PRIMAL SCREAM

Make all the noise you want. Nobody is listening.

The rare promo you see here is the Japanese poster for Carl Monson’s thriller A Scream in the Streets. We’ve seen this movie described as the first cop buddy picture. We don’t know if it was the first, but the dynamic is there—a straight-laced family man partnered with a wild hothead, their relationship residing at the core of a plot involving murder and mayhem in Los Angeles. So yes, it’s a buddy movie perhaps, but just barely—A Scream in the Streets is in actuality a sexploitation movie that spends far more time on the down and dirty than on crime solving, something you can probably deduce from the fact that the promo features a nude Sharon Kelly, aka Colleen Brennan, and by the fact that the alternate promo below features an even more nude Kelly/Brennan. 

While not hardcore, A Scream in the Streets was certainly too extreme to receive an R, and today it remains unrated, a garish display of flesh, blood, and profanity, as the cop combo wend their way through Los Angeles during a hot summer week rife with sleaze and crime, trying to keep the city from imploding as they also track a killer who targets women while dressed as one. If there’s a lesson in the movie at all it may be that it’s pointless to try and go unsullied by such rampant depravity—you can try not to touch it, but it’ll reach out and touch you. Either that or the lesson is if it looks like a man dressed as a woman and acts like a man dressed as a woman, it’s probably going to try and kill you—even if you’re a cop. A Scream in the Streets premiered in the U.S. first, then in Japan today in 1973.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1976—Gerald Ford Rescinds Executive Order 9066

U.S. President Gerald R. Ford signs Proclamation 4417, which belatedly rescinds Executive Order 9066. That Order, signed in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, established “War Relocation Camps” for Japanese-American citizens living in the U.S. Eventually, 120,000 are locked up without evidence, due process, or the possibility of appeal, for the duration of World War II.

1954—First Church of Scientology Established

The first Scientology church, based on the writings of science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, is established in Los Angeles, California. Since then, the city has become home to the largest concentration of Scientologists in the world, and its ranks include high-profile adherents such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

1933—Blaine Act Passes

The Blaine Act, a congressional bill sponsored by Wisconsin senator John J. Blaine, is passed by the U.S. Senate and officially repeals the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, aka the Volstead Act, aka Prohibition. The repeal is formally adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution on December 5, 1933.

1947—Voice of America Begins Broadcasting into U.S.S.R.

The state radio channel known as Voice of America and controlled by the U.S. State Department, begins broadcasting into the Soviet Union in Russian with the intent of countering Soviet radio programming directed against American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responds by initiating electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts.

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.

Unknown artist produces lurid cover for Indian true crime magazine Nutan Kahaniyan.
Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.

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