vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above is another poster for Zoku Imokinchaku, aka Sea Anemone Girl Continued, starring Mari Atsumi. We shared the tateken sized promo earlier this year, and this is the hansai promo, which we tend to call merely standard sized. The movie premiered in Japan today in 1970, and you can see the other poster here.
Zoku Imokinchaku*, for which you see the poster above and which premiered in Japan today in 1970, was the sequel to the previous year’s Imokinchaku, but shot in color. Atsumi plays a high school girl named Hamako who tries to save enough money to buy her family’s ancestral land. Her plan to obtain it through work seems sound enough, but trouble in finances and love, including the theft of her money and a doomed infatuation with a dreamboat who happens to be gay, present serious obstacles. Of course, if the previous film taught Mari anything it was to persevere, and she makes forays into nude modeling and singing in efforts to cobble together a sufficiently large nest egg to buy the land. Do any of these schemes actually work? You’ll have to add this one to your queue if you want to find out.
On a related note, we learned that Daiei Co. released an Atsumi record in conjunction with this film, and that it also engineered the publication of a photo book. Cross promotion of pinku films was a common tactic back then. In fact, many stars performed live in cinemas between double features, either singing, dancing, or reenacting bits from the films. Japanese law was strict about nudity onscreen, but we’ve been told these live performances sometimes featured full nudity, which is interesting to contemplate. Atsumi made a lot of public appearances. Below, for example, she’s in Shimizu Park in Chiba, where a gaggle of photographers shot pictures of her in her undies. We have images from another Atsumi public appearance we’ll share later.
*We can’t find a romanized title for this film anywhere, but Zoku Imokinchaku is probably right. It’s at least close. If anyone wants to correct us feel free. The official title is 続・いそぎんちゃく.
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale.
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves.
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule’s main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule’s descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission.
Austro-Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray’s fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King’s killing, but with Ray’s death such questions became moot.
The newspaper Pravda, or “Truth”, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country’s leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid.
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler’s diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess’s flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
