vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
We’re interested in all things Mari Tanaka, so we had to share this promo image featuring her striking a nice over the shoulder pose. This was made for her movie Rabu Hantâ: Atsui hada, aka Love Hunter: Hot Skin, which premiered in Japan today in 1972. You can see a couple of other interesting promos at our write-up on the film here.
Here you see a promo poster for the roman porno flick Rabu Hantâ: Atsui hada, aka Love Hunter: Hot Skin, starring Pulp Intl. fave Mari Tanaka. In this one she plays a rich man’s wife who indulges in an extramarital liaison, hooking up with her lover in a parked car, which thanks to some vigorous rocking generated by its occupants, goes down a hill. The lover is killed, and Tanaka suffers non-lethal injuries, though is trapped in the wreck. Thus immobilized she is victimized when a man shoots photos of the whole naked fiasco. Later he uses these photos for nefarious purposes—either Tanaka extracts blackmail cash from her husband or the photographer will show him the photos. It’s really amazing the scrapes these roman porno actresses get into.
In addition to the poster above we also have a nice promo image of Tanaka below, probably her most provocative, at least that we’ve seen. The last image we shared of her was one we scanned that hadn’t been seen online before. For that matter so was the first one we ever shared of her. But the below shot can be found on many sites, and for that reason we can’t credit the original uploader because it’s not possible to know who it was. But he or she did the cyberworld a service when they uploaded this one. Rabu Hantâ: Atsui hada is well worth seeing, but good luck finding it anywhere in the English speaking world. It premiered in Japan today in 1972.
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.
