Alison Skipworth: A Great Old Broad

Alison Skipworth (Night after Night released 14 October 1932)

The other night I watched one of my favorite pre-Code films, Night after Night--this was Mae West's first film appearance, and although the screenplay was credited to Vincent Lawrence (with writing credits to Louis Bromfield and Katheryn Scoda), Mae West wrote much of her own dialogue (she is uncredited, however). Among the notable West-ian lines: when a young woman checking coats sees West's jewelry, she gushes, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!" The irrepressible West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

Anyway, I love this film--not so much for the main story, with a gangster/speakeasy owner falling for a "classy" socialite, but for West. The otherwise dull and predictable movie sparks to life when she is onscreen. But virtually all her scenes are shot with the amazing Alison Skipworth, who rarely gets much attention despite a long and very successful career.

Born in London in 1863, Skipworth began her professional career as a stage actress in both London and New York before turning to film. She appeared in her first film in 1912 and moved to Hollywood in 1929.

As a young woman, Skipworth was famed as a great beauty. When she began her acting career in 1894, Skipworth, then in her thirties, specialized in playing the role of grande dame, a socially prominent and haughty figure (though Skipworth herself was the daughter of a physician). The plays in which she acted were not very successful--at one point Skipworth claimed that she'd been in twenty-one flops between 1925 and 1930. 

Film offered her new opportunities--she took character roles, playing plump, often ridiculous "aristocratic" types, a series of dowagers and matrons like Emily La Rue in If I Had a Million (1932), where she was paired with W. C. Fields, and Tillie Winterbottom in Tillie and Gus (1933), again a foil to Fields and his role as Augustus Winterbottom. Her last film was made in 1938, when she was 75, though she continued to act on Broadway into the early 1940s. Skipworth died in 1952, just a few weeks before her 89th birthday.

My favorite Skipworth performance is in this film, where she is Miss Mabel Jellyman, hired by George Raft's gangster to give him lessons in "class," including proper etiquette and speaking. But once she meets Mae West's Maudie Triplett, Miss Jellyman is only too happy to laugh at Maudie's double entendres, get drunk with her, and, ultimately, go into business with her--even though she assumes Maudie's "business" is keeping a brothel (Maudie denies this, insisting she runs a beauty shop). My favorite scene: when the two wake up in bed together after a night out. Now that's a double entendre!!

Anna May Wong: Actor and Activist

Anna May Wong (3 January 1905 - 3 February 1961)

The Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times features a cover story on Asian-American actors by Amanda Hess titled "We Will Not Be Ignored." (Interestingly, the online version, which I've linked to here, changes the pronoun case from "we" to "they," suggesting the statement about refusal belongs to Hess rather than to the actors photographed for the piece,  Aziz Ansari, Daniel Dae Kim, BD Wong, and Constance Wu--the piece online is titled "Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored.")

Anna May Wong,
photographed by George Hurrell in 1938

The actors not only decry Hollywood's persistent stereotypes of Asian Americans, but also a more recent and troubling trend, "whitewashing": "taking Asian roles and stories and filling them with white actors." 

The term itself is new, and represents a practice different from "yellowface," which refers to white performers using makeup and prosthetics to "play" Asian roles. 

Not that yellowface has gone away, unfortunately (for an NPR story, "Why We've Been Seeing More 'Yellowface' in Recent Months," click here), but for now attention has turned from transforming white actors into Asian characters to the practice of simply erasing Asian characters from source material and then casting white actors to play these racially scrubbed roles.

While acknowledging that it has "never been easy for an Asian-American actor to get work in Hollywood," the Times piece seems to suggest that a combination of hashtag activism, public awareness, and "raw, unapologetic anger" might actually change things, but, then again, Hess concludes, "Whether that translates into change on-screen is an open question." 

An open question indeed. Hollywood has been here before.

Hess's excellent piece unfortunately goes no farther back in Hollywood history than George Takei's Hikaru Sulu in the TV Star Wars series (1966-69) and Margaret Cho's All American-American Girl, which ran on ABC for one season in 1994.

