vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Two years ago we shared a brilliant Japanese poster for Schulmädchen-Report 5. Teil – Was Eltern wirklich wissen sollten, aka Schoolgirl Report Part 5: What All Parents Should Know. Above you see an alternate poster, front and back. It’s a strange movie, part of a series of thirteen, which you can read about here.
The Japanese poster you see here, which is quite striking, was made to promote the West German sexploitation movie Schulmädchen-Report 5. Teil – Was Eltern wirklich wissen sollten. Quite a mouthful. In English it was known as Schoolgirl Report Part 5: What All Parents Should Know. Still a mouthful. There’s a reason for that. These films, of which thirteen were made, are legendary—or maybe infamous is the appropriate word—for pioneering the idea of sexploitation flicks as documentaries. We’ve talked about a few of them, specifically numbers three, seven, and eleven. The tail end of the title for this one—What All Parents Should Know—gives the film a gloss of scholarship, as if scientific research went into its making. But it was a fig leaf. People watched these movies to see nudity and sex, not to educate themselves. And if anyone actually hoped for education, well, they were steered horribly wrong.
The movie consists of six vignettes. In the first, three high schoolers bet during a rural field trip that they can lay their straight arrow teacher. In the second, a man is seduced by his granddaughter and ends up on trial. And so it goes, from scenario to scenario, all of them strange. None of the performers involved, female or male, would win a beauty contest, but a few are appealing, such as Sonja Jeannine, who features on the poster, and Ingrid Steeger, who was a stalwart in sexploitation films and men’s magazines. While a couple of the vignettes have serious undertones, they’re mostly meant to be tongue-in-cheek. What is incredibly serious, though, is how far the envelope gets pushed thematically. Grandfather/granddaughter incest? That’s not good at all. We can’t recommend the film, but we love the poster. You won’t see it anywhere else. Schulmädchen-Report 5 premiered in Sweden in 1973 and opened in Japan today in 1974.
“I’m out of order? I’m out of order? Your Honor, are you kidding me? She’s out of order!”
Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.
Harper Lee’s racially charged novel To Kill a Mockingbird is published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. The book is hailed as a classic, becomes an international bestseller, and spawns a movie starring Gregory Peck, but is the only novel Lee would ever publish.
As part of the nuclear tests codenamed Operation Dominic, the United States detonates a one megaton bomb on Australian controlled Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. The island was a location for a series of American and British nuclear tests, and years later lawsuits claiming radiation damage to military personnel were filed, but none were settled in favor in the soldiers.
The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
