GILDA AS CHARGED

Sixty-three years ago today Rita Hayworth electrified as the archetypal femme fatale.

Gilda is a film that appears on every list of top ten noirs we’ve ever seen, and still it is impossible to overstate how great the movie is. Rita Hayworth had acted in more than a dozen features before this one, but she was a revelation here. Her husband steps into her bedroom saying, “Gilda, are you decent?” And she appears with a hairflip and a wicked smile, saying, “Me?” Right away you know you’re in for a ride. You know this is a woman who is never decent. Something about the blazing eyes seems to promise unimaginable carnal adventures. She stands backlit in a nearly sheer shirt that shows the silhouettes of her breasts. After a song and dance routine she allows a stranger onstage to try and zip her out of her strapless black dress. At one point, about to ride off into the night with a suitor, she says, “Haven’t you heard, Gabe? If I’d been a ranch they’d have named me the Bar Nothing.” All this just to drive poor Glenn Ford mad with jealousy. Yes, Gilda is a femme fatale for the ages, and Gilda is a must-see piece of American cinema.

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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1985—Matt Munro Dies

English singer Matt Munro, who was one of the most popular entertainers on the international music scene during the 1960s and sang numerous hits, including the James Bond theme “From Russia with Love,” dies from liver cancer at Cromwell Hospital, Kensington, London.

1958—Plane Crash Kills 8 Man U Players

British European Airways Flight 609 crashes attempting to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane is the Manchester United football team, along with a number of supporters and journalists. 20 of the 44 people on board die in the crash.

1919—United Artists Is Launched

Actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, along with director D.W. Griffith, launch United Artists. Each holds a twenty percent stake, with the remaining percentage held by lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo. The company struggles for years, with Griffith soon dropping out, but eventually more partners are brought in and UA becomes a Hollywood powerhouse.

1958—U.S. Loses H-Bomb

A 7,600 pound nuclear weapon that comes to be known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, near Tybee Island. The bomb was jettisoned to save the aircrew during a practice exercise after the B-47 bomber carrying it collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost, and remains so today.

1906—NYPD Begins Use of Fingerprint ID

NYPD Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot begins using French police officer Alphonse Bertillon’s fingerprint system to identify suspected criminals. The use of prints for contractual endorsement (as opposed to signatures) had begun in India thirty years earlier, and print usage for police work had been adopted in India, France, Argentina and other countries by 1900, but NYPD usage represented the beginning of complete acceptance of the process in America. To date, of the billions of fingerprints taken, no two have ever been found to be identical.

1974—Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped

In Berkeley, California, an organization calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps heiress Patty Hearst. The next time Hearst is seen is in a San Francisco bank, helping to rob it with a machine gun. When she is finally captured her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argues that she had been brainwashed into committing the crime, but she is convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, a term which is later commuted.

Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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