SCREAM BLOODY MURDER

Wait, don't kill me! I can be useful! I can teach you this lindy hop I learned in my dance class!


We said last week we’d get back to British actress Susan George. Above you see her on a poster for Die Screaming Marianne, along with the claim that the movie is the ultimate in suspense. Well, if that’s the case, how could we say no? George plays a nightclub dancer hiding out from her father, a former judge who took bribes during his long career. He lives in a villa in Portugal with George’s half sister. When George turns twenty-one she’ll receive her mother’s inheritance, which is in a Swiss bank account along with papers proving her father was a crook. Her half sister wants the money, which amounts to $700,000, and her father wants the documents. Both decide that killing George is the only way to achieve their goals.

The filmmakers, including cult horror director Pete Walker, primarily come at all this via a somewhat elliptical route that brings to mind giallo cinema, where you aren’t sure what’s significant, or really what’s even going on at first. But by halfway through, it all begins to make sense and the story boils down to the very conventional question of whether George’s father and half sister can get away with murder. We won’t answer that, but we’ll tell you we can’t fully recommend the movie because of its obtrusively oddball style. George definitely made better films, a few of which we mentioned in our previous post on her. That being the case, we’ll see her again. Die Screaming Marianne premiered today in 1971.
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

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.

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 painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

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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