vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
What would sci-fi be without Jane Fonda? Just watching her overheat Dr. Durand Durand’s Excessive Machine is enough to get your juices flowing. We have several Barbarella posters, but we’ll save those until their premiere dates. Meantime, here’s a promo shot from Barbarella. Jane Fonda turns 61 today.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.
NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.
Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.
American author William Faulkner, who wrote acclaimed novels such as Intruder in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury, dies of a heart attack in Wright’s Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
