CUT TO THE CHASE

Our best option is to run as fast as we can. You can keep up with me okay in that floor length gown, right?


These two orange promos were made for The Chase, starring Robert Cummings as a down and out war vet and Steve Cochran as a Miami gangster. The film also has Peter Lorre as Cochran’s henchman and Michèle Morgan as his wife. The plot set-up is simple. When Cummings finds a wallet packed with cash he returns it, though he’s down on his luck. The wallet belongs to shady Cochran, who is impressed by Cummings’ honesty and hires him to be a chauffeur. Pretty soon he’s driving Morgan around too, which is a nice bonus. When she decides she wants to leave Cochran, she asks Cummings for help and he dreams up a scheme to escape by ship to Havana.

If you watch this you’ll notice that Cummings is sedate, almost in a daze, but there are reasons for this that are revealed later. His escape plan does not—of course—come off without a hitch. Lorre figures it out and throws a monkey wrench in the works. That’s not a spoiler. This is film noir, which means you know his initial plan won’t work. But we won’t reveal more. In our opinion, it would have been nice if the filmmakers had at least gotten some second unit shots from Havana to use, just a few street scenes or harbor shots, but no such luck. Though the movie has a backlot feel, some of the sets are pretty nice just the same. In the end it’s worth seeing. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1946.

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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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