GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

There's room for only one off-the-shoulder evening gown in this gang.

There’s nothing quite like a knife fight, and you get a doozy on this promo poster for the crime thriller Girls on the Loose. You’re probably wondering if this actually occurs in the movie. It does, and it’s a fun scene, but a long and winding road getting there. The film has a nice opening—a heist by a trio of masked robbers. They pile into a laundry van driven a fourth gang member and peel off their disguises to reveal themselves as women. Mara Corday is the ruthless ringleader trying to keep her gang in line, but trouble soon arrives in the form of a police investigation and a weak link in the crew who needs dealing with.

The problems multiply when a detective takes a romantic interest in Corday’s little sister Barbara Bostock. Gang member Joyce Barker wants sis silenced, but blood is thicker than money for Corday. She and Barker eventually have the knock-down-drag-out depicted on the poster, but it isn’t really worth the wait. Girls on the Loose is a fun idea but ultimately is an undistinguished and forgettable b-movie that doesn’t do as much with its premise as it should have. There’s no definitive release date, but most of its reviews appeared at the end of March and beginning of April 1958, so we’ll say it opened within a week either way of today 1958.

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HISTORY REWIND

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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