Victory Tits

Accompanying my breakthrough discovery that womens’ breasts moving up a cup size per decade from 1920-1960
comes a parent (or sister?) discovery every bit as profound: in the Hollywood movies of yore, tits used to say something.

And in the message-packed films of the 1940s, it ends up being tits that carry most of the message, for all that the stars and sets and men in the aisles selling war bonds could do.
Not only did women’s fashion become more angular and businesslike, concerned more with the logistics of movement than with outlining every curve of the frame (as the thirties were deliciously guilty of), it emphasized the breast-region as a center
of strenth, with dresses designed to sweep up at the shoulders and necklines travelling abruply downward, stopping where the
breasts seem to begin. The effect is architectural: the feeling of something pushing up under a tremendous strain–truimph
in the face of adversity.

And the added beauty of this, the WAC breast, was that it could be found not only in films like SO PROUDLY WE HAIL which emphasize women’s strength in the war effort, but in the nightclub, the boudoir, the street. Everywhere you go in a forties film, if you’re going to places where women are, there’s going to be some woman with a fierce upswept hairdo, atlas-like shoulders and triumphant tits.

Alongside this development is another personal favorite: that of bullet-tits, a style of dress in which the nipple makes
itself known in no uncertain terms. Jane Russell, who would come on the scene in the late forties, is perhaps the champion
of this, taking the aggressive-nipple prototype to new heights.

(This could be a visual pun…or it could just be me)

Gynandrous Images #3

Gosta Ekman (more about this man later) in a publicity shot for 1926’s Klovnen.

The Tragic Unlikely

Among the most fascinating backstories of Old Hollywood is the life of one Ross Alexander

A man with a film career spanning five years, twice bearded, obsessed with Bette Davis, and allied with some of the queerest stars on the WB lot (I’m thinking mainly of Dick Powell, who, though not gay, had an incredibly pansy onscreen persona, and Errol Flynn, whose case was much the opposite). That he was a suicide victim, at the ripe old age of 29, is stranger still in taking into account his career as the consummate joy boy/best buddy, a kind of precursor to the preadolescent pluck that an actor like Donald O’Connor would use as his signature. He seems a figure not quite important enough to have been tragic, and not quite around long enough to be sufficiently interesting—-and yet he is an endlessly fascinating presence, in the tantalizing way that someone like Robert Williams (star of three films before his untimely death) was. One wants to see more and more of him if only in the hopes of cracking through the exterior, that dauntless enthusiasm, a kind of manic happiness not unlike the style of Al Jolson. The brow-beating method of entertainment. There is nothing specifically to say about, or do with, him, intellectually, other than notice how every aspect of a life marked by sudden tragedy, even the seeming lightest moments of that life, take on an ethereal sort of cast. It’s the sort of thing one feels watching Olive Thomas or Wallace Reid, or, to a lesser extent, Ramon Novarro. One begins to wonder if the function of Hollywood was anything more than to showcase a bunch of dead and dying beautifuls in a sufficiently tragic light, the light that only celluloid can bring to the beauty of a face.

Gynandrous Images #2

Poster for Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934)

Chaste Entertainment–Its Roots and its Consequences

Watching Captains Courageous I don’t know which i’m more nostalgic for: the streak of boys-to-men films that overwhelmed the direct postcode period (1935-41) as i kind of  ‘-oh-shit-we-can’t-talk-about-sex-anymore-what’s-there-left-to-say’ backlash, or the heyday of the obnoxious child actor. the best thing about actors like Freddie Bartholomew andJackie Cooper is that one finds oneself necessarily empathetic towards and repulsed by them at once, creating a truly ambivalent viewing experience. the death of the code would have seemed to kill any pretensions Hollywood ever had towards telling stories which inspire ambivalence, and yet the most fascinating thing it did was produce a perfect hoard of uninteresting actors which one was suddenly asked to identify with. This is perhaps why I’m beginning to warm up the post-code period—-complications keep arising even in the simplest stories which i never expected. for instance, how to feel sympathetic towards blander-than-eggs George Brent in a film like THE RAINS CAME? How to understand the post-code character of Miriam Hopkins in films like A GENTLEMAN AFTER DARK and OLD ACQUAINTANCE? How to give three-quarters of a shit about the Hardy family? These things can be done and more. I don’t think I’m too wide of the mark in saying that the post-code film, if nothing, forces upon its viewers the gift of boundless patience.

