Tag: Classic Women

The best thing you can say about Geraldine Brooks is that she was better than almost every movie she ever played in.  She could hold her own against highly-strung co-starring divas as Joan Crawford and the volcanic Anna Magnani.  Starting at 18 in a starring role in the long-running Broadway play Follow The Girls, she did nearly half of the 288 performances.  Then she got hired by Hollywood to appear in movies, and in the best Hollywood tradition, she was totally undervalued. Only when she quit Hollywood to do Italian movies was she fully appreciated — and when those movies appeared in America, they were bowdlerized beyond recognition.

So… TV, from 1952 she settled for appearing on silly TV shows for another twenty-four years, her performances still always better than the shows themselves.

But enough of that.

Magical.

Here’s a little addendum to last week’s post about the Platinum Bombshell.  Today, we’re going to look at a series of pics taken in Griffith Park (Los Angeles) by ace photographer Edwin Bower Hesser…

…of an 18-year-old Jean Harlow.

Griffith Park never looked so good.

She would die only eight years later.

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…