Above is a publicity still of Darren McGavin, star of the short-lived American television show The Night Stalker. The series ran in 1974, and featured the character of Carl Kolchak as a world weary newspaperman investigating macabre and supernatural doings in Chicago. Over the course of twenty episodes Kolchak tangled with a vampire, a mummy, a werewolf, and even a killer android. It comes across a bit clunky now, but at the time the series was acclaimed for its deft writing and humor. Despite the good reviews, the American public didn’t get it, and the show suffered from poor ratings that only got worse with each week. McGavin, feeling constrained by the character and format of the series, eventually asked to be released from his contract and the network granted his wish. But some creations are simply ahead of their time and The Night Stalker, which should have been forgotten forever, continued to attract fans and today has a fierce cult. Even X-Files creator Chris Carter admits the show was a direct influence. He asked McGavin to reprise Kolchak on The X-Files as a running character—a turn that would have been momentous for fans of the macabre—but McGavin declined and the dream team of Kolchak and Mulder never materialized. Darren McGavin, forever to be remembered as Carl Kolchak, died today in 2006. 

I filibustieri della Martinica, aka Marie of the Isles isn’t really a pulp style movie. It’s a swashbuckler set in 1635, with pirates and swords and elaborate hats. However it has this killer poster, made for its January 1960 release, and it stars British actress Belinda Lee, she of the famously sculpted cheekbones and hawk eyebrows. Lee took European cinema by storm in the late 1950s, but like James Dean and Soledad Miranda, her career and life ended abruptly in an automobile accident. It happened in March 1961 during a trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, when a car in which she was a passenger blew a tire and flipped on a winding road near San Bernadino. Lee was thrown from the vehicle and was alive when the highway patrol arrived, but with a fractured skull and broken neck, she didn’t last long. She died in the arms of a California police officer who said she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was twenty-seven. 

It was today in 1947 that Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, was found dead in Leimert Park in Los Angeles, sparking a massive investigation that ultimately came up empty. Short’s may be the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. It’s certainly one of the most grotesque. She had been beaten, mutilated in numerous vicious ways, cut in two, drained of blood, and arranged in an explicit, spread-legged pose. The killer is always thought of as a man. Safe assumption. The crime just screams hatred and fear of women. The poet Robert Burns wrote famously of man’s inhumanity to man, but he could have added that there seems to be a special type of inhumanity reserved for women. Dahlia material fills the web, so we don’t really need to add much more. But we’d have been remiss in not noting this day—after all, pulp would not be the same without poor Elizabeth Short. But her death serves another purpose besides literary inspiration, in our view—it reminds us that murder is the obscenity that trumps all others. 

Our newest femme fatale is American actress Tamara Dobson, a 6'2" former fashion model who made an unforgettable splash in early ’70s blaxploitation as Cleopatra Jones. She’d played a couple of bit parts before then, and played a few more roles after, but it’s the ass-kicking, karate-chopping Jones that film fans will always remember. Dobson died this month in 2006 of pneumonia related to multiple sclerosis.     

Photo of actor James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder after his fatal head-on collision with another car on U.S. Route 466, fifty-four years ago today.     

At left is a photo of Lila Leeds, circa 1949. Leeds started in Hollywood as a hatcheck girl, quickly married conductor Jack Little, and eventually scored roles in films such as Moonrise, and So, You Want To Be a Detective. But her film roles paled in comparison to the lasting notoriety she achieved for being arrested with Robert Mitchum in 1948 for possession of marijuana. She spent sixty days in jail, and was released to discover that her career was over. She did manage one more film role, the ironically titled She Shoulda Said No!, but soon was forced to leave Hollywood behind. According to another notorious Hollywood arrestee, Cheryl Crane, Leeds had picked up a heroin habit while in prison, which hindered her attempts to get her career back on track at least as much as her ruined reputation. Leeds eventually died in obscurity. That was ten years ago today. 

Patrick Swayze (right) in a scene from 1989’s Roadhouse, one of the most uproariously entertaining bad movies ever released, a preposterously macho slugfest that imparted more wisdom than the Ten Commandments and Bhagavad Gita combined, and inadvertently gave us one of the best drinking games ever invented.     

Walter Cronkite testing out a Reduced Gravity Walking Simulator at the Lunar Landing Research Facility in Langley, Virginia, circa 1968. The photo is from a NASA history site here.

Former boxing champ Arturo Gatti was found dead yesterday in a hotel room in the Brazilian seaside town Porto de Galinhas. Gatti, who was Italian born but a Canadian citizen, was married to a Brazilian woman and spent a lot of time in the country. As yet it is unclear how the 37-year-old died, because his body had no obvious stab or gunshot wounds, but police did say there was blood on his head and neck, and bloodstains on the floor. Brazilian police investigator Edilson Alves added, “It is still too early to say anything concrete, although it is all very strange.”

Gatti was one of the most popular boxers of his day because of his fearless, brawling style and charisma. He became a ring legend after his trilogy of fights with Mickey Ward. Gatti lost the first battle, but took the next two, though he broke his hand in the third round of the second fight, and the sixth round of the third fight. During his career he won the IBF super-featherweight championship and the WBC light-welterweight championship. He retired for good in 2007 with a career record of 40-9 with 31 knockouts.

Update: Sunday night Brazilian police announced that Gatti's wife, 23-year-old Amanda Rodrigues, may have strangled Gatti using the strap of her purse. Police speculate that she struck Gatti on the head first to immobilize him, or perhaps got him very drunk so she would be able to overpower him. Witnesses had seen Gatti and Rodrigues have an altercation Saturday evening, but Rodrigues had told police a third party likely killed her husband. But the timeline tripped her up. The only way her story could be true is if she spent ten hours in the hotel suite with her husband without noticing he was dead. Rodrigues was formally charged with murder.