Classic Beauty: Jean Harlow

Considering that Jean Harlow died at age 26, her impact on cinema was enormous.  And honestly, I can kinda see why:

She absolutely oozed sex appeal — for the time, as much or more than Marilyn Monroe did some twenty years later — and certainly never posed nude, either.  It is said, with some justification, that she never wore underwear of any kind.  Jimmy Stewart later claimed that she kissed so beautifully that when doing a kissing scene with her, he deliberately flubbed the action so that they had to do several takes.  And as for Clark Gable… they did several movies together, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing much acting, either.

Talk about setting the screen on fire…

Classic Beauty: Joyzelle Joyner

Not all Hollywood female dancers were of the Ginger Rogers-Cyd Charisse type, oh no.  Especially during the early years of the movies — notably in the silent era — there was a huge demand for “classical” or “exotic” dancers, usually as backdrop during the swords ‘n sandals genre.

Maybe the best known of these was Joyzelle Joyner, who appeared (often un-credited) in dozens of them.

In The Sign Of The Cross, her dance sequence was cut because of its “lesbian overtones”:

She’s also reputed to have done studio modeling, although not too many of those have survived (and nor have most of her movies, sadly):

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Classic Beauty: Lillian Bond

Born in London, but after a teenage stage career she moved to the U.S., where her Brit accent had no impact on her career because the movies were all silent.  Then, when the talkies became all the thing, Lillian Bond‘s accent had, sadly, been submerged into Murkin.

None of that’s important, of course, because that’s not why we’re here.  This is.

And for me, this (of course):

I think she was absolutely stunning.