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BLONDE GOLD

by Christopher Moor

    Mary Pickford was the first blonde moviegoers fell in love with -- little Mary of the golden curls, pure and chaste on film. But away from the cameras she was a shrewd businesswoman and one of the founders of United Artists, in 1919. She was America's sweetheart of the silent screen, a star who actually survived the difficult transition from silent to talking pictures, winning an Oscar for "Coquette" in 1929.

    When Little Mary cut off her famous curls, she outraged moviegoers the world over. The backlash was swift. Instant relegation. She was no longer their favorite blond. Their affections had been transferred to another blonde movie star, someone with an entirely different screen image.

    The first platinum blonde bombshell: Jean Harlow.

    Her movie heroines were often tough and worldly and expertly played by a natural comedienne. Jean Harlow was also capable of stealing movies from both Spencer Tracy and Marie Dressler, acknowledged as repeated scene stealers themselves.

    Jean Harlow's life has become almost a stereotype now for a blonde movie goddess. An early death preceded by a turbulent lifestyle. She died at the age of twenty-six from uremic poisoning.

    Most of the major film studios had a carbon copy Jean Harlow under contract. There was Thelma Todd over at Hal Roach, and a then Paramount starlet named Alice Faye. Faye later changed her screen persona, to become box office magic in her own right.

    However, Thelma Todd was to be found slumped over the steering wheel of her car, in circumstances reported as "Suspicious." Rumors of her committing suicide flourished.

    Marlene Dietrich had by now established herself as a favorite with picture goers, and Mae West was in the process of doing so. Dietrich and West were the epitome of glamour and star quality, two blonde superstars who became legends in their own lifetimes -legends far greater than those blonde movie goddesses who would later outrank them at the box office.

    The depression had now hit the world. People looked to the movies for some escape from the harsh reality of everyday life. Escapism was what they wanted.

    And they found that ray of hope in another blonde. A phenomenon. It was a cute little girl called Shirley Temple, dimpled and curly haired. Whether she danced with Bill "Bo Jangles" Robinson, or sang of the "Good Ship Lollipop," her movies had patrons queuing up outside cinemas for most of the 1930s.

    When she began to grow up, her place was taken by another star from the 20th Century Fox studio -- a newly refined, soulful Alice Faye, a lady doomed to suffer on screen, because she invariably loved the wrong man.

    Perky little skating star Sonja Henie provided a wholesome contrast and competition for Alice Faye at the box office. However, she did not fell the fair Alice.

    Neither did comediennes Carole Lombard and Jean Arthur. Ditto Ginger Rogers. She dyed her hair brown, went dramatic, and found new fame away from Fred Astaire.

    Nature stepped in to dislodge Alice Faye from her throne. She was stricken with appendicitis just days before starting "Down Argentine Way," in 1940. Worried executives at 20th Century Fox asked the same question, over and over: Who can replace our top star at such short notice?

    She returned from Broadway, this previous two-time Hollywood failure. She conga-ed and she conquered. Betty Grable's first appearance in Technicolor made her a star.

    Betty Grable personified the girl next door set to music. Her musical films made her a favorite with men, women and children for well over a decade. The GI's favorite pin-up girl of WWII, as well . . . And who can forget that immortal bathing suit pose? The one in which she wore a white swimsuit and stood, smiling prettily, with her back to the camera.

    Grable's rivals were Lana Turner and Veronica Lake. Turner was dubbed "The Sweater Girl" and Lake "The Peek-A-Boo Blonde" after her distinctive hairstyle. When she eventually cut those locks, her drawing power at the box office was snipped along with her tresses. On the other hand, Lana Turner survived not only the changes in fashion and public taste, but a traumatic personal life too.

   Divorce, scandal and murder did not dim Lana Turner's star. Today, the still glamorous lady remains active in television and movies and must indeed be a strong contender for the title of "Most Durable Blonde."

    Virgina Mayo, June Haver and Lizabeth Scott were a trio of blondes who also enjoyed top, or near top, stardom in the 1940s.

    But it was Marilyn Monroe whom Betty Grable promoted as her successor, when she eventually opted for full-time motherhood. Grable varnished Monroe's toenails, and according to writer Douglas Warren, openly encouraged her to walk with that provocative wiggle.

   Marilyn Monroe, too, had posed for a famous pinup: the most celebrated nude ever. Its discovery created a real furor, back in the more innocent days of 1953. There was even talk of shutting down filming of "Gentleman Prefer Blondes."

    It was, however, a nine-day wonder. The picture was completed, the publicity died down, and Marilyn Monroe went on to act with Sir Laurence Olivier.

   Not before she had grown tired of being a dumb blonde sex symbol. She wanted to expand her talents and be known for her acting rather than her body, an ambition she was not to fully realize.

    Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962--death from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Some say it was murder, others insist on suicide, and the speculation will probably continue for another twenty-six years with the real answer not being known.