Gynandrous Images #1

Ellen Terry as Sir Galahad

G.F. Watts 1862

Aesthete Versus Aesthetic

In trying to reconcile my two great loves, I lately find myself wondering, what precisely would Oscar Wilde have felt about the cinema?
Had he not died so criminally young, and lived a mere 25 years longer to the ripe old age of 71 he would have not only been able to see his Salome and Lady Windermere’s Fan made into fantastic films (albeit somewhat insulting—-Nazimova may have paid more attention to Beardsley than Wilde, and Lubitsch used to brag how he hadn’t used a word of actual Wilde in the script for Windermere) but a plethora of titles which seem to draw out his very obsession—-Easy Virtue, Dangerous Innocence, The Virtuous Sin. Because in the ’20s and early ’30s, it seems, the way we thought about sex was as a total, and totalizing, paradox—-something cruel and beneficial, destructive and pleasurable. Something to be had at all costs—-but to be shunned in the cool, clear, public light of day.  It was held as something like to Bunburying. In short, he would have found himself in a paradoxical paradise. Part of me thinks he would have dismissed film as trash, as genius is wont to do on finding himself face to hideous face with something described as the ‘opium of the masses’. But then I come across an image like this:

and think he would have had no choice but to love it as i do. perhaps to retain a disdainful attitude towards what was being done with film itself, but to love film as film, the principle of it, the new, the reflective, reflexive, the moving art. Here could be found the wild, weird Salome of one’s dreams, more alive than the fabled painting which was so beloved of the uranians (paging Husymans):

and with all the added ethereality and vulgarity of movement. Plus there’s the yum factor

which I hardly think he would have been opposed to.

Let Joy Be Unconfined

Mae Murray is perhaps old Hollywood’s most serious mugger.

And that’s certainly saying something.

The reason Murray is of all the silent women to me the most endearing is because she’s such a goof. There is nothing pristine about her beauty. She doesn’t feel the need to protect or preserve it. On the contrary she goes out of her way to appear outre,  never losing sight of the comic potentiality of ‘the pose’. In scenes with outrageous bathrooms where Gloria Swanson seemed to at home, Murray makes felt the sense of travesty in all of it, and after watching her for an hour one finds that her incredible personal beauty is only secondary to her comic sensibility. She is so…impish

In a way that is unpredictable. Fascinating. Kind of like the Pickford prototype infused with the spirit of Pan.

Gynandrous Icons of the 20th Century #3

Eric Blore

Need I say more?

The Strange Duality of Fredric March

Seldom has an actor of such understated beauty been given, seemingly, his pick of the juciest, most literary roles in Hollywood.

I say this because it seems to me that most of the really excellent and especially dimensional roles were saved for the bona fide uglies on the lot. Of course, no one can convince me that an actor like Edward G. Robinson or even Charles Laughton is without a kind of situational beauty. However the fact remains that they were not by any means marketed as such. So that when March comes on the screen in the roles that are supposed to stand for the internal battle of man vs. beast it’s no small shock. He seems to have a distinguished beauty without being at all an intellectual figure. He’s a step above the ‘everyman’, playing roles of a kind of complexity someone like Gary Cooper or even Ronald Colman couldn’t have handled, and yet what is exactly complex about him as an actor? His style isn’t particularly refined, he tends toward overstatement, and at times he can be downright hammy. So why exactly was he thrown Jean Valjean and why, the more pressing question, was he able to do such brilliant things with it?

It is perhaps his passion, which seems to alternately weigh on him and release him from worldly care. He has a sort of ambivalence, as in he’s never really secure in any walk of life. When he’s happy, there’s always a question behind it, and when he’s devastated one senses he gets some kind of power from it, that sorrow for him is a force. He is perhaps the perfect actor to play a role like Orpheus, the eternal mourner who turns to music and buggering to try and get away from his sorrow, only to find out that sorrow makes up so much of who he is in the first place. After all, it is the sorrow, I imagine, that made the music of Orpheus so irresistable.