And so today seemed a great day to post about Anna May Wong. Born in Los Angeles, Wong began her film career as an extra in 1919, but by the time she was seventeen, she had been cast in a leading role in the 1922 The Toll of the Sea, a reworking of the Madame Butterfly story.

And that part, unfortunately, signaled the difficulties for Wong--racial stereotyping limited the roles she was offered either to subservient, submissive "China doll" (or "lotus blossom") characters or to predatory, dangerous "dragon lady" parts. She also appeared in a range of roles that called for an exoticized "other"--from a Mongol slave girl (in 1924's The Thief of Baghdad) to the indigenous Keok (in 1924's The Alaskan) and a Native American (to the extent that Peter Pan's Princess Tiger Lily is any kind of representation of a native woman).

But mostly her roles were variations on the Butterfly and Dragon Lady stereotypes. Like other actors of color, Wong was limited by racism, but she was also limited by state censorship boards that refused to screen films that contained depictions of inter-racial relationships. Industry restrictions from 1927 known as "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls" included "miscegenation" as a "shall not"--one of eleven "things" that would not "appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated." The eleven "do nots" and the twenty-five "be carefuls" were formalized in the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPA) Production Code of 1930, frequently referred to as the Hayes Code.

According to the Production Code, "miscegenation  (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden." This act, while not explicitly including Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans, for example, effectively barred Wong from leading-lady roles and condemned her to caricatures of doomed, submissive women or demonic, sexually predatory women. (For "The Production Code and 'Miscegenation,’" from the Film Reference encyclopedia, click here.)

Wong and Dietrich,
in Shanghai Express

Wong moved to Europe, where she had a spectacular career, culminating in her last silent film, Piccadilly, from 1929. She returned to Hollywood and took one more dragon-lady role, playing Fu Manchu's daughter Ling Moy in the 1931 Daughter of the Dragon (Fu Manchu was, of course, played by the Swedish-American Warner Oland in yellowface).

But in 1932 Wong co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in the unforgettable Shanghai Express. (Wong had met and become friends with Dietrich during her time in Europe.) Wong plays a prostitute, Hui Fei, but in this she is matched by Dietrich's Shanghai Lily, also a sexual adventuress. They are both "coasters"--women who live "by their wits," traveling on the China coast. Dietrich's character avoids rape by the evil Henry Chang (described as a "Eurasian," but the character is played by Warner Oland, again in yellowface), but Wong's Hui Fei is not so lucky. Later the stoic Lui Fei quietly assassinates the warlord. Even better, she survives after she commits this act of vengeance. (In most of her roles, whether a China doll or a Dragon Lady, she winds up dead.)

After Shanghai Express, Wong again found only stereotypical roles offered to her, and she again sought work in Europe, returning to the U.S. in 1935, hoping to play the role of O-lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Who could be better cast in this role than Wong? Unfortunately, the role went to the Austrian actress Luise Rainer, who played the role in yellowface--and won an Academy Award.

Wong continued to work on stage, on television, and in film throughout her life. But as with today's Asian-American actors, she found too many of the roles to be caricatures, too few giving full scope to her talent. 

Like the actors quoted in today's Times, Wong spoke out against the stereotyping of Asian Americans. As Zihao Wang writes, "Her activism and sacrifices to push Asian American identity in entertainment tried to paint a human picture of Asian Americans in a time when stereotypes and prejudice prevailed. Both American and Chinese communities relentlessly critiqued her work. Upon returning from her pilgrimage to China; Anna May Wong commented 'It’s a pretty sad situation to be rejected by Chinese because I’m "too American" and by American producers because they prefer other races to act Chinese parts.'" 

As filmmaker Yunah Hong, whose documentary Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words premiered on PBS in 2013, notes, "When her film roles were limited, she traveled around Europe performing in cabarets, polishing her talents as a singer, dancer and monologuist. When MGM didn't cast her in The Good Earth, a film set in China, she went to China anyway and filmed her trip. Long before anyone was called a 'community activist,' she devoted herself to the Chinese American community's war effort during World War II."

