THREE OF A KIND

You two can call yourselves what you want, but to me, prostitute is an ugly word. I consider myself a social worker.

We’ve seen a fair amount of poster art from John Solie. This effort looks a little different for him, a bit less polished maybe. It’s a striking piece anyway, set at the intersection of Love Street and John Street, made for the urban drama Street Girls, which premiered today in 1976 and starred Carol Case. The first thing to note about this film is that it was co-scripted by eventual multiple Oscar winner Barry Levinson. He was influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, clearly, but Street Girls‘ closest cinematic relative actually came three years later in Paul Schrader’s 1979 thriller Hardcore. The vibe is identical, and the plot, about a smalltown father trying to save his sexually exploited daughter, is similar. What isn’t similar are important elements such as budget, technical values, and acting.

Street Girls is about the aformentioned forlorn father, but most of the plot early on focuses on the daughter, played by Case, who’s dancing at a strip dive called the Step Down a Go-Go, is sexually involved with one of the other women, and has been been targeted by bad guy Paul Pompian for conversion to drug addiction and prostitution. Dad mostly blunders oaflike around the city—in this case Eugene, Oregon—but eventually runs into the right people to help him find his litle girl, if only he can convince them. If that happens it’s possible Case won’t be turned out, but it’s a fraught race against a determined pimp.

Street Girls is an example of what it means to be a novice in Hollywood. No matter the nature of a production you must commit to doing your best, or your career will be short. Case gives about as committed a performance as you’ll see. It doesn’t work completely, though we suspect more time could have drawn out a better result. But that’s always the rub—time derives from budget, as does the ability to make quality hires across the board before the cameras even roll. It’s nice that Levinson rose to be a superstar director, but it isn’t neccessarily that he was the only one here with talent. He would have benefitted from other factors, including pure luck. Watching this, we thought it would have been nice if mainstream success had found Case too. Instead, Street Girls was her only film.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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.

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”.

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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