DATE WITH DESTINY

Everybody's gotta die sometime.

This photo-illustrated poster was made for the 1948 suspense thriller Night Has a Thousand Eyes, which demands to be watched if for no other reason than its lyrical title. The awesome Edward G. Robinson plays a phony psychic who’s thrown for a loop when he unexpectedly starts to have real visions—or seems to. Has he merely refined his scam, or can he really see the future? He tells Gail Russell she’s fated to die in mere days but claims he wants to help her avoid her destiny. She believes the prediction, but her beau and a handful of cops keep trying to pin various crimes on Robinson as Russell’s clock dwindles to zero hour. The base ingredients here—the good cast, experienced director John Farrow, a source novel by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich, aka George Hopley—were probably pre-destined to produce something worthwhile. We’d say the novel is better, but as adaptations go Night Has a Thousand Eyes mostly works. We sense that… Wait! It’s becoming clear… It’s you! With a bowl of popcorn and a beer! Watching the movie!

You ever feel like you're going to lose no matter what?

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados, and his work fronts William Irish’s Night Has 1000 Eyes. The cover alone got us into this one. It tells the story of a woman who has been burdened with very dark—and very real—predictions about the future, forecasts far too specific to be lucky guesses. For example, she’s told she’ll meet a woman who wears a diamond watch around her knee, and it comes true when one of her friends asks to borrow a garter, then raises her skirt to show how she’s dealt with her broken one by fastening her watch around her stocking. Given that these predictions are so specific, the crucial announcement that the woman’s father will be killed by a lion seems utterly unavoidable, even though they live in the middle of a metropolis.

The cover may seem to remove the need to read the novel, but don’t worry—it actually depicts not the climax or any point in the middle, but the first several pages, in which a beat cop comes across a woman determined to leap from a bridge. It’s after he rescues her that we learn the bizarre story of why she’s there. Irish, aka George Hopley, aka Cornell Woolrich, is perhaps a bit too reiterative with his prose in this one, tending to belabor his points after they’ve been fully made, to the extent that the novel feels a bit like it’s been padded out to reach a word threshold. Minor flaw. Even if you’re periodically tempted to skip some of the existentialism 101 musings, Irish/Hopley/Woolrich weaves a compelling tale here—one later made into a film starring Edward G. Robinson—and it’s well worth the time spent.  

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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 panting 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”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

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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