In 2008, Turner Classic Movies broadcast an incredible series, "Asian Images in Film." Luckily, you can still read the introductory essay (click here) and see the entire schedule (you can reproduce the TCM film series for yourself!). You can also read about Jeff Adachi's documentary The Slanted Screen.* You will also find an extended essay on each of the 35 films in the series, as well as find information about another documentary, Elaine Mae Woo's Anna May Wong: Frosted Yellow Willows: Her Life, Times, and Legend (2008).

There are many spectacular images of Wong online--depicting her in the stereotypical roles of China doll or Dragon Lady. They are gorgeous, and you can seek them out if you want. But I chose not to include any of them here.

*Update, January 2020: The wealth of information about the "Asian Images in Film" series is no longer available at the TCM website--if you follow the link above, you get a "bad gateway" notice, and if you search the TCM site itself, "No Results" is what you will find. I thought it worth noting--in a post about erasure, here is another example. The link now takes you to the TCM material as it’s been preserved by the Internet Archive. 

As for Jeff Adachi’s documentary—the Internet Archive’s capture doesn’t save the information about The Slanted Screen, but, even better, you can SEE it through Kanopy (available through your public library). 

You can find information about Elaine Mae Woo’s documentary here. 

Update, 10 March 2023: With Everything Everywhere All at Once nominated for an Oscar Best Picture and its Michelle Yeoh nominated for Best Actress, Katie Gee Salisbury's New York Times essay reflecting on the career of Anna May Wong and the larger experience of Asian Americans in film, is a welcome read! (Click here.)

Update, 5 September 2025: A great article on Anna May Wong in The Guardian, Pamela Hutchinson's "'I was killed in virtually every film’: How Trailblazing Chinese-American Star Anna May Wong Upended Cinema" (click here). The article provides a good overview of Wong's life and career, and is published to note a program at the BFI Southbank (British Film Institute), "Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention" (events and screenings scheduled through 6 October). What a line-up of lectures, discussions, and films (click here to see the program). Even if you aren't in London, you can access a wealth of information here, including brief introductions to each film, including several that are rarely seen.

Women and Representation

More on Women in Film and Onscreen

Yet another study focusing on diversity--or the lack of diversity--across media platforms in the entertainment industry. As if that news is surprising.

Today the USC Annenberg School for Communications  and Journalism released the latest study of representations of women, persons of color, and LGBT persons on screen and behind the scenes in movies and television. The numbers are not good. (For a post about another study, released just weeks ago, click here.)

The Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment is, as its title suggests, comprehensive: the study includes films, broadcast television, and digital series from 10 major media companies: 21st Century Fox, CBS, Comcast NBC Universal, Disney, Sony, Time Warner, Viacom, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

Altogether, the study covers 109 major motion pictures (released in 2014) and 305 prime-time broadcast series, cable series, and digital streaming series (from the 2014-15 television "season").

Here's just a taste: "For every female character speaking or named in a widely distributed TV show or movie, there are two male characters. For every female director making those shows and movies, there are 5.6 men. For every woman in the highest levels of decision-making at Hollywood studios, there are four men."

And: "For every non-white character on screen, there are roughly 2.5 white ones. For every non-white director, there are roughly 6.7 white ones."

And: "Just two percent of characters are identified as LGBT."

For a story in The Atlantic, from which the CARD's numbers have been quoted, click here.

The full CARD study is readily accessible and eminently readable--you can download a copy here.

But most important, keep this in mind when you're deciding where to spend your entertainment dollars . . . 

After a Year of Blogging . . . Women and Film

2016 and a New Post: Women and Film

My 2015 "daybook" project is now complete. I was able to post an entry on women's history every day during the year. Those 366 entries (I wrote an extra one on 22 May) remain in the blog archive, if you're interested, and, of course, the blog itself remains searchable via online search engines. 