   Kim Novak had a turn of public favor. The British produced their first blonde sex symbol, Diana Dors. And Sheree North, Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren were all named as Monroe's successor.

   But Marilyn Monroe's reign was not an unbroken one. Grace Kelly whisked away her crown in 1955.
Two years earlier she had been a featured player in a Clark Gable movie. Now, she was the most talked about person in pictures. An Oscar winner -- Best Actress for her performance in "The Country Girl" -- and the top female star at the box office. Marilyn Monroe did not even make picture goers' top ten favorites for the year!

    Grace Kelly personified the cool blonde, beautiful, but always slightly aloof. Alfred Hitchcock created the image for her, that regal appearance which would stand her in good steed for her most famous role, yet to come.

    She left her screen career far behind her when, in 1956, she married Prince Rainier of Monoco. Then, it seemed like a fairy tale ending to what film historians called the best planned career in the history of the movies.

    But life demanded another ending for the last reel in the life of Princess Grace. She died in a motoring accident on the high roads of her beloved Monaco, in 1982. The world mourned her death. And its manner created much speculation at the time. There was even talk of the brakes in the royal car being tampered with.

   Brigitte Bardot's tousled hair and sexy strips had made her an international sensation. Hollywood, however, resurrected another blonde to take over from Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly.

   Doris Day had always been popular with moviegoers and the record buying public. She started films in 1948. First, she was groomed as Betty Grable's musical rival, then as a dramatic actress in Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan movies. She even worked for Hitchcock. But it was her departure into lighthearted, innocent sex comedies, which brought her to the fore.

    And it was just a little incongruous. Because Doris Day had a teenage son, had been married three times and was approaching her fortieth birthday. Nevertheless, Hollywood cast her as the heroine fighting off the big bad wolf in order to retain her virginity.

   Doris Day, the lady of the freckles was an effervescent screen personality, someone whose movies always guaranteed that patrons went home feeling happy. Happiness was a commodity missing from many Hollywood films made during the years of the Vietnam War.

    Julie Christie's beauty enchanted audiences briefly in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago." But Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she was then, failed as a movie star and returned to television. The success of her red bathing suit poster was not enough to guarantee her movie stardom.

   Bo Derek was the next blonde movie goddess preferred -- the girl with the perfect score, the sensation of the movie, "10," with her beaded hairstyle and great curves. Even Bo has fallen victim now to the always fickle movie going public.

    Despite Bo's success as a pinup poster girl her latest movies have not been the moneymakers expected, and the title of Blonde Movie Goddess Supreme is now vacant.

   It could be Daryl Hannah who makes the big splash. Though current opinion is that the girl most likely to inherit, will be Madonna.

FILM NOIR: SLOW FADE TO BLACK

by L. E. Ward

    Certain genres of film seem to yield more and more, as the decades go by, of their richness, denseness and complexity. One of these is, certainly, the belatedly titled (by French critics of the 1950s) black film, or film-noir. The reputations of literateurs in our history (including Poe and Washington Irving), have often begun in Europe, not to mention that entire post-WWI generation of expatriates -- who had been predated by Henry James and Gertrude Stein, among others, in the late nineteen, and early twentieth centuries.

    At times, American excellence is too close-up; too visible to be "seen"; or viewed with a vision of the happenstance; the taken-for-granted. The Scriptures said it originally: "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country."

    I first saw films-noir as a matinee-going child of the 1950s. At that time, I was not aware of them by a name, or even, necessarily, as a genre, except as depictions of crime and corruption, usually in a tense, urban setting. Films which stood out for me -- with no recommendation or reference other than my own personal, boyhood viewing -- in that era, were "Finger Man" (1955; Harold Schuster) and "The Prowler" (1951; Joseph Losey) -- these, in particular, and for their particulars. Titles which emerged were "The Phenoix City Story," various city "Confidentials" and "Exposes"; even imported, low-budget British films, like "The Square Ring" (1953; U.S. release, 1955). Frank Lovejoy and Richard Conte were typical protagonists. Espionage or theft under a low sky emerged in "Shack Out on 101" (1955) and "Highway Dragnet" (1954) -- films remembered, by me, today, only in terms of an impression of "atmosphere."

    As I recall, after a third of a century, "The Prowler" had to do with a policeman (Van Heflin) enticed by a housewife who claimed she was disturbed by a "prowler," and who lured him into a scheme to kill her husband. The climactic car chase on a dusty road is the only image retained by me. "Finger Man" yielded more: the terseness, tenseness, of Frank Lovejoy as a criminal, gone undercover after a booze-ring, with the heroine (Peggy Castle), walking alone on a dim-lit, city street, to her death at the hands of a scarred villain. When Lovejoy later apprehends the fiend, he says: "I know why you killed her, but did you have to do that to her face?" decades before I ever heard of existentialism, this remains my vivid, non verbalized introduction to the "night-world."

