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Promo photo of Dennis Hopper, actor in Rebel without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and Apocalypse Now, also co-writer, co-star and director of the eternal Easy Rider, seen here circa 1955. Easy Rider‘s official tagline was: A man went looking for America—and couldn’t find it anywhere. It was meant to describe Peter Fonda’s character Captain America, but it is real-life maverick Hopper for whom the line always seemed more apt
Vanishing Point’s hard-driving anti-hero Kowalski is nobody special before the fateful moment he decides to deliver a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in fifteen hours. He has to drive like a bat out of hell to do it, and suddenly what could have been a meaningless trip becomes instead a deadly serious rebuke to authority. Kowalski burns up mile after mile of open road, ripping along in a wash of dust and noise, and occasionally stopping to meet some of the denizens of the vast American west. This is one of the best counterculture movies ever made, in our humble view. Like Easy Rider, it portrays the establishment as fiercely opposed to freedom, and exposes its patriotic rhetoric as empty of substance. The two movies are almost companion pieces, telling us that when you rattle your cage, trouble will always be waiting around the next bend, or just over the horizon. Vanishing Point premiered in the U.S. today, 1971.
Neither of us at Pulp Intl. were around during the 60s. Articles and reviews tell us Easy Rider—heavy with symbolism, sparse of dialogue, and low on budget—perfectly captured the unsettled mood of the times and changed moviemaking forever. But we weren’t there, so we watch this film as latecomers, like people examining the high water mark of a flood that long ago receded. If the waters had risen higher perhaps we’d be living in a different world now, a better world rebuilt from scratch. But maybe not. Easy Rider was released in Japan today, 1970.
A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.
During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.
The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.
