"What Women Are Allowed Into The Club Of Geniuses Anyway?" "The Brontes?" "Hm. That's It?" "Yes, I Think

favorite female on pre-code

↳ ann dvorak: three on a match (1932)

BUtterfield 8 (1960)

A Family portrait during the Spanish Flu, 1918 ♡

A teenage boy in Des Moines, Iowa, 1945. Photo taken by Nina Leen.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols)

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

HARRY HOUDINI ↳ as Harvey Hanford in The Grim Game // cuffs

I totally lost it when he looked at the camera. <3

I got 37373 tabs open in my head rn

Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character. It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.