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.
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray’s fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King’s killing, but with Ray’s death such questions became moot.
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.