But now what? I am not going to abandon this blog, though I have no plans to write every day. Rather, I'll go back to the 2014 schedule of posting here whenever something interests me--or, more frequently, when something angers me!

Lately the New York Times has been filled with articles about the upcoming season of awards for film and television. I read the online edition, and today's film section offered multiple articles on this year's Oscar nominations (soon to be announced), on today's Producers Guild of America nominations, and on Sunday's Golden Globe Award broadcast, just for starters. Online, Google has posted tons of links to stories about the Golden Globes broadcast (Mel Gibson will present an award! E! will be broadcasting "Live from the Red Carpet"!), as has my Comcast homepage. 

And so I thought I'd mention just a few of the things none of these breathless "news" announcements has taken the time to clarify: 

While significant numbers of women have made undeniable progress in their effort to achieve equality, we still have a long way to go. Despite the enormous progress that has been made, women’s participation in many areas of contemporary society remains limited—women are under-represented in government, in business, and in the professions, and they still suffer economic disparity simply because they are female. Nowhere do we see this gender gap any more clearly than in the field of entertainment. Whether their professional careers are in theater, film, or television, women are still not equal participants.

In commenting on the opportunities for women in theatrical productions, and in particular on the number of plays written by women that manage to make it to the stage, playwright Marsha Norman recently noted, “Women have lived half of the experience of the world, but only 20 percent of it is recorded in our theatres.”[1] In other words, “if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.”[2] 

What's true on stage is also true on screens both large and small. Recent studies of the top 100 films released in 2014 demonstrate that only 11.2 percent of the writers were women; women accounted for only 1.9 percent of the directors and 18.9 percent of the producers. (If you expand the list to the top 250 films, women still accounted for only 11% of the writers, but the numbers for women directors rose to 7% and the numbers for producers rose to 23%.)

Behind the scenes, they were only 18 percent of the editors, 5 percent of the cinematographers, and 5 percent of the sound designers. 

From Directors Guild of America's Feature Film Diversity Report:
Women Account for only 6.4% of Film Directors
(but just 3% for major box-office titles)

On screen, a woman played a leading role in only 21 percent of the top 100 films—but not a single woman over the age of forty-five “performed a lead or co lead role.”[3] And none of these numbers address issues of pay equity.[4] 

While in 2014 women were more fully represented on television screens than they were in film—40 percent of the “major characters” on broadcast, cable, and Netflix programs were female—they still comprised only 26 percent of the writers, 14 percent of the directors, 26 percent of the producers, 21 percent of editors, and 2 percent of cinematographers, for example, among other roles.[5] 

As Stacy Smith concludes in her comprehensive study of inequality in the portrayals of women in film, “The landscape of popular cinema . . . remains skewed and stereotypical.” Films “continue to distort the demographic reality of their audiences,” and even after years of “activism, attention, and statements about addressing the issue, Hollywood’s default setting for characters and content creators remains fixed on ‘status quo.’”[6] 

Or, as Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, says, more succinctly, when it comes to the big screen, women still encounter a “celluloid ceiling.” And on the small screen, it’s much the same: women are, even now, “boxed in.” 

So, over the "awards season," while you're watching the parade of female stars in hugely expensive designer dresses and jewels sashaying and posing on the red carpet (hey, I'll be enjoying it too), remember the numbers!

Notes

[1] Quoted in Suzy Evans, “The Gender Parity Count Ticks Up—Slightly,” American Theater, 20 July 2015, http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/07/20/the-gender-parity-count-ticks-up-slightly/. 

[2] Marsha Norman, “Why ‘The Count’ Matters,” The Dramatist, November/December 201), 18. 

[3] Stacy L. Smith et al., “Key Findings,” Inequality in 700 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race, & LGBT Status from 2007 to 2014 (Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, 2015). In addition to this longitudinal study, see Martha M. Lauzen, Women and the Big Picture: Behind-the-Scenes Employment on the Top 700 Films of 2014 (San Diego: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 2015); Martha M. Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 250 Films of 2014 (San Diego: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 2015); and Martha M. Laurzen, It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2014 (San Diego: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 2015). 