    The 1940s films-noir were seen by me, almost in toto, when they came to television, in the late 1950s, and early 1960s, when various studios sold their "backlogs" to television. One had "heard of" some of the more famous; but one got to see, and learn to appreciate, to immerse oneself, in the ambiance, the "period" atmosphere, again, independently.

    Most of the films not only were in black-and-white but they used "shadows" for emphasis; for, indeed, a kind of "poetry." If anything is disturbing about these "colorizing" fiends, it is all that they have missed, and has been missing, in recent decades. Present color has accompanied an abandonment of the old shrewdness in mannerism, art direction, set decor.

    The German expressionist backgrounds, as well as flight from the Nazis, of many of the writers, directors -- and even some actors of "black" film, are undeniable; or, at the very least, suggestive. Some critics have squabbled that how could something -- a genre really exist, if its makers have not so labeled it and declared themselves and their intentions?

    The strongest, clearest, adequate "evidence" is the films, themselves and their abundance, in both quality and quantity. What B-film or television episode about crime or detectives, or not, can compare to the work of the 1940s (and somewhat of the 1950s)? "Miami Vice" has had effects, visceralness, "colors"; so has "Crime Story." To me, neither is matchable.

    This is definitely to be said for the 1940s movie-makers: they created a corrupt, aristocratic, materialistic world -- making it compelling, and not glossy. It was a world imbued with a knowledge of lofty ideals, but a realization of the way men really "live," and the beast that dwells underneath the skin. Some revisionists have carped that Hollywood did not know, or "allow," the atrocities of the fascists, either to be seen explicitly or precisely, in the wartime era, or even its aftermath. While one can counter this, somewhat, with examples like "Saboteur" (1942), "The Stranger" (1946), and a few others, this is not, terribly, the point.

    The vision of blackness is timeless, is eternal, is instinctive, as well as subjective. Of course, it involves a visual, as well as aesthetic ambiance; we are-entertained, entranced, by inequity and iniquity. Still, one was never puzzled, or less than certain, of what inhumanity or corruption was. The "city" -- impersonal, dangerous, uncertain, and unreliable -- contrasted with rural and small-town bourgeois values. The seduction of the cosmopolitan -that glitter that both were gold, and not "golden" -- was a conundrum. I recall the moral center of Veronica Lake's impassivity, which was, really, not "passive," either in the main, or in its results. Most of the detectives were loners, independents; they were a part of, yet apart from, the often-corrupt, and always tractable, "police." They knew the score; worked for hire, for a living, were rarely conned, although they could be; and were resolute to the photo-finish.

    Before the 1940s, the "detectives" were urban gentlemen (whether Philo Vance, Nick Charles, or Sherlock Holmes -- or Charlie Chan), who approached crime as a hobby, as well as an intellectual incentive. By the advent of John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), nothing would be so elitist or flippant, again. For all the tartness of 1940s detectives' tongues, and their maintenance of an attitude of "cool," of tight-lipped composure, they were like aerialists on a tightrope of experience, with only the abyss, or the knowledge of the abyss, beneath.

    The genre progressed, and changed, slowly but surely. Alfred Hitchcock was one of its greatest originators, as well as stylists, but so was Fritz Lang, Orson Welles and Robert Siodmak. Some producers focused upon unusual intelligence and even artistry in handling of mediocre material, significantly, Val Lewton. Billy Wilder, Henry Hathaway, Otto Preminger and many others brought additional nuances.

   By the 1940s, private detective films became a surfeit; although their guises were, truly, various and subtle. Consider Edward G. Robinson as the insurance investigator, Keyes, in "Double Indemnity" (1944), as well as the committed Nazi-hunter in Welles' "The Stranger" (1946), as indications of just how precise, yet variable, depictions of the moral adversaries of the "immoral," could be.

   Some historians have seen the femme-fatale as a causal factor of blackness to descend upon humanity; others have been attuned to the aestheticism of elitists, themselves (the old saw of art versus reality; education versus feeling). "Double Indemnity," among others ("Ivy," "The Locket," etc.), can be cited in the former instance; many others ("Laura," "The Unsuspected," "The Madonna's Secret"), among the latter.

    Film-noir, probably, does have parameters, but they are not as easy or as facile as this. Above all, dark film is serious; it is like a cat enticing a mouse into its trap. What would not succeed as a sermon, captivates as a come-on.

