A LITTLE CONFLICTED

Nagisa and Tani learn that some things aren't meant to be shared.

Above is a poster for the roman porno flick Osanazuma: Zekkyô. We haven’t watched a roman porno since the summer, and there are good reasons for that. They’re not often fun. This one had no Western release, thus no English title. Its official title 幼な妻絶叫!! means in English “young wife screams.” Okey dokey. We watched it and it’s another cookie-cutter entry from Nikkatsu pictures, this time starring Rina Nagisa, who according to legend was discovered in a nightclub and, after an appearance in Semi-dokyumento: Sukeban yôjimbô, eventually installed as the latest hot thing in Japanese sexploitation cinema.

Nagisa plays an eighteen-year-old smalltowner who elopes to the big city with her boyfriend Nagatoshi Sakamoto, but falls on hard times. She and her man both take low wage jobs, and it’s at Nagatoshi’s gas station attendant gig that he’s noticed by none other than Naomi Tani. Burdened by the knowledge that Rina wants to attend night school, he shags Tani in exchange for 50,000 yen to pay for classes. The tryst leads to lingering problems, but meanwhile, on the opposite side of the roman porno plotline, Rina is noticed by a pervy old stranger who clearly believes that desire and consent are two different beasts. We won’t reveal more.

Roman porno movies, which we’ll note again aren’t hardcore but rather the equivalent of envelope pushing r-rated fare, all have the same sexually violent underpinning, and the same unblinkingly voyeuristic approach. In this era, they all read as indictments of male cinematic tastes. In our efforts to understand the genre we’ve learned mainly one thing: there’s a feminist reckoning coming to Japanese society one day, and movies like Osanazuma: Zekkyô will be right at the center of the discussion. It premiered today in 1976.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

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.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

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.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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