We’ll just get right to the point. Black Shampoo is a monument of gratuitous skin and gunplay almost unequaled in the annals of blaxploitation. The film was a take on the Warren Beatty flick Shampoo, but done on the cheap, with burly John Daniels in the lead as a womanizing hair salon proprietor who runs afoul of the mob. You get every stereotype in the book here, and they’re all good for a laugh. Even Tanya Boyd’s copious nudity is pushed to an unintentionally comical extreme, as she is at one point forced to flee for her life wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt fastened by a single button, making the whole long chase over the hills and through the woods a game of peek-a-bush. In another scene she stares down at her own naked body as if thinking, “My God, I am so hot even I have to look.” No argument there. We just love this movie. Social relevance—uh, not really. Entertainment value—extremely high. Black Shampoo opened in the U.S. today in 1976.
1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.