    Take the "world" of Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in "Laura":  Can anything have been more visually "lovely?" Consider the elegance of urban "great houses" and country-retreats moved through in "Saboteur," "The Fallen Sparrow," "The Unsuspected." Consider the elegant eroticism of "loveless lovers" in "Gilda," "Mildred Pierce," "Double Indemnity"; and consider the wide (if unrecognized) strain of a sexual nonconformity -- too easily dismissed as misogyny. Book after book on film-noir comes from the presses, but I still see no reference to Van Heflin as a platonic gay companion of Robert Taylor in "Johnny Eager" (1942); more to the point, what did the hatred of conventionality mean for the audience and the actors, in "Laura," "The Uninvited" and "Rebecca" (with strong suggestions of lesbianism); and the woman-killing "Uncle Charley" (Joseph Cotton) in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943).

    Sometimes, the fascists were established as explicit enemies: cold, wealthy, impervious to human feeling, and life, itself--whether Conrad Veidt in "Casablanca" (1943) or Claude Rains in "Notorious" (1946). The sex may have been "bad," and "good," but only rarely was it given a suggestion of "goodness," as in the case of the psychiatrist (Ingrid Bergman) who saves Gregory Peck in "Spellbound" (1945). Even in "Road House" (1948), the good man -Cornel Wilde -- saves the good woman (Ida Lupino); but twisted sex, in the form of the evil jealousy of Wilde's partner (Richard Widmark), put both their lives and limbs at risk, until the conclusion. The political seriousness of film-noir in the 1940s with prewar, wartime, and postwar corruption and criminality all being called, at various times, and in various guises, to account, as well as to attention -- can be emphasized by a kind of negative proof. When the true brutalities of war, and its immediate, postwar aftermath, ended (or at least ebbed), the budgets (at the very least), and critical and commercial importance of films-noir, did not cease, but they, frankly, subsided.

    They did not, of course, disappear, even into the present. From time to time (the mid and later 1960s -- upon occasion, during the 1970s and the 1980s) they, like Satan, have recurred when we have had need of them. The old ambiance of wealth, Eros, and danger recurs in "Chinatown" (1973) -- with its suggestion that Mrs. Mulwray cannot go to the police ("He owns them, too"). One cannot even trust oneself, as William Hurt discovers in "Body Heat" (1981) -- where his salvation and nemesis, in the form of Kathleen Turner turns out to be one and the same person.

    Evil, corruptibility, malleability have all remained constants. What was originally unique was what, in a burst of pique, yet fascination, numerous 1940s film makers made of them. They looked at the monsters close-up: of big people, who were low-living; and of small, or little, people, who could be corrupted. One rarely, if ever, laughs -- or even cries -- while watching What was originally unique was what, in a burst of pique, yet fascination, numerous 1940s film makers made of them. They looked at the monsters close-up: of big people, who were low-living; and of small, or little, people, who could be corrupted. One rarely, if ever, laughs -- or even cries -- while watching film-noir. Laughter and tears are, after all, feelings; emotion; sentiment. Film-noir -- for all its gaudy apparel -- is a black world; a dead universe; where feeling has ended. One may tear a little, in remembering the films and film-viewing experiences, of eras past, a little, however. At "Tangerine" being played in the background, at the end, of "Double Indemnity,"or at Clifton Webb reciting Dowson's "They are not long the days of wine and roses, love and desire and hate," near the end of "Laura."

    One remembers bits and pieces -- dialogue; interior decoration; other oddities -- from more of such films, than anything except the most beautiful and buoyant of musicals -- which are, of course, their antithesis -- even to the Technicolor the musicals were almost always originally photographed in: Bette Davis, falling dead on the railroad tracks, to the strains of "Chicago," in "Beyond the Forest" (1949). Gene Tierney, wearing dark glasses, sitting as "Danny" (Darryl Hickman) drowns in "Leave Her to Heaven" (1945) -- a fine film which the rare, original Technicolor, destroys, dramatically and thematically. Marilyn Monroe as the tawdry, yet understandable, Rose -- writhing up the final steps of the bell tower in "Niagara" (1953) -- one of the few films-noir made in Technicolor, where the color was not only an "asset," but not a liability. "They can't play for you anymore, Rose," Joseph Cotton says about the bells to the lifeless body of Marilyn Monroe he has just suffocated.

    But they "play" for us endlessly, on film, and in such films. For politics, Eros, color, or black-and-white, changing pretensions and fashions, aside, film-noir returns us to the original, undying jungle of earth, both pro and con -- at one and the same time. In their presence, we are both villain and victim. Both Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train," ruining the child's ice cream cone, strangling Laura Elliott, and the vision of Hitchcock, seeing her murder -- helpless to assist, or prevent -- through her glasses, which have dropped to the grass. We are mortal; guilty yet innocent; innocent yet guilty -- as we witness the great shadow of Joan Crawford as "Mildred Pierce" -- move from the room in which her younger, neglected daughter has just died. We see the shadow on the wall, alone; and it expresses the inexpressible; nothing, yet everything. We are in the world none of us ever made; and from which none of us will ever escape alive; informed of our pleasure, and pain; our complicity -- and of our own sentence to the "night-world" of eternity.