Waiting for the Weekend to come. Above, a vintage French poster for Le poison, aka Lost Weekend, with Ray Milland, Jane Wyman and Doris Dowling. Lost Weekend premiered in the U.S. in 1945, but due to World War II Europeans had to wait two years for its release. It finally opened in France today in 1947.
Ray Milland takes a long vacation on the black sea. The saying goes that you can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning, and the drama The Lost Weekend demonstrates that truth. Hard to believe star Ray Milland is the same actor who would end up in b-movie purgatory, toiling in schlock like Frogs and The Thing with Two Heads. Here you see him in an Academy Award winning performance as a man for whom every drink leads to a binge, and for whom every binge leads to a blackout. He isn’t oblivious to his condition. He knows, even as he lies and steals to feed his sickness, that he's just drifting farther and farther out onto a black sea. As a way to gain control, he plans to write a novel about his experiences, called just “The Bottle.” But in order to write about the bottle he has to be able to climb out of it. Some say this film hasn’t aged well, but we think it compares favorably to every movie about alcoholism we’ve seen, and it's also a source of interesting controversy about whether it's been unfairly left out of discussions about film noir. The Lost Weekend, with Ray Milland, Jane Wyman and the lovely Doris Dowling, premiered today in 1945.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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