Red tide brings a flood of problems to a coastal community.
If you've been to our site often you can look at the above poster and immediately know it was made to promote an ama movie. This niche of Japanese vintage cinema, like the tides, just keeps coming. This film was called Yobai ama and was known in English as Nasty Diver. Sounded promising, so we watched it and it deals with assorted marital problems in a fishing village. Yôko Azusa plays an ama working days diving in the bay, working nights as a bar hostess, and working as a part-time domestic for a local geisha, while her husband does who-knows-what.
Trouble starts when Yôko's husband refuses to have sex during her period. He makes numerous excuses, including that it's bad for her health, but she isn't fooled for a second. She walks out on him and of course this is big news in this fishing village, which brings an opportunist out of the woodwork eager to take advantage of Yôko's separation. He's the local pimp, Yoto, glib and persuasive as movie pimps tend to be. Will Yôko end up on the game? Will she get back together with her period-squeamish hubby? You won't find out from us. This is lightweight stuff from Nikkatsu, but certainly we've done worse with sixty-nine minutes of spare time. Yobai ama premiered in Japan today in 1977.
Junko can’t come to the phone right now—she’s taking dictation.
OL nikki: Nureta satsutaba premiered in Japan today in 1974 and starred Aoi Nakajima as a woman named Junko who’s seduced by a banker involved in a scheme to embezzle 900 million yen. That’s like $350 in U.S. money. Just kidding—it’s actually a shade over a million dollars in 1974, we think. We gather that the inspiration for this film was an actual embezzlement scheme at Tokyo’s Shiga Bank. The “OL” of the title stands for “office lady,” and the entire title would translate roughly as “office lady diary: wet wad of money.” Hah hah. Wad. Um, this was the fourth entry in what was a very popular series, with seven made all together, though not all starring Nakajima. We have posters for other OL movies and we’ll get those up down the line, hopefully.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
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. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
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. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
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. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
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. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
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.
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