vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
U.S. actress Janet Blair does the top hat and cane routine in this promo image made for her 1942 movie Broadway. It was one of her early roles, and she starred opposite George Raft, who portrayed himself in the film. Blair went on to amass many screen credits, but for our money her best effort is I Love Trouble, which we discussed a couple of years ago. You can read about it here.
From K.G. Murray Publishing Co., the group that would later produce Adam magazine, comes this October 1948 issue of Man Junior, which you may already know was the offspring of Murray’s flagship publication Man. We showed you one of those here. Both magazines featured art, fiction, cartoons, and glamour photography, but Man Junior was of smaller dimensions—in fact pocket sized. It launched in 1937 and was an immediate success. The cover art above, signed Val, is uncredited, but inside you get illustrations from Arthur Nichol, Jack Waugh, and others, plus an adventure from the immensely popular comic character Devil Doone, who was created by R. Carson Gold, first appeared in Man Junior in 1945, and was drawn during this period by Hart Amos. You also get a pretty cool photo of American actress Janet Blair, who we shared a portrait of just a couple of weeks ago, and of special note are two nude studies from famed British photographer John Everard. We’ll have more samples form Kenneth Murray’s publishing empire soon.
Above, American actress Janet Blair, who appeared in many films, including the 1948 noir I Love Trouble, and the 1945 musical Tonight and Every Night, seen here clowning around in a cute shot by Joseph Jasgur, mid-1940s.
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country’s leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid.
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler’s diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess’s flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is “Kaputt.” The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes.
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
American blues and jazz singer Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit”, which is considered to be the first civil rights song. It began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, which he later set to music and performed live with his wife Laura Duncan. The song became a Holiday standard immediately after she recorded it, and it remains one of the most highly regarded pieces of music in American history.
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West’s considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy.
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed.
