vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: an alternate poster for a movie we talked about last year—Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. It premiered today in 1972. This is its standard promo, and it differs from the rare tatekan we already showed you only slightly, but could we pass up another chance to share art of this type? Certainly not.
This rare tatekan size poster was made for the roman porno movie Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, which premiered today in 1972 and is known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. Plotwise, Kazuko Shirakawa plays a beautiful bar worker who’s carrying on an affair with elderly Taiji Tonoyama. He lives in a mid-city highrise and uses binoculars to spy on his many neighbors, which he needs to do to become sexually aroused. Kazuko is more or less fine with this little kink, mainly because she wants to use him to improve her circumstances. She convinces Taiji to move to a higher, larger apartment and buy a telescope so he can get his rocks off even more efficiently.
So basically what you have here is a roman porno take on Rear Window with all restraint removed. It makes sense, right? Admit it—when you watched Jimmy Stewart getting an eyeful of Georgine Darcy you made the same jokes we did about how in real life he’d be getting handsy with himself. Nikkatsu Studios brought those thoughts into the open. We respect it. We do the same with Pulp Intl., which is why it has a sharper focus on sex compared to other vintage book and movie sites. As we’ve said before, many of those novels and noirs are catalyzed by sex, but it couldn’t be described or shown. Nikkatsu took the next logical step. As we do.
Inevitably, peeper and peeped upon meet. Kazuko bumps into Junko Miyashita, then Junko calls on Kazuko later and shares a confidence with her. When Kazuko’s other, younger lover needs a million yen, a desperate Kazuko resorts to blackmail. Think that’s going to work out okay? Then you don’t know roman porno. This one, with its focus on crime rather than sexual domination, is superior for the genre. Since only about 20% of roman pornos are good, we should probably quit while we’re ahead. But we won’t because we love sharing the posters. And speaking of, if you watch Hirusagari no joji: Uramado see if you can spot the Christina Lindberg posters in one scene.
We’ve been holding onto this poster for a few years. We were told when we got it that it’s for a movie called in English A Clockwork Lemon—an intriguing title. But we looked everywhere and the name didn’t appear in a single film database. The poster text doesn’t say anything about clocks or lemons, by the way, but it’s often true that Japanese titles are changed completely for films’ Western runs. When we finally located info on this one—looking for the Japanese rather than English name—it turned out it was made in 1968, which eliminates “A Clockwork Lemon” as the English title, since Kubrick’s dystopian citrus epic didn’t appear until ’71. Unless, of course, he stole his title from this film. We doubt that, so, let’s assume we were led astray on the English title, but whatever, that happens sometimes. Wanna know what the movie is called in Japanese? The text reads something like “same hole again.” So, there you go. Not much we can add to that.
Um, except to mention as we always do, that these aren’t porn films, despite the titles. They’re about on the level of late night cable softcore. Softer, actually, because no naughty bits could legally appear onscreen in vintage Japanese cinema. “Same Hole Again” was directed by… actually, wait—that sounds so wrong. Maybe we’ll just go with Japanese here. 穴じかけ was directed by Hajime Sasaki, stars Kazuko Shirakawa, and appeared in 1968. Shirakawa is an important cinematic figure—she headlined the first roman porno (again, not porn) production Nikkatsu Studios ever made—Danchizuma: hirusagari no jôji, aka Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon. She made a series of films in the genre, later moved into mainstream flicks, and was still acting as of 2011. Sorry we don’t have more info. But you gotta love the poster, right? To make up for our lack of data, below is a shot of Shirakawa looking lemony fresh.
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.