For a study focused on women directors in film, see Directors Guild of America, “Feature Film Diversity Report,” Directors Guild of America (December 2015).

On the number of women in leading or “co lead” roles, Lauzen offers a critically important analysis of the percentages cited by Smith et al.: “Only 12% of all clearly identifiable protagonists were female. . . . In 2014, 75% of protagonists were male, and 13% were male/female ensembles. For the purposes of this study, protagonists are the characters from whose perspective the story is told.” Laurzen, It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World, 1. 

[4] The 10 November 2015 issue of Variety was dedicated to the issue of gender equity, including stories on professionals at all levels. On pay equity for film actors, see Ramin Setoodeh, “Equal Pay Revolution: How Top Actresses Are Finally Fighting Back,” Variety, 10 November 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/news/hollywood-gender-pay-gap-inequality-1201636553/. 

[6] Martha M. Lauzen, Boxed In: Portrayals of Female Characters and Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women in 2014-15 Prime-Time Television (San Diego: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 2015), 1, 3. On such equity issues in television, see also Maureen Ryan, “ACLU’s Melissa Goodman on Gender Discrimination: It’s a Legal and Civil Rights Problem,” Variety, 10 November 2015, http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/aclu-melissa-goodman-diversity-tv-directors-gender-discrimination-1201635880/. 

[6] Smith, Inequality in 700 Popular Films, 21.

Update, 9 May 2025: It's been nearly a decade since I posted here about women and film. Here's some relatively good news from Martha M. Lauzen's most recent analysis in It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing U.S. Films of 2024:

2024 offered one of the richest slates of films featuring female characters in recent memory. These fictional women railed against unsatisfying personal relationships and discriminatory work environments, pushing back hard against a culture that considers them disposable. The females populating these films didn’t always triumph, but they fought the good fight and never folded. For the first time in recent history, the percentage of top grossing films featuring female protagonists equaled the percentage of films with male protagonists in 2024. 42% of films had female protagonists and 42% had male protagonists. 16% of films featured ensembles.

With a caveat:  

However, it is important to note that because this number assesses the top 100 films with female protagonists, small fluctuations alter the number dramatically. In 2023, 28% of top-grossing films were told from a female perspective. In contrast, the percentages for all speaking characters and major female characters are calculated on over 2,000 characters. As a result, the percentages for characters in speaking roles and major roles are more stable. The percentages of female characters in speaking roles increased only 2 percentage points from 35% in 2023 to 37% in 2024. The percentage of major female characters rose a single percentage point, from 38% in 2023 to 39% in 2024.

The full study is posted by the University of San Diego's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. I encourage you to take a look--it's only 14 pages long and filled with data and graphs. You will also find Lauzen's companion publication, The Celluloid Ceiling: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women on Top Grossing U.S. Films in 2024, at the same site. (Along with a wealth of other material.)

Marlene Dietrich Forever

Marlene Dietrich, Hollywood legend (born 27 December 1901)

Several years ago, one of my students stopped by my office to talk about a topic for a paper she was working on. We were reading Renaissance drama, and she was excited by the "cross-dressed heroines" that appeared in several plays. She was connecting the plays we were reading with a play she knew, Shakespeare's As You Like It, and was shocked by the issues of sex, gender, sexuality, and desire that these plays were raising (we had read Lyly's Galatea, Jonson's Epicoene, and, for a real twist, Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure).

A "cross-dressed" Dietrich in
Morocco

My student was struggling with ideas that weren't exactly new--feminist, gender, and queer theorists and critics have been reading these early-modern "transvestite heroines" for several decades--but they were new to her, and that was the point. She was struggling to sort out her insights and ideas and what exactly she wanted to say. 

She was excited and that made me excited--and after an hour or so of great conversation, as she was picking up all her texts, she pointed to a poster I had hanging in my office. "I've been meaning to ask," she said. "Who's that, anyway?"

