vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above, two really nice West German promos for Roman Polanski’s quasi-horror flick Ekel, better known as Répulsion, with Catherine Deneuve as a woman who goes crazy in the isolation of her apartment. We talked about this one briefly and shared two Japanese posters for it a while ago. After opening in France and the UK, the film received its debut for German viewers at the Berlin International Film Festival today in 1965.
Italian actress Elsa Martinelli makes a beautiful beach look even better in this nice promo image, and we can only assume she didn’t go in the water with all those necklaces on, because otherwise she might have sunk and been lost forever. Martinelli was an era spanning star who debuted onscreen in 1953, made numerous excellent films, including The Indian Fighter and Et mourir de plaisir, won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 6th Berlin International Film Festival in 1956, and accumulated more than fifty screen and television credits through 2004. The above photo was shot in Brazil around 1970.
Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage.
Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.
Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night.
Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.
Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.
As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.
The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.
