vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above, an alternate Japanese poster for Stanley Donen’s 1967 man-sells-soul-to-devil comedy Bedazzled, starring Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Eleanor Bron, with Raquel Welch rather appropriately cast as the character Lust. Bedazzled premiered in the U.S. today in 1967.
Smack in the middle of the swinging sixties the British comedy Bedazzled premiered with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and sex bomb Racquel Welch. The film revolves around a deal with the devil that goes continually and hilariously awry. Our favorite part is when Dudley Moore looks over the Devil’s contract and innocently asks, “Why am I referred to as ‘the damned’?” The American promotional materials weren’t particularly pulp, and neither was the film, but Welch makes everything better and the stylish Japanese poster above is just devilicious. The date was today, 1967.
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.
Polish-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies September 12, and Czolgosz is later executed.
The Neutrality Acts, which had been passed in the 1930s when the United States considered foreign conflicts undesirable, prompts the nation to declare neutrality in World War II. The policy ended with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations.
During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, a paramilitary group calling itself Black September takes members of the Israeli olympic team hostage. Eventually the group, which represents the first glimpse of terrorists for most people in the Western world, kill eleven of the hostages along with one West German police officer during a rescue attempt by West German police that devolves into a firefight. Five of the eight members of Black September are also killed.
The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, mobilizes the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students known as the Little Rock Nine from enrolling in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
