BAITER OR WORSE

When she gets them on the hook they never get off.


The beautiful photo-illustrated poster you see above was made for the British drama Man Bait, featuring George Brent, Marguerite Chapman, and Diana Dors. We gave it a watch, and for some reason the opening credits say, “introducing Diana Dors,” though this was actually her thirteenth credited role. We won’t try to puzzle out that mystery. Plotwise, Dors and her irresistible lips are the bait, as she’s convinced by a lowlife male acquaintance to blackmail her boss out of three-hundred pounds by threatening to lie about him making an unwanted advance toward her. Unfortunately, Dors is a reluctant scam artist, which puts her at odds with her manipulative accomplice. To say that everything goes wrong for her because of this relationship is an understatement.

Overall, Man Bait is a good film. While Dors is adequate in her role (she was still only twenty-one, despite her previous experience), Brent and Chapman, who both had dozens of films on their résumés at this point, are flawless as the blackmail victim and his loyal employee. An undercurrent of unrequited love prompts Chapman to side with Brent even though things look pretty bad for him as the plot progresses. But there’s no need to be too terribly worried—the movie was made during the Hays Code censorship era, so you know crime can’t pay. Sure, the Code was American, but even British productions adhered to it if they hoped to earn a U.S. release. Man Bait did when it premiered in Los Angeles today in 1952.
In order to qualify as a temptation there has to be a chance you can resist. These are not a temptation—they’re a certainty.
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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.

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.

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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