vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Maria Mari starred in such films as the 1978 roman porno Lusty Transparent Man and the 1981 ama flick Nympho Diver: G-String Festival, and you see her above in a beautiful promo photo from around 1978. Mari didn’t make many movies—the Japanese Movie Database lists six, while IMDB has her in eight. All in all, it was a three-year run. Well, once you’ve had sex with an invisible man there’s really nowhere else to go career-wise.
Tômei-ningen: okase! was known in English by two titles—Lusty Transparent Man, which sounds pretty innocuous, and Invisible Man: Rape!, which sounds horrible. We’re really more interested in sharing the poster, but with regard to the film what you get here is a Nikkatsu roman porno production about a college student who invents an invisibility elixir. At that point he clumsily pervs his way like a dirty Jerry Lewis from one voyeuristic entanglement to the next, bumbling his way inside the lady parts of the female leads. How do you shoot love scenes with an invisible man? You have the women writhe around by themselves. They’re all taken by surprise, but all end up enjoying themselves. There’s some doubt whether they even realize their partner is a man, rather than a horny ghost or a figment of their own imaginations, but in any case these encounters aim for laughs, not eroticism. The question is whether you think they’re funny. We didn’t. Tômei-ningen: okase! premiered in Japan today in 1978.
Exacerbated by a long drought combined with poor conservation techniques that caused excessive soil erosion on farmlands, a huge dust storm known as Black Sunday rages across Texas, Oklahoma, and several other states, literally turning day to night and redistributing an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil.
In the U.S., CIA director Allen Dulles launches a program codenamed MK-ULTRA, which involves the surreptitious use of drugs such as LSD to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. The specific goals of the program are multifold, but focus on drugging world leaders in order to discredit them, developing a truth serum, and making people highly susceptible to suggestion. All of this is top secret, and files relating to MK-ULTRA’s existence are destroyed in 1973, but the truth about the program still emerges in the mid-seventies after a congressional investigation.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait in the White House. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt’s body is transported by train to his hometown of Hyde Park, New York, and on April 15 he is buried in the rose garden of the Roosevelt family home.
American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.
