vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: Ann Blyth and William Powell in a production photo made while they were filming 1948’s fish-out-of-water romance Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. We wrote about it here.
The lovely photo at top of U.S. actress Ann Blyth was made when she was filming the tearjerker Our Very Own in 1950. It was a popular shot, and a frame from the same session was used in a 1952 issue of Photoplay Pin Ups, which you also see here. No, it’s not the same photo. The colors are different, of course, but thats just the printing process. If you look closely, you’ll see that the tilt of her head is different, and her hands are held differently. The two photos were shot instants apart.
Six years ago we featured a fun photo of Blyth in her mermaid costume from Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid and mentioned that she was still around. That remains true. She’s ninety-three and defying the presumption that all the stars from the golden age of Hollywood are gone. Among her many films is the crime drama Brute Force, which we’ve been meaning to get to, so you’ll see Blyth here again before very long. In the meantime, you can see that shot of her as a mermaid here.
Today we’re looking at a decidedly non-pulp movie—Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, a featherweight comedy starring William Powell and Ann Blyth. We watched it because we featured Blyth as a femme fatale last year. She was wearing a mermaid costume in the photo we shared, and an image like that will make one curious. In the movie a fifty-year-old man having a bit of a two-thirds-life crisis takes a Caribbean trip with his wife, stumbles across a youthful mermaid, and falls in love with her. Powell is good, of course, as he is in everything, and Blyth is expressive—which is to say she doesn’t speak. Why would she? She’s a fish, silly. She does hiss, though. Irene Hervey as Powell’s hot wife has a bit of a wandering eye herself, but for an actual man rather than a fantastical creature, and Andrea King plays a woman intent on making the moves on Powell. With all these potential infidelities there’s lots of dramatic potential, but this is a family comedy, which means nothing too taxing to the average moviegoer occurs and everyone ends up where they belong—Powell and Hervey recommitted to their marriage, and Blyth recommitted to the sea. Cute stuff. Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid premiered in the U.S. today in 1948.
Above: a fun promo photo of American actress Ann Blyth taken on the set of her romantic comedy Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, 1948. Blyth started in movies in 1944 and last acted in 1985, but she’s still around at age eighty-seven.
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.
In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.
Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.
