ALARMED RESPONSE

Remember the for better or worse part of the vows? This is the worse.

These two photo-illustrated posters were made for the drama Cause for Alarm!, and it shows star Loretta Young in wide-eyed panic mode, a state in which she spends most of the film as the wife of a man who’s decided she and his doctor are teaming up to kill him with a progressive overdose of heart medicine. It’s pure paranoia. The guy is losing is mind. But he’s written an incriminating letter to the district attorney that details the imaginary plot. When Young’s husband keels over dead after taunting her about the letter that the mailman has just carried away minutes earlier, she realizes the law might believe him and tries to undo what he’s done. This has the effect of making her look like a guilty woman even though she isn’t. It’s a classic case of crossed up circumstances, though these days it plays somewhat differently than originally meant, with a layer of unintended commentary about the stultifying lives of mid-century suburban housewives. While it’s reasonably diverting as a psychological drama we wouldn’t say it’s top notch. But it’s certainly worth a look. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1951.

Cause for Alarm!, Loretta Young, Barry Sullivan, Bruce Cowling, Margalo Gilmore, poster art, cinema, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 14

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.

February 13

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.

February 12

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.

February 12

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.

February 11

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”.