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Above: a striking cover for Gilbert Miller’s novelization of the 1957 movie The Flesh Is Weak, which is about how a ring of sex traffickers trick naive women into street prostitution. It stars Milly Vitale, and the painting here by John Richards is a very good likeness of her, despite its cartoonish style. We also like the fur. She must have borrowed it from her pimp. To see our other material on this film just click its keywords below and scroll.
Above: an Australian promo poster for The Flesh Is Weak, the 1957 John Derek/Milly Vitale vehicle we discussed earlier this month. Shorter version: Derek tricks Vitale into hauling her flesh out to the street to work at the oldest profession. There’s no Australian release date for it, but it probably didn’t play Down Under until 1958. Read more and see the amazing French promo here.
American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.
In Mexico, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata is shot dead by government forces in the state of Morelos, after a carefully planned ambush. Following the killing, Zapata’s revolutionary movement and his Liberation Army of the South slowly fall apart, but his political influence lasts in Mexico to the present day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York City by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Though Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best known book today, it was not a success upon publication, and at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was mostly forgotten as a writer and considered himself to be a failure.
American clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., is buried five days after being shot dead on a Memphis, Tennessee motel balcony. April 7th had been declared a national day of mourning by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and King’s funeral on the 9th is attended by thousands of supporters, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison by the nation’s British rulers for being a member of the Mau Mau Society, an anti-colonial movement. Kenyatta would a decade later become independent Kenya’s first prime minister, and still later its first president.
Major League Baseball player Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run, surpassing Babe Ruth’s 39-year-old record. The record-breaking homer is hit off Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and with that swing Aaron puts an exclamation mark on a twenty-four year journey that had begun with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League, and would end with his selection to Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
