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Harlem hath no fury like a righteous man scorned.

This Japanese poster for the 1990s period crime drama A Rage in Harlem happened to catch our eye, partly because the art by Joe Batchelor is great, but also because we knew the American promo featured not this painting but a rather banal group photo of the cast. We don’t know why Japan got the better promo, but we can speculate. By this time global audiences were acclimated to photographic promo art, but in Japan the cast—Forest Whitaker, Robin Givens, and several established actors of the period—were unknown to local filmgoers, so the distributors marketed the movie as an art film, a sort of exotic trip to 1950s Harlem. The text on the poster’s reverse seems to confirm that: 1956, Harlem. Jazz clubs, dancehall dresses, and people in suits, with a nightlife unfolding in a Harlem-style destination.

Chester Himes’ novel For Love of Imabelle provided the source material, and it features everything the poster promises. The story deals with a naive and religious young Harlem undertaker played by Whitaker who’s taken in by scam artists, tries to retrieve his money, but runs into an array of complications, some of them comical, most of them lethal. The movie follows the book pretty closely, which means it’s bound to have good moments, but the direction by Bill Duke is a bit ponderous in the early stages, the script’s many interjections of humor lack the zest of Himes’ writing, the soundtrack is often a mismatch of mood, and the entire production suffers from budgetary constraints. It wasn’t shot in New York City, but rather Cincinnati. While architecturally that made sense because Cincinnati has scores of brownstone houses in the style of old Harlem, there’s really no substitute for the Big Apple.

On the plus side, the cast is interesting. Whitaker would later become a respected Hollywood figure, though here he’s a little green, still feeling his way as an actor. Danny Glover, Bajda Djola, and Gregory Hines are entertaining in supporting roles. Givens fits the part of a femme fatale like a glove—which is to say, she’s slinky as hell and startlingly beautiful. And turning back to the setting, while, as we said, Cincinnati is no Harlem, the many brownstone apartment houses did create a workable backdrop, and Duke uses the city in every advantageous manner he can manage. These are enough attractions, we think, to push the movie onto the plus side of the ledger. After its 1991 U.S. run A Rage in Harlem reached Japan in 1992. The rear of the poster gives a premiere date of May 2.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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