vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
This 1954 promo image from Paramount Pictures features U.S. actress Mary Murphy. She appeared in some good movies, among them The Wild One and The Desperate Hours, and some dogs, such as Hell’s Island. Such is the norm in Hollywood. In the end, though, she accumulated about seventy credits in cinema and television, which is much better than the norm. Along the way she made one of the more amusing promo shots in history. At least, it’s amusing to us. Check here.
Mary Murphy, not to be confused with her many famous namesakes, was an American actress best known for co-starring with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. She played a virginal small-town girl, yin to Brando’s vagabond rebel yang. And what a pair they made. In this photo Murphy has a more mature yet still innocent look, gun accessorized. It was made for the 1955 thriller Hell’s Island.
At the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles, California, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents the first Emmy Awards. The name Emmy was chosen as a feminization of “immy”, a nickname used for the image orthicon tubes that were common in early television cameras.
Charles Manson and three female members of his “family” are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which Manson orchestrated in hopes of bringing about Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise between blacks and whites.
A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.
The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.
The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.