That was a picture of Marlene Dietrich, one of the great screen presences. I was stunned that this bright, articulate, and very well read student didn't recognize Marlene Dietrich.

Well, to be honest, it's not that she didn't recognize Dietrich, she just had no idea who it was at all. 

I probably went on and on (okay, I did go on and on), but I suggested that, if she had a Netflix subscription, she make sure to put the 1930 film Morocco at the top of her queue--it had a great scene with a cross-dressed heroine . . .  

I don't remember much about the literature paper my student wrote, but I do remember that she watched that Dietrich film! And then went on to watch all the Dietrich that she could find . . . 

A glorious still from Shanghai Express

There are great online sites if you don't know Dietrich, or don't know as much about her as you'd like. So I'm linking here to the official Marlene Dietrich website, which doesn't try to sell you stuff and seems to be associated with the estate.* There is all kinds of biographical information there. I'll also link you here to the New York Times obituary, which also gives you good biographical information, and here to the entry for Dietrich on the Turner Classic Movies website.**

Mostly, though, the best way to know Marlene Dietrich is by her films! Definitely watch Morocco, but I'd also recommend Shanghai Express--which also features the brilliant Anna May Wong--and the truly bizarre Blonde Venus. And you might also enjoy The Scarlet Empress, with Dietrich as Catherine the Great . . . 

And one of my favorites is a film from very late in her career, 1957's Witness for the Prosecution. I watch it almost every time I find it on the TCM schedule, and it never fails to mesmerize me. 

Finally, I love Dietrich as a singer. Here's "Falling in Love Again" from a 1972 television special--this woman was in her seventies, people! (There are many performances from her long career posted on YouTube. They are occasionally removed, I am assuming for copyright reasons. If the link I've provided here doesn't work, just search YouTube, and you'll find many, many Marlene Dietrich songs, some recorded during live performances, others from her recordings.)

Update (June 2017): The National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D. C.) is hosting an exhibition, "Marlene Dietrich: Dressed for the Image," open from 16 June 2017 to 15 April 2018--focusing on Dietrich's androgyny and the way she "challenged strictly limited notions of femininity." For more details, click here.

*Update, 27 December 2021: This link seems to be no longer working, and I have not been able to find the new online address for this "official" Marlene Dietrich website. I've left the link, hoping the site may be back at some point.

Update, 27 December 2024: The website is back!

**Turner Classic Movies still has lots of great material on Dietrich (use the search function), but the “overview” of her life and career seems no longer to exist. I’ve linked here to the overview as it has been preserved by the Internet Archive. (If you search at the TCM site, don’t miss Frank Miller’s profile of Dietrich—it’s no substitute for the old overview, but it’s a succinct essay about her career.)

Mae West: "Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful"

Mae West (born 17 August 1893)

For many, Mae West is memorable only for her screen roles, particularly Lady Lou in She Done Him Wrong and Tira in I'm No Angel, both from 1933 and both co-starring Cary Grant. In the first of these films, West asks Grant, "Why don't you come up some time and see me?" In the second, she changes the line: "Come up and see me some time."

But West not only starred in these films (and a few others before the enforcement of the Hays Code made her blatantly sexual persona disappear from the screen), she created them. Long before Hollywood, she not only performed her greatest role--Mae West--she wrote and produced her own plays, and most of her films were based on her own scripts.

There is so much to say about West--but instead of me writing about her, I think it's best to let West speak for herself. These are just a few of her memorable, and memorably quotable, lines:

