 You think crawling is going to help? Have some pride. Get up and take it like a man. 
Above, a fun shot of U.S. actress Tippi Hedren, née Nathalie Hedren, made when she was filming the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Marnie. Despite having one of the odder pseudonyms of the era there's no elaborate story involved. Her father nicknamed her Tippi when she was four. Hedren also appeared in such films as The Birds, The Harrad Experiment, and the unbelievable Roar. Have you heard of Roar. No? Well, it's certainly one of the most bizarre movie projects in history.
Rather than get into the plot (such as it is), we'll just tell you that during its making Hedren broke her leg after being bucked off an elephant's back, and received thirty-eight stitches after a lioness gnawed the back of her head. In addition, her daughter Melanie Griffith, cinematographer Jan de Bont, and producer Noel Marshall were also mauled by lions. Griffith needed fifty stitches in her face and plastic surgery, de Bont needed one hundred twenty stitches and his scalp sewn back in place, and lucky Noel Marshall merely developed gangrene.
If you haven't seen Roar and are an aficionado of weird cinema, we can't recommend watching that one highly enough. Ironically, while we've seen that all-time obscurity, we haven't seen the well-known Marnie. But there's a reason—one of the worst people we ever knew, someone who stole several of our most prized belongings, was named Marni, so avoiding that reminder has kept us from getting around to the film. But it isn't like that's Tippi's fault, so her movie is finally in the queue. When we watch it we'll report back.
 Whew! That's better. I was sweating like a Texas fry cook in this outfit. 
Above is a fun photo of Japanese actress Yûko Iruka suddenly realizing the shortcomings of wearing leather during summer. We last saw her headlining the 1977 girl gang movie Jigoku no tenshi: Akai bakuon, aka Hells Angels: Crimson Roar, and we were thinking we'd check her out in another flick, but it looks like she made only the one. Considering the crazy things actresses were asked to do in Japanese genre films, she may have gotten off easy. We have no date on this image, but we figure it's from around the same time as her movie.
 Life and death at the edge of a razor. 
This promo is for Jigoku no tenshi: Akai bakuon, aka Hells Angels: Crimson Roar, one of scores of girl gang movies that deluged Japanese cinema during the 1970s. This one is from Toei Company and concerns a gang member named Yoko, played by Yûko Iruka, who spends three years in prison for assault with a switchblade, and afterward emerges onto the mean, nightclub-lined streets of her coastal hometown. You know Japanese bars are sleazy when their names are English—Bar Lucky, The Apollo, The Happening, Club Ace, New York 3, et al. We especially liked the placard that read: Girls can get so excited and lustful sometimes, as shown in this picture. Why don’t you come in now? The girls working for me are so sexy. You can try to satisfy them. Yes, even sex club signage is polite in Japan.
These places are all geared toward American servicemen, of course, and the distaste for Western decadence, though subtle, is clear. But it isn’t Americans who are a problem for Yoko—it’s a group of pesky Yakuza who make their home at the Lonely Angel bar. After Yoko is drugged into paralysis and raped by two of the slimier specimens she hones that trusty switchblade of hers and goes on a revenge spree that, well, doesn’t end nicely for her enemies. She gets timely help from her boyfriend, and when he ends up on the point of a katana, that makes her even angrier. Turns out she’s deadly with a sniper rifle too. Standard stuff, but with an unusual and effective star in Iruka, and Reiko Ike’s 1973 hit song “Futen Gurashi Part 2” recurring throughout the soundtrack—a bonus. Jigoku no tenshi: Akai bakuon premiered in Japan today in 1977.
            
 Sweet Homicide? The song is called “Sweet Caroline.” What is this new singer of yours, Vinny, some kind of friggin’ smart aleck?  
Bad times never felt so good, so good, so good, especially for an ambitious newspaper reporter investigating a murder in Prohibition-era Chicago. The novel Sing Out Sweet Homicide is a tie-in to the 1960-1962 television series The Roaring 20’s, and you get all the elements here—mobsters, molls, and money by the fistful. The cover art is by Mort Engle.
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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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