vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above is a beautiful alternate poster in the elongated style known as a three-sheet for the thriller Green for Danger, which we talked about last year. We love this piece. The movie deals with medical mishaps—or is it murder?—in a London hospital during World War II, and stars Alistair Sim, Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, and Rosamund John. It premiered in England today in 1946. You can read more here.
London born Sally Gray has an interesting aka—she was Constance Vera Browne, Baroness Oranmore and Browne. From 1930 to 1952, billed as Gray, she appeared in more than twenty films, including Danger in Paris, Green for Danger, I Became a Criminal, and the 1949 film noir Obsession. We don’t have a date on this photo but the noir style of it, Gray’s youthful appearance, and the fact that she made no films between 1942 and 1945 leads us to triangulate it to around 1946. Don’t quote us on it.
Edit: Some sources have since claimed the photo was made for Gray’s 1949 film The Hidden Room, but we’ve found one with a press sticker on the flipside and it says this:
Just right for informal evening wear is this emerald green jumper in fine silk with wool crepe with its well-cut simple black skirt and bright gold buttons; seen on Sally Gray appearing in the new Two Cities Film of Compton Mackenzie’s “Carnival”, starring Sally Gray and Michael Wilding, with Stanley Holloway and Bernard Miles; directed by Stanley Haynes at Denham Studios.
Carnival was a period movie in which Gray wore no modern wardrobe, so this is not a shot of her in character from the film. It may be one of those promos unassociated with any film. Actors shot sessions all the time just to keep their visual material current. However, in either case, Carnival was made in 1946, so our guess about the year was spot-on.
The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.
American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.
Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.
American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.
American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.
A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.
