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"In a changing world one thing remains constant. But sometimes the manner in which it is presented differs. And the treatment of sex on the screen has been a reflection of the customs, manners and moral
s of the times" from an introduction to the recent compilation film 'the Love Goddesses". In this the first of two articles, Douglas McVay deals with some of the legendary goddesses of the screen
What does it take to make a celluloid goddess? [There follows extracts from Irving Shulman's Jean Harlow, culminating in reflections on Harlow as not much of an actress, but] 'the distinct, unique American type of beauty . . . basically it is gay and carefree, wholesomely sexual without being furtive or dirty. And always it is blonde..." [McVay propounds that this may be applicable to Harlow but] . . . it is demonstrably untrue in relation to the screen's other enchantresses. It is true that the cinema has produced notable even great actresses who have lacked that curious, essential supra-histrionic presence (not necessarily directly connected wi th sex) which confirms goddess status... Yet the actual goddesses have very largely been actresses of quality too... besides the tradition of carnal feminity which Harlow helped to develop, another very different tradition in goddesses has always co-exist ed and often interwoven with the Harlow style - namely, which one may summarise as 'the spiritual and androgynous". The twin pillars of these contrasted styles, the carnal and the spiritual, were surely Theda Bara, the vamp of A Fool There Was, and Lillian Gish... Spiritual in essence as Gish may have been, however, she could never be described, with her petite and plumply girlish face and figure, as androgynous. It was left to Louise Brooks to furnish this synthesis: and to unite, also, the spiritual and the carn al. Gish supplied one half of the female personality equation: the naive gaiety and vulnerable poignancy. Brooks provided the other: the cynically ambivalent, ruthless allure. Yet, because she could herself switch on occasion to sentiment and a sense o f purity, her range went, finally, beyond Gish's: so that she is arguably the greatest of all the silent era goddesses. (Garbo, one feels, didn't fully blossom until the coming of sound). Gish was pretty: Brooks was beautiful. Both had charm: but where Gish had pathos of a clear, straightforward kind. Brooks's pathos was always more classically refined - like her looks. Despite her frequent acting skill, her ability to convey psychologica l ambiguities and transitions, one increasingly believes the key to her mystery to be plastic: purely visual patterns, juxtapositions and contrasts of black Cleopatran coiffure; slanting yet wide eyes; slanting, sensuous-smiling or serious-sad lips; and, of course, that irrcomparable neck - a solid though slender-curving alabaster coIumn . . . only comparable with Garbo's, and (more nearly) Audrey Hepburn's . . . yet surpassing both? If surpassing both, perhaps because there are moments when she appears to act entirely with her neck: as in the opening scenes of Prix de Beaute. In the bathing sequence, she twists it in a sudlden dynamic flash, or bends it to reveal its strange and enticing convexity; and in the meal episode that follows, pulling a man's tie mockingly, she twists, jauntily again . . . But needless to say, she acted with her whole face as well (her figure was nice, but a bit plump and ultimately unexceptional as a means of communication): witness the extraordinary moment, in the taxi, when her gay laughter abruptly sobers into tender tranquillity, as she leans against her lover's shoulder . . . Louise's special star quality was that when serious she looked more innocent or pure or virginal or honest (and when faintly, provocatively, slightly hungrily smiling, more carnal), than any other female star before or since in my experience. It was no s urprise that in the squalid fairground sequence in Prix, as she glanced at the brawny bare throat of a man on her left, and then at a Negro on her right, she should subtly suggest the fascination of the erotic-as well as the sordidly impoverished-"abomina tion". In the same picture, too, she brought off two typically admirably psychological transitions. Accosted by a masher on a train, her earlier unaffected smiles on thinking herself alone imperceptibly change, as she accepts and lights a cigarette, to the more vulpine, sophisticated, angular smiles of flirtation. And (more abruptly) her exuberance with her lover after becoming "Miss Europe" is replaced by a sculptured gravity of protest (her face, hair, gaze oddly foreshadowing Seyrig in Marienbad: Se yrig indeed, is I fancy her only sizeable pictorial parallel on ceIluloid), when she finds him enraged. Later, coming on him as he sits depressed in a train compartment, she sinks down beside him in a fluffy fur coat; attracts his attention by (once more) stretching out, caressingly, that convex throat to rest against him; and follows this by an ever-more-intimate, snuggling, stroking series of tiny embraces. In A Girl in Every Port she materialised as a predatory circus artiste: resembling, from the very first image of her in high-divers" cap, cloak and tights, glittering greyly, her black-fringed Egyptian tonsure and candid-eyed quiet-smiling, pale-chiselled features delicately formidable, a Bat Woman out of some Superman thriller. She executed in this relatively small role a sort of dress-rehearsal for her classic vamp incarnation in Pandora's Box: putting the finishing touches to her diving costume and ma ke-up before her mirror; sitting curled up next to Henry Arnold like an elegantly disturbing Siamese cat, edging nearer to him and slowly starting to stroke his arm and thigh; or climactically invading his bedroom, advancing on him with mockingly silent p urpose as he cowers indignantly away from her in an ill-concealing nightshirt, and proceeding to emasculate him of dignity by depriving him of his trousers! And in Pandora, as Wedekind's Lulu, a nymphomanic adventuress whom everybody (as Noel Coward might have put it) wants to "look after", she evoked with her dark, long lashes, straight nose, slim boyish frame and mouth shifting from pursed pettishness to gr inning cunning to faintly carnivorous wide-lipped mirth, a necrophilic creation worthy of the female bloodsucker in Vampyr, the Statue in Sang d"un Poete, the Princess of Death in Orphee. In a succession of bewitchingly lit, flickering close-ups, she loll ed on her couch and stretched out her arms to her lover in amorous invitation . . . then, towards the end of the movie, confirmed her hermaphroditic overtones by disguising herself in a sailor's cap, striped jersey and canvas trousers before sailing into the night in a stolen boat, away from a lesbian admirer. Yet, carnal as Louise's impact so often was (in Diary of a Lost Girl, she swoons and is seduced on the spot by a suitor unable to resist her lolling white neck and her body relaxed in a neglige), in the reformatory scenes in the same movie she lends a pri son crop a Grecian austerity; while in an ensuing episode there is an exquisite close-up of her gazing, clochehatted, down through a rain-blurred window at a widow and children walking forlornly into the street. In sudden compassion, she has the woman (he r former enemy) called back. Her unfulfilled maternal instincts awoken by one of the infants, she beckons it to approach. The widow prevents this: but when Louise stares at her reproachfully and droops in sorrow, the woman ashamedly relents. Louise's exp ression of ecstatic happiness as she clasps the child to her has an authentically Garboesque spontaneity and intensity. And Garboesque, also, are the most ravishing close-ups of Prix de Beaute: Brooks, nostalgically looking at a beautyqueen photo of herself, wearily, yearningly leaning her head on her hand and clutching one side of her hair; Brooks, listening to a disc of the tango to which she danced in her beauty-queen days (a slow track in to her lying, vacantly staring, on a sofa: then a stunning, huge close-up of her tilted face against a cushion); Brooks, in a bedroom sequence where she sits up in bed (in a pose take n from Diary), and, in a last, slow-fading big close-up before resolving to leave her husband in the night and accept a film offer, leans her head against her hand with a statuesque loveliness, a fatalistic calmness, an exhausted strength. Shot by her de serted, vengeful spouse in a projeetion-room while watching her latest movie, she lies in supine close-up, her screen wraith singing in the background. A glimmering image of her face momentarily possesses a serenity, eyes closed, once more akin to Garbo. But her final expression is less completely serene, and acquires the glassy fixed whiteness of a death-mask: it is right that her suitor should seek to touch her - but then withdraw his hands. Garbo herself, of course, like Brooks, had androgynous elements in her magic... [The rest of the article discusses Garbo, Dietrich and Hepburn and concludes looking forward to the "forties and early "fifties.] |