• I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
• I wrote the story myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it.
• When I'm good, I'm very good. When I'm bad, I'm better.
• Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
• I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
• It isn't what I do, but how I do it. It isn't what I say, but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it.
• I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.
• When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.
• Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.
• I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
• She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
• When women go wrong, men go right after them.
• There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.
• Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
• Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
• It is better to be looked over than overlooked.
• Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you.
• To err is human, but it feels divine.
• Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
• I've been rich and I've been poor. Believe me, rich is better.
• Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.
• Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
• I like my clothes to be tight enough to show I'm a woman, but loose enough to show I'm a lady.
• You're never too old to become younger.
• I like restraint, if it doesn't go too far.
• I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.
• A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
• I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
• Love thy neighbor--and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.
• It's all right for a perfect stranger to kiss your hand as long as he's perfect.
• It's not the men in my life that count, it's the life in my men.
• Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
• A man in the house is worth two in the street.
• A hard man is good to find.
• Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I'm tired.
• Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.
• A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.
• An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.
• Don't keep a man guessing too long -- he's sure to find the answer somewhere else.
• Flattery will get you everywhere.
• I've been things and seen places.
• I'm no angel, but I've spread my wings a bit.
• The score never interested me, only the game.
• Men are my hobby. If I ever got married I'd have to give it up.
• So many men . . . so little time.
• I only like two kinds of men, domestic and imported.
• I go for two kinds of men. The kind with muscles, and the kind without.
• I only have "yes" men around me. Who needs "no" men?
• Save a boyfriend for a rainy day--and another, in case it doesn't rain.
• Some men are all right in their place--if they only knew the right places!
• I like a man who's good, but not too good--for the good die young, and I hate a dead one.
• I feel like a million tonight. But one at a time.
• Men? Sure, I've known lots of them. But I never found one I liked well enough to marry. Besides, I've always been busy with my work. Marriage is a career in itself and to make a success of it you've got to keep working at it. So until I can give the proper amount of time to marriage, I'll stay single.
• His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork.
• He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.
• Don't marry a man to reform him--that's what reform schools are for.
• It takes two to get one in trouble.
• Too many girls follow the line of least resistance--but a good line is hard to resist.
• Good women are no fun. The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.
• Good sex is like good Bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.
• Diamonds is my career.
• When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.
• No gold-digging for me. I take diamonds! We may be off the gold standard someday.
• You can do what you want, but saving love doesn't bring any interest.
• Any time you got nothing to do and lots of time to do it, come on up.
• Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
• Kiss and make up--but too much makeup has ruined many a kiss.
• Brains are an asset to the woman in love who's smart enough to hide 'em.
• Say what you want about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.
• Cultivate your curves--they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided.
• The curve is more powerful than the sword.
• I've been in more laps than a napkin.
• I'd like to see Paris before I die. Philadelphia will do.
• I see you're a man with ideals. I better be going before you've still got them.
• Women with "pasts" interest men because men hope that history will repeat itself.
• Don't ever make the same mistake twice, unless it pays.
• You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

And, one of my favorites, since I've already posted on Catherine the Great. Here's Mae West from a speech she delivered during a curtain call after she performed her play Catherine Was Great: "She ruled thirty million people and had three thousand lovers. I do the best I can in two hours."

There are many wonderful biographies in addition to the films--and many websites. Unfortunately, the links to these websites are changing all the time, and I can't keep up with "fixing" all the broken links. So if you want to start reading online, I suggest the TCM "overview" of Mae West--click here.

Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart"

Mary Pickford (born 8 April 1892)

  

Mary Pickford, "the girl with the golden curls,"
in 1916

Born Gladys Louise Smith, the tiny Mary Pickford (just a hair over five feet tall) became famous by playing little girls with "golden curls"--including Tess, in Tess of the Storm Country; Fanchon, in Fanchon the Cricket; Molly, in The Foundling; the eleven-year-old Gwendolyn, in Poor Little Rich Girl; Rebecca, in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Sara, in The Little Princess; Pollyanna Whitler, in Pollyanna. 

Pickford acted in over 251 films during her career (she won the second Academy Award for best actress for her performance in 1929's Coquette), but her contributions to film go beyond her performances--in addition to acting, she produced, wrote, and directed.

According to the Mary Pickford Foundation, Pickford was "a multifaceted pioneer of early cinema": "she oversaw every aspect of the making of her films, from hiring talent and crew to overseeing the script, the shooting, the editing, to the final release and promotion of each project." She was also "a creative producer and a savvy businesswoman who helped shape the film industry as we know it today."

