vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
The fun pinky violence actioner Nora-neko rokku: Wairudo janbo, aka Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo, premiered today in 1970, so we have for you all the promo images were able to find. You see Meiko Kaji, Tatsuya Fuji, Bunjaku Han, Sôichirô Maeno, and others. We wrote in more detail about the movie at this link.
Above is a nice image of Japanese actress Bunjaku Han, who appeared in landmark pinky violence films like Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal, Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo, and many others, as well as in more obscure fare such as Kawaii akujo, aka Lovely Wicked Woman. Here you see her in a 1969 shot made by Shigeru Izumi and first published in Heibon Punch.
Above, an alternate poster for the pinku heist movie Nora-neko rokku: Wairudo janbo, which starred Meiko Kaji and Bunjako Han, and premiered in Japan today in 1970. We watched it, we liked it, and we explained why here, where you can also have a look at the film’s tateken sized poster.
Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, become the first celebrities to leave their impressions in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, located along the stretch where the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame would later be established.
During the last days of the Third Reich, as Russia’s Red Army closes in from the east, Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker during a brief civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both Hitler and Braun commit suicide the next day, and their corpses are burned in the Reich Chancellery garden.
After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before due to religious reasons, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. He is found guilty of a felony in refusing to be drafted for service in Vietnam, but he does not serve prison time, and on June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses his conviction. His stand against the war had made him a hated figure in mainstream America, but in the black community and the rest of the world he had become an icon.
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his five man crew set out from Peru on a giant balsa wood raft called the Kon-Tiki in order to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. After a 101 day, 4,300 mile (8,000 km) journey, Kon-Tiki smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947, thus demonstrating that it is possible for a primitive craft to survive a Pacific crossing.
After two days of rumors and denials the Soviet Union admits there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four had suffered a meltdown, sending a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Today the abandoned radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl is rife with local wildlife and has been converted into a wildlife sanctuary, one of the largest in Europe.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and fifteen supporters are arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, Italy while attempting to escape the region in the wake of the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist government. The next day, Mussolini and his mistress are both executed, along with most of the members of their group. Their bodies are then trucked to Milan where they are hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of a gas station, then spat upon and stoned until they are unrecognizable.
