza pulita, aka Pete, Pearl and the Pole. André Oumansky goes backhand on Lola Albright in 1964's Joy House.
Frank Ferguson catches one from Barbara Bel Geddes in the 1949 drama Caught.
This looks like a real slap, so you have to credit the actresses for their commitment. It's from 1961's Raisin in the Sun and shows Claudia McNeil rearranging the face of Diana Sands.
Gloria Grahame finds herself cornered by Broderick Crawford in 1954's Human Desire.
Bette Davis, an experienced slapper and slappee, gets a little assistance from an unidentified third party as she goes Old West on Amanda Blake in a 1966 episode of Gunsmoke called “The Jailer.”
There are a few slaps in 1939's Gone with the Wind, so we had our pick. We went with Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard.
Virginia Field takes one on the chin from Marshall Thompson in Dial 1119.
Clint Eastwood absorbs a right cross from nun Shirley MacLaine in 1970's Two Mules for Sister Sara.
What was her real name? It's a Short story.
Above are three photos of British-Burmese actress Seyna Seyn, who in our view has one of the greatest names in show business history. But as we asked above, could such an exotic and alliterative handle be real? Sadly, no. She was born Sylvia Short, which strikes us as a perfectly serviceable show business name, but when you come up with something like Seyna Seyn you have to go with it. Seyn's filmography includes Casanova 70, I marziani hanno 12 mani, aka The Twelve-Handed Men of Mars, Agente segreto 777 - Operazione Mistero, and Se tutte le donne del mondo... (Operazione Paradiso), aka Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. As those titles suggest, she mostly worked in Italy. We figure we'll get around to one or two of her movies pretty soon.
Greetings, Earthling. Take me to your leading purveyor of glitter.
This promo photo features Hungarian actress Catherine Schell, and it was made for the cheeseball British television series Space: 1999, about the trials and troubles of the inhabitants of a moon colony after a massive explosion blows the moon out of Earth's orbit. As the survivors hurtle through space they encounter strange phenomena and new lifeforms. Schell played an alien named Maya from the planet Psychon, and could transform herself into anything organic, including, seemingly, an aficionado of intricate beadwork. She played Maya for twenty-five episodes, and is also well known for appearances in films such as On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Moon Zero Two. This shot is from 1975.
Black don't crack a smile. Above is a second excellent tateken poster for Shin joshuu sasori: 701-gô, known in English as New Female Prisoner Scorpion: 701, with Yumi Takigawa dressed in black from head to toe and looking ready to deal out death. These tateken style promos are rare, so we're happy to have found two. As usual, we like to share posters on a film's premiere date, and that was today in 1976.
The next few rounds are on her.
It's always fun until someone sprays gunfire around the bar. Above you see a promo image of British actress Virginia Field made for her 1950 film noir Dial 1119. This would be a controversial photo for an actress today, and understandably so, for reasons that regularly make headlines. We shared another promo of Field from Dial 1119 a long while back, which you can see here.
Rocket fueled adventures from Earth to space and back again.
Above: more covers of Star-Cine Cosmos, a popular brand of French photo-comics made from feature films. We always meant to get back to this magazine with its striking art, but it's been a full twelve years since we last looked at it. Time flies—especially in outer space. The films featured here are, original titles only, top to bottom, Space Men, Alraune, Forbidden Planet, The Mole People, X-15, Radar Men from the Moon, Battle in Outer Space, When World Collide, This Island Earth, Earth vs. The Spider, and Master of the World.
When commies get their hooks into you it's forever.
The Woman on Pier 13, for which you see a very nice promo poster above, had a pre-release title that tells you everything you need to know about it. That title was I Married a Communist. What you get here is a melodrama about Laraine Day, whirlwind married to successful San Francisco industrialist Robert Ryan, an exemplar of American free enterprise, but who was once a member of the communist party back in New Jersey. Uh oh. Long before meeting and marrying Day, he exited the party without even thanking his hosts for the snacks, moved to Frisco, and changed his name. Married life is going wonderfully until the commies track him down and threaten to expose him if he doesn't give over two fifths of his salary each month and sabotage labor negotiations between San Fran shipping magnates and striking dockworkers. They kill a guy in front of him, just so he knows they mean business. The sneaky, thieving, blackmailing, murdering rats. They're cruel squared. All they needed to be worse were monocles and riding crops. And maybe a handy tray of stainless steel dental hooks. And speaking of hooks, wait until you see what what Ryan can do with one. The Woman on Pier 13 is well made and pretty fun, but it's less useful as cinema than as a time capsule of anti-commie propaganda. It premiered today in 1949.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1951—The Rosenbergs Are Convicted of Espionage
Americans Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage as a result of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. While declassified documents seem to confirm Julius Rosenberg's role as a spy, Ethel Rosenberg's involvement is still a matter of dispute. Both Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953. 1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck." 1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack. 1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
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