Birthday Beauties

I'm normally not very fond at all of February, but it's clear that there is some strange magic to that unpromising month, if only based on the extraordinary gifts it seems to have bestowed on what would appear to be a disproportionate number of children born nine months later.

Today, really, is an embarrassment of gorgeousness...

We start with the woman Cecil Beaton described as an "Asian Venus," the extraordinary Princess Fawzia of Egypt. Today she's a little old lady living quietly in Cairo, but in her time she was rather a handful, as well as being the Shah's first wife.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have art-film darling Tilda Swinton, seen here, I believe, doing an al fresco Carrie Nye impression. Or is it Cybill Shepherd?

Joel McCrea ended up a grizzled character player in Westerns, but in his youth he was a gleamingly handsome leading man at the dawn of the Talkies.

Ah, Lady Olivier. Mercurial, brilliant, and capable of inspiring, based on all one reads, almost boundless reserves of affection among friends and loved ones despite infinitely bad behavior, Vivien Leigh never quite recovered from the strain of being married to one of the few people on earth perhaps as lovely as she and yet more able than she to be regarded even more for his acting than his entrancing bone structure.

Speaking of which, bone structure would likely have carried this young man far (or at least further than sleazy Joan Collins TV movies) had not an unkind fate intervened. Somehow one feels there is an element of mercy in Jon-Erik Hexum's having been saved from a future as the David Hasselhoff of the 2020s...

If Hexum's presence here adds a note of the tragic, let's scurry right back to the ridiculous and consider the last of our birthday belles and beaux, the smoldering Miss Elke Sommer. Here we see her in full Scandinavian sexbomb bloom, in a still doubtless drawn from one of the almost endless number of All Star International Productions of the 1960s to which she contributed ... well, not very much at all.

The last I heard of her she was feuding with Zsa-Zsa over who was or was not a bigger has-been, but that was years ago. I'm sure it's still a question she's mulling over, but even so I hope she's having a happy birthday.

The Female of the Species

Well, we've looked at various Daughters, Girls, and Women, so it seems almost inevitable to go down this little memory-lane, perhaps the most sordid of them all...

For a long time, but never more than during the sublimely trashy era between the nudie-cuties and the rise of videotape, "female" was movie-shorthand for, in many and varied ways, "slut."

You'd think that the male leads in a picture with this title would be more or less irrelevant; still, John Holmes, whatever else one might think about him, was certainly not easy to ignore...

One wonders what competing film was guilty of shyly exploring the bizarre, twilight world of abnormal sexual behavior.

A West Side Story star, the son of a silent-film legend, and what clearly look like the production values of Russ Meyers come together for...well, from the look of it, not all that much. Frankly, it gives every sign of being a yawner that might as well be titled Faster, Cowgirl! Kill! Kill!

I'm not going to make any jokes drawn from the headlines, I'm not going to make any jokes drawn from the headlines...

But I will say this: beware of any film that says it's in color - when its one-sheet poster isn't.

Who knew that Gun Crazy had an alternate title? For that matter, who knew that Gun Crazy originally came from a Saturday Evening Post story? I'd love to see the Norman Rockwell illustration for that one.

Remember that warning about color movies up above? It goes double for Brigitte Bardot movies that use "Spoken in English" as a tagline.

I don't know about Kathleen Crowley, but I'd cross the street to avoid anything that made Jayne Mansfield scream like a siren in the night. On the other hand, if Lawrence Tierney were doing the screaming...

Here we have the ne plus ultra of sleazy fifties "Female" pictures, albeit one that tried, hard, to play it classy.

This is the one where Our Joan strides around snarling out lines like "I have a nasty imagination, and I'd like to be left alone with it." She makes certain you believe it. On the other hand, it also has a character called Queenie played by Natalie Schafer and Jeff Chandler in (men's) swimwear, so it's not a total waste.

This one is trying to be the ne plus ultra of contemporary "Female" pictures, but all I think it really does is provide a subject for future surprise: Tilda Swinton and Paulina Porizkova once made a movie together?

There may be seven basic female responses; only six, however, get an illustration. All, apparently, involve, in varying degrees, bad hair, but only one requires being a Kaye Ballard impersonator.

In the end, though, despite the best efforts of Joan, Natalie, Tilda, and Paulina - this is the ne plus ultra "Female" picture, now and forever. And remember: just 'cause we pretty, everybody's jealous.