Diana takes a turn behind the trigger.
Above: Diana Dors stars in three promo images made for her 1956 drama Yield to the Night, also known as Blonde Sinner, one of her better flicks, we think. We have plenty of Dors in the website, covering both her career and personal life. You can read about Yield to the Night here and here.
The hangman comes for Britain's top sex symbol.
A while back we showed you a British poster for Diana Dors' drama Yield to the Night, which tells the story of a woman on death row facing a date with a noose. That poster was a photographic effort. The movie was renamed Blonde Sinner for its U.S. release, and a photo-illustrated poster, which you see above, was issued to promote it. This is a classic piece of movie memorabilia, perfect in every way. The Brits actually got an illustrated poster too, just not this one. Maybe we'll dig theirs up later. After premiering in Great Britain during the summer of 1956 Blonde Sinner opened in the U.S. today that same year.
Diana Dors dirties her golden locks for another turn as a woman behind bars.
The excellent promo above for Le femme et le rôdeur, aka The Unholy Wife was created by Roger Soubie, one of the best French poster artists of the mid-century period. His art drew us to the movie, which we watched only to discover Diana Dors in identical grime mode as in her prison drama Yield to the Night. Not only do both productions feature Dors locked down with her blonde tresses gone brown due to lack of available dye, but both involve her being on death row for murder. Since The Unholy Wife was the next film she did after Yield to the Night we can only assume her initial foray into crime and incarceration was such a success it needed to be repeated. Like almost exactly. Unfortunately, two visions of a bruise-eyed Dors about to receive state-sponsored revenge were too much for audiences, and her repeat excursion was roundly panned. And sadly, we must agree. Dors is living in California and is married to a Napa winery baron, but since she’s also sharing her affections with a hot young lover, she soon ponders murdering her unsuspecting hubby for his estate. When we lived in Berkeley, just south of the California wine country, we rarely pondered anything more than sunlit grapes and a nice Schug Syrah. But okay, The Unholy Wife is a film noir, which means Dors is no more happy with her heaven-on-Earth existence than a Wall Street stockbroker is with his untaxable Cayman Islands shadow fortune. Both inexplicably want more. Dors starts the film in prison and tells her story via flashback, so we already know her schemes backfired. If only the same were true for stockbrokers. The Unholy Wife premiered in England in the summer of 1957 and premiered in France today the same year.
So, what are you doing on Friday? Being executed? Oh, I see. How about Thursday? We love this poster for the British-produced prison drama Yield to the Night, aka Blonde Sinner, which is the tale of a woman languishing on death row for committing murder. Diana Dors stars, and before you decide you can’t buy her as a death row inmate, know that she isn’t playing a hardened criminal, but rather a spurned woman who has committed a rash act of passion. As written, the role works fine for the glamorous Dors. In fact, you kind of get two versions of her, the first a platinum-maned knockout, the second a sunken-eyed, dishwater blonde wreck (although the wreck is still quite nice looking, of course). There’s no question of whether her character committed the crime—we see her pull the trigger in the first minutes of the film. The tension derives from whether she will win a reprieve from the death chamber. We won’t tell you. But we will say that for fans of mid-century cinema, this one is a worthwhile expenditure of time. And as a bonus, for fans of mid-century design, the credit graphics are kind of cool. Yield to the Night had its British premiere today in 1956.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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