All Things Beautiful

Even in the midst of the clamorous, ridiculous, so often tedious parade that is Facebook, sometimes something stops you in your tracks. This went past a few days ago, and I've just spent a considerable amount of time tracking it down so that, in case you missed it, you too can spend a little time in a glamor-induced trance.

Stars on their Days Off

On a fine summer afternoon, here we see Spangler Brugh, Ruby Stevens, and William Gable, taking a break from their golf game in a snapshot by Jane Peters.

Queens For Just One Day

...And of some mighty strange realms...

Say what you will about the scantiness of jungle fashions - this is one queen who's found a volumizer that really works for her.

As for this one, I have no idea what's going on, but I really, really want to see it. If nothing else, the "proudly presents" is both a jaunty and a slightly pathetic touch.

Another fine release from the good folks at AIP, although I find the theming here a little muddled - is she the Queen of Blood, somehow arachnid, or the centerpiece of a disturbing circus acrobatic act? Perhaps Basil Rathbone knows, but I sure the hell don't.

Here we have one of the screen's less memorable pairings - if they had dumped Reagan for Joan Crawford, that would have been a picture to put Johnny Guitar to shame.

Of course, we couldn't get away without including this one in any roundup of Queens - although I have to say I don't think it holds up terribly well. Fab alternate poster, though, no? And not an outfit I remember, either, although it's been a while.

Here's anothing almost insanely obscure one. You know what I really want to see? Barbara Stanwyck Battle an Army of Savage Midgets. With Joan Crawford as the Terrifying Lady of Snakes.

Any rumours that this is the next Johnny Depp pic should be swiftly put to rest.

As should any idea that this picture is as much fun as either the title or the prospect of the sheer Gaboriness of it. On the other hand it does have the fabulous "I hat zat Qveen!" moment. A line for the ages.

I hate it when the skull-candlestick gets all chatty, don't you? Between that and the visibly bored, dagger-wielding Michael York impersonator there on the right, I'm not encouraged.

After everything from the Amazon to the lands of the undead, the Yukon seems practically as prosaic as - well, as a Stanwyck-Crawfordless Montana. But not nearly as prosaic as Monogram - how did genteel leading lady Irene Rich end up there?

After and Before: Ruby Tuesday

Barbara Stanwyck, looking uncharacteristically ruffled at winning an Emmy, 1983;

Ruby Stevens, looking like not much is going to startle her, circa 1926...

Stanwyck is something. Crawford was Metro's baby, just as much as Davies was Hearst's. Davis needed Warner's to give her the space to figure out who she was. Hepburn was nobody's baby, but she had as many failures as successes and was, until late in life, less universally a favorite than one might think. The exotics - Garbo, Dietrich, and their lesser sisters - traded in a very specific kind of currency, while the sex bombs - from Bow to Monroe and well after - had their own, essentially separate milieu. Ditto the musical ladies, whose ventures into other genres often perplex.

Stanwyck, though - she could be funny as hell, dangerous as any vamp, and way sexier than the average bottle blonde. Granted, she didn't sing, but she started out a hoofer and could acquit herself admirably on the floor. She ended up playing Big Tough Ladies, but she always seemed just in enough on the joke to be having fun.

What was her secret? Hard to say, but I think it helped that, start to finish, she gave every sign of knowing exactly what she wanted and of having every ability to get it herself.

Darling Daughters

Everybody's somebody's baby...

Being a dancing daughter is what first set Joan's career on the right path...

...But being B.F.'s didn't do much for B.S.'s - how can she have made so many movies one has never even heard of? I'm going to make a wild guess that Coburn was B.F.

I don't believe this one helped anybody's career. Great lashes, though.

Loretta Young. On a farm. With a Swedish accent. Yeah, that's believable. Possibly the prissiest picture ever named after a genre of dirty joke.

At least one of the four looks like she might be Dracula's. The rest just look Inexplicably Solemn, but then it is from a Fannie Hurst story...

Once Drac got the ball rolling, everybody wanted in on the act. Sadly, none were ever such a success that we reached the Dracula's Daughter and Frankenstein's Daughter Meet the Daughter of a Brooklyn Gorilla phase, but I bet people thought about it...

