Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Kôyû Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue, who you see below. The movie is a women-in-prison flick, which means tough conditions, worse inmates, and the very worst guards imaginable. Obviously, all such movies were mainly excuses to show a lot of skin on flimsy pretexts—shower time!—and indulge in same sex eroticism and vicious catfights. As a genre, women-in-prison movies were a global phenomenon. Nearly every country with a film industry made them, none more copiously than the United States. But the Japanese entries tend to be very provocative. Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku premiered in Japan today in 1975.
1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.