With D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, Pickford challenged the studios for artistic and economic control of her work, the four founding United Artists in 1919. She sold war bonds during the first world war, helped to establish the Motion Picture Relief Fund, now the Motion Picture & Television Fund (and served as its first vice president), and was one of the founders of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers in 1941.

Pickford (left) with legendary screenwriter
Frances Marion*

Pickford died in 1979, but her legacy lives on. There are numerous biographies, and many of her films are available on DVD--although they are not currently streaming on Netflix, they are quite regularly broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. Even better, a number of Pickford's films are available for streaming via the Internet Archive (The Little Princess, for example, which you can access by clicking here).

If you aren't familiar with Pickford or her work, I'd recommend heading over to the Mary Pickford Foundation website--there you can find excellent biographical information, archival footage, interviews, an extensive photo gallery, a complete filmography, any a generous selection of film clips.  

The PBS documentary series The American Experience produced a documentary on Mary Pickford. You can view it by clicking here (this link was last checked on 8 April 2026--if it is no longer working, you can find the documentary via Google.) A full-length documentary, produced by CBC, is available by clicking here. (Mary Pickford was born in Toronto.)

Pickford in 1941 at the site of another of her philanthropic projects,
the Mary Pickford War Funds bungalow

*If you've never heard of the screenwriter Frances Marion, you can start at IMDb!

Gloria Swanson: A Force to Be Reckoned With

Gloria Swanson (born 27 March 1899)

Although she is most remembered--if she is remembered at all--as the aging, crazed Norma Desmond in 1950's Sunset Boulevard, Swanson's career as a film actor and producer began in 1914. Over the course of nearly 70 years (she died on 4 March 1983), Swanson starred in dozens of silent shorts and feature films, made the transition into talking films and then television, turned down a million-dollar-a-year contract with Paramount pictures in 1927 to join United Artists, and ultimately started her own company, Gloria Productions.

In addition to acting, her film credits include singing and costume design. In 1938, she established Multiprizes, ostensibly a patent and invention company, though its purpose seems to have been aimed at helping Jewish scientists escape Europe and find refuge in the U.S. Swanson was nominated for a best actress Academy Award three times, including in 1927/28, the first year of the awards (she never won).

Swanson in Male and Female, 1919

Swanson was famous for her fashion, her many marriages and sexual liaisons, and her dedication to a vegetarian diet long before it became fashionable. In 1980, she published her autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, and although there are more than a few biographies written about her, her own account of her life seems the best place to start--it's as compelling on the page as Swanson herself is on screen.

If you haven't seen Swanson on film, you of course need to see Sunset Boulevard, but you should also see her in some of her great silent films, especially Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Wife (1920), Beyond the Rocks (1922, with Rudolph Valentino), and Sadie Thompson (1927). It's too bad that none of Swanson's films is currently on Netflix's streaming service, but many are available on DVD, and they are frequently shown on Turner Classic Movies.

For an excellent review of Gloria Swanson's contributions to the emerging film industry, see the profile at the Women Film Pioneers Project. This site includes biographical information, a bibliography, and a well-documented filmography. And, obviously, there's great info on Swanson at IMDb

Swanson in Sadie Thompson, 1928

Before Marilyn Monroe, There Was Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow (born 3 March 1911)

For most of my college students, the phrase "blond bombshell" applies only to Marilyn Monroe--but long before Marilyn, there was Jean Harlow.

Although she died suddenly in 1937, just twenty-six years old, Harlow made a series of films that guarantee her onscreen immortality.

It's hard to go wrong with a Harlow film, but if you haven't seen it--or if you haven't watched it in a while--I recommend 1932's Red Dust, with Clark Gable. 

For a complete list of her films, check out Jean Harlow: The Official Site, which offers a brief a filmography and lots of photos.* There are also great biographies; I recommend Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira's Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937.

*This website seems to have disappeared in late 2024, but I’ve linked you here to a copy preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.