LANA TURNER Does Her Part, 1942 She Was A Pin-up Girl Of The First Order. She Was A Soldier’s Dream

JOAN CRAWFORD as Lane Bellamy in FLAMINGO ROAD (1949) dir. Michael Curtiz

the first film I saw Norma Shearer in was The Women and I think that negatively coloured my perception of her for years (decades?) because I thought she was the worst one in that (Paulette Goddard, Rosalind Russel, and Joan Crawford outshine her completely and when I saw the film as a teen I found her matronly and submissive). Watching her pre-code films now is wild, she's so sexy and cool! This is a problem I've had with a lot of actresses who took up more "good woman" roles in the late 30s and 40s (eg Claudette Colbert or Myrna Loy) because when I first got into classic films as a teen, I could not relate to those women or their characters and found them old and stodgy. Similarly I always thought actors like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant in the 1940s were so ancient and couldn't believe any woman would be attracted to a man that old

Movies about spinsters! That was a thing. How dare they?! But there are some good ones though. The Heiress, Now Voyager, Summertime …

I admit it, I’m into spinsploitation films.

Ann Dvorak in Scarface (1932)

Sometimes I talk a lot and sometimes I don’t talk at all and somehow both are embarrassing

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Corey Haim in The Lost Boys (1987)

I like Ink Drinker.

very late 50s early 60s movies are some of the most fascinating historical texts on earth i stg. like they can finally talk almost explicitly about sex, and they’ve finally thrown out the pair of twin beds for a normal queen or whatever, and they can talk about heterosexuality (inherently implies homosexuality)(like in auntie mame). they’re ALMOST there. you can literally feel the film industry grasping and clawing it’s way out of the hays era with every successive movie. it’s pretty incredible actually. and if you really want to feel that exertion just pick a couple of movies from various points in the decade and watch them in chronological order and the change is so astounding. can you imagine being there for that. can you imagine living through 40s movies and suddenly after wwii, the studios start collapsing and a huge tonal shift happens, and things get darker and grimmer and suddenly movies are talking about racism and women’s postwar discontent. and then oh my god it’s 1952 and censorship is suddenly kind of up in the air for the first time but you can’t even focus on that because marlon brando just swaggered onto your silver screen in his sweaty tee, chewing with his mouth open, and you see blanche get raped. and then immediately after that, deborah kerr is lying on top of burt lancaster and really really making out with him like they might as well have been having real sex up there. and don’t look now but dorothy dandridge was just nominated for an leading oscar!!!! what!!!! and all the girls are crazy for sidney poitier and harry belafonte ETC ETC ETC ETC until like the mid 60s when the whole everything is just completely utterly unrecognizable

Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, Hollywood, 1950