vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: two U.S. insert size posters for the gangster drama Johnny Eager. The top one was made for the film’s original run, which began today in 1941, while the second bears a 1950 copyright date at lower left, which means it was made for the re-release of the film that year. We wrote about this classic already, but no need to go there (unless you really want to). Just watch it. Johnny Eager is a good night’s vintage entertainment.
This photo of Lana Turner was made when she was filming the crime thriller Johnny Eager, and what’s interesting about it is that co-star Robert Taylor, who played the titular Mr. Eager, was erased from an original MGM promo shot. Apparently, whoever altered the shot felt Turner didn’t need Taylor in a supervisory role, so he was magically vanished. If only it were always that easy to get someone off your back. The photo is from 1941.
Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.
As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.
The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.
