Author Archive: Retro

Explorer Edward Salisbury takes an expedition across the Pacific Ocean to such exotic locales as Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and the New Hebrides Islands, and record the lives of the various natives they encounter there.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR DOCUMENTARY

Movie Previews

One of the oddest comedies of the 1950s, Behave Yourself! stars Farley Granger and Shelley Winters as a pair of none-too-bright newlyweds. Granger and Winters adopt a stray pooch named Archie, who unbeknownst to them has been trained as a go-between for a couple of underworld gangs. To the ever-mounting amazement of our hero and heroine, corpses begin to pile up all around them as one gang endeavors to rub out the other during a million-dollar smuggling operation. While it’s quite possible to treat murder as a farcical situation-remember Arsenic and Old Lace?–the killings in this film are sometimes too graphic to induce laughter (there’s nothing terribly mirth-provoking about gang flunkey Hans Conried lying dead in a bathtub with a bullet hole between his eyes). Another detriment is the casting of Granger and Winters, both of whom are woefully unsuited to their roles. In fact, such veteran villains as Lon Chaney Jr., Sheldon Leonard, Francis [...]

The Convair B-36 was the largest bomber, in sheer physical size, that has ever gone into service with the USAF. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the B-36 was the mainstay of the USAF’s long-range strategic bombing deterrent. Serving primarily as a strategic deterrent, the B-36 never saw any combat, although some B-36 reconnaissance aircraft flew some rather hazardous missions near or perhaps even over Soviet territory during the height of the Cold War in the mid-1950s.

The origin of the B-36 can be traced back to the early days of 1941, at a time when it seemed that Britain might fall to a German invasion, depriving the USA of any European allies in case of war, and in particular, leaving the Army Air Corps without any bases outside the Western Hemisphere. Consequently, the Air Corps felt that it would need a truly intercontinental bomber with unprecedented range, one that could bomb targets in [...]