vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: an alternate poster in tateken format for a movie we highlighted last year—Sanbiki no mesubachi, aka Three Pretty Devils. It starred Reiko Ohara, Junko Natsu, and Yoko Ichiji, and preimiered in Japan today in 1970. See what we wrote about it here.
This photo of Japanese actress Reiko Ohara in an amazing ruffled two-piece something-or-other stands in stark contrast to the last time we saw her, when she was brandishing a pistol almost as big as her forearm. Given a choice, we prefer her summer look, but on the other hand what’s more pulp than a woman with a gun? You can judge for yourself here.
There are several Reikos in the realm of pinku but we’ve talked about only two—Pulp Intl. favorite Reiko Ike, who we featured a few days ago, and action star Reiko Oshida. Time for some new blood. Above you see a beautiful image of Reiko Ohara, who was also a big star in Japanese filmdom, appearing in dozens of action and comedy flicks beginning in 1965, including Furyo bancho te haccho kuchi haccho, aka Wolves of the City: Blue Soldiers, and Yagyû ichizoku no inbô aka Shogun’s Samurai. She has an unusually large gun here, or perhaps is an unusually small person. We don’t know which. But we know the photo originally appeared in a large art book called 大原麗子メモリーずっと好きでいて, which translates as something like, “Reiko Ohara Memory I’ve Always Liked.” The book was published in 2010, but Ohara was born in 1946, so we’d say the image was originally shot way back around 1970. She died in 2009, so it’s possible the book was published as a tribute, but we aren’t sure about that. We have other images of her and she’s posing with a massive gun in many of those too. Like below, for example. We figure she thought she needed it around at all times for protection from the other Reikos.
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.
