vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: an alternate poster for a movie we talked about last year—Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. It premiered today in 1972. This is its standard promo, and it differs from the rare tatekan we already showed you only slightly, but could we pass up another chance to share art of this type? Certainly not.
This rare tatekan size poster was made for the roman porno movie Hirusagari no joji: Uramado, which premiered today in 1972 and is known in English as Afternoon Affair: Rear Window. Plotwise, Kazuko Shirakawa plays a beautiful bar worker who’s carrying on an affair with elderly Taiji Tonoyama. He lives in a mid-city highrise and uses binoculars to spy on his many neighbors, which he needs to do to become sexually aroused. Kazuko is more or less fine with this little kink, mainly because she wants to use him to improve her circumstances. She convinces Taiji to move to a higher, larger apartment and buy a telescope so he can get his rocks off even more efficiently.
So basically what you have here is a roman porno take on Rear Window with all restraint removed. It makes sense, right? Admit it—when you watched Jimmy Stewart getting an eyeful of Georgine Darcy you made the same jokes we did about how in real life he’d be getting handsy with himself. Nikkatsu Studios brought those thoughts into the open. We respect it. We do the same with Pulp Intl., which is why it has a sharper focus on sex compared to other vintage book and movie sites. As we’ve said before, many of those novels and noirs are catalyzed by sex, but it couldn’t be described or shown. Nikkatsu took the next logical step. As we do.
Inevitably, peeper and peeped upon meet. Kazuko bumps into Junko Miyashita, then Junko calls on Kazuko later and shares a confidence with her. When Kazuko’s other, younger lover needs a million yen, a desperate Kazuko resorts to blackmail. Think that’s going to work out okay? Then you don’t know roman porno. This one, with its focus on crime rather than sexual domination, is superior for the genre. Since only about 20% of roman pornos are good, we should probably quit while we’re ahead. But we won’t because we love sharing the posters. And speaking of, if you watch Hirusagari no joji: Uramado see if you can spot the Christina Lindberg posters in one scene.
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.
In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.
Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.