Ah, John "ex-Mr. Shirley Temple" Agar - the mark of quality.

Do you know how hard it is to make a long-sleeved bias-cut buckskin shirtwaist-style minidress? The leopard belt really does set it off, though.

Actually, Mrs. Brown, what you've got is a bad case of wannabebeatles. Take two aspirin and wait for the sixties to pass.

I think this is the one where she swims, but you never can tell with an Esther Williams picture.

And this is definitely the one where she cries, but that's written into Sally's contract, no?

When I was a tiny tot, my parents went to see this. It was a Huge Event movie playing at the downtown movie palace, and it was going to be the event of the season. The morning after, you would have thought that they had been forced to sit through repeated showings of Plan Nine, and forever after it's been a family byword for Terrible Movie.

But could it really have been worse than this? When you don't recognize a single name, when the graphic looks like that, and when the best that the tag line can come up with is "hundreds of extras" - I think this is one daughter to send back to poppa...

Angels of Mercy

Nurses on film get kind of a bum rap. They're either insufferably noble:

(Neagle, Robson, Oliver, Pitts - add in Dressler and you would have had a festival of comedy dowagers trying to act serious)

Or they're the biggest sluts this side of stewardesses:

It's a serious profession, but movies always seem to fall back on tired starched-cap-and-sponge-bath routines:

In some cases, it must be admitted, with apparently enough success to inspire a sequel:

This one reminds me of The Killing of Sister George - I've never gotten over the idea of bucolic country nurses biking around British villages. Our heroine here, however, is clearly more Susannah York than Beryl Reid.

This one looks like it's trying to have it both ways - noble and naughty...

But then again, so did this one, decades earlier. Still, I'm going to presume that one is not a remake of the other...

No mistaking it here - it's noble all the way; even if she were to try a little naughty - I mean, Forrest Tucker? (Although there are those miltonberleische rumors...)

Here it's hard to tell - is Stanwyck a Florence Nightingale or a Floradora Girl? (Both, as it turns out - she's a bad girl gone straight, with, as you might expect, complications - and Clark Gable as a rotter. Good stuff)

No such ambiguity here.

And, finally, the trashiest nurse of all. The next time you're in a hospital, look around at the legion of loosely clad, uncapped, be-croc'ed men and women carrying out their mostly routine, occasionally lifesaving tasks - and try to imagine them spreadeagled in ecstasy near an illicit grave.

Although the real question about this film may be: how and why did Nurse Sherri persuade the Pussycats to murder and bury Josie?

Birthday Boy: Somebody's Perfect

102 years ago today in a little town in Austria-Hungary, Mrs. Eugenia Wilder, née Dittler, had a baby boy. She must have been a remarkable woman, for her little Billie grew up to be Billy Wilder.


Looking through his owlish round spectacles, observing Mama Eugenia, what did he pick up that allowed him to create a gallery of some of the screen's greatest - and most diverse - women?

Is there part of Eugenia in Nina Yakushova Ivanoff, whom a combination of Paris and Melvyn Douglas transform into Ninotchka?



Somewhat more disconcertingly, is there anything of her in the predatory Phyllis Dietrichson, queen of the blank face and the world's only ominous bangs?

Perhaps that's the part that let him bring to life so entirely the vast and tragic mess that is Norma Desmond:

(I think Boulevard Crepuscule is if
anything a better title, don't you?)

I would like to think she's there in Ariane Chavasse, Hepburn's most sophisticated gamine in Love in the Afternoon (and if the December in any May-December is Gary Cooper, who's to say it nay?):

But, to my mind, the proof that Eugenia did good by her little boy is that he grew up to be able to imagine two such creatures, equally improbable, as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk and the man who transforms himself so happily into the fetching bass player Daphne:

He did well by his leading ladies, that's for sure: two of Stanwyck's defining roles (Double Indemnity and Ball of Fire), two of Monroe's (Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch), two of Audrey Hepburn's (Love in the Afternoon and Sabrina) making Garbo laugh and Swanson immortal - not bad for a boy from Sucha Beskidzka.

I do think some of it had to be Eugenia.