Category: Classic Beauty

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…

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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Okay, I’m a sucker for that fresh-faced “girl next door” thing, so it should come as no surprise to see Jennifer Morrison here.  Even her name is comfortably unremarkable, but she herself is anything but.  Let’s start with the girl next door:

Okay, so she has grown up somewhat since then:

Oh, yes.

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.

No study of 1960’s Pulchritude would be complete without Julie Christie:

Some other time, we’ll look at her in color.

Doomed by her contract to stand forever in the shadow of Ava Gardner and Lana Turner (the studio’s favorites at the time), Jane Greer was once called “the greatest actress never to win an Oscar”.  And it’s quite true:  as the femme fatale  in so much of the 1940s-era noir  genre, she showed a sinister stillness about her roles that set her apart from the overacting of most of her female peers.  I think I only ever saw her in Out Of The Past, in which she was every bit the equal of the brooding, brilliant Robert Mitchum.

So let’s have a look, shall we?

And out of costume:

Of course, no look at a noir  actress would be complete without a gun:

Deadly.