“The Very Best Screenplay I Was Ever Sent Was `Double Indemnity.’ It’s Brilliant, But What’s

Harold Lloyd in The Flirt (1917)

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

Garbo got a kick out of sporting turtlenecks at a time when only jockeys and prizefighters wore them, and she was the first film star, followed by Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich, to liberate women from skirts. Knowing observers slipped innuendo into their reports of Garbo and Dietrich’s preference for masculine styles. Vanity Fair pictured the Swede and the German, in 1932, under the headline “Both Members of the Same Club,” implying more than their mutual fondness for men’s suits and slouch hats.

Women who spurned skirts were not only violating taboos at the time, but breaking laws; in Paris in the twenties, a permis de travestissement was required of any female wearing a man’s suit. Mores were not much more relaxed on Hollywood Boulevard. “Garbo in Pants!” shouted a wire-photo caption.

“Innocent by standers gasped in amazement to see Mercedes de Acosta and Garbo in pants pretty much managed to go Where she pleased (and, perversely, she didn’t seem to mind the extra attention her fashion preferences brought her).

One night in 1928 Bill Frye slipped her into Chasen’s by rolling her trousers up beneath her overcoat, which she wore to the table. “We had already booked the reservation,” says Frye, “and when I saw what she was wearing I called the restaurant and told them I was bringing Miss Garbo to dinner and could she please come in slacks. They said no, she could not. I asked, ‘What if you put us to the right, just as we come in the door?’ They still said no, so we played our little trick.”

Greta Garbo striding swiftly along… dressed in men’s clothes.” A few days later, MGM sent out a story under Garbo’s name, in which she apologized for inflicting her “trousered attitude” on hostesses, escorts, and maitres d’.

Greta Garbo in The Single Standard (1929)

Young girl taking a lunch break surrounded by barrels of herring in the small fishing town of Siglufjörður

Iceland - Siglufjörður, 1957

editing your own writing is like woah you really like commas........ maybe ease up on those commas there, pal........ maybe Fewer commas would be nice

"As Cora, Lana was costumed throughout in a stark white wardrobe. Her hair was a snowy white as well, and against a deep suntan she acquired for the role, the effect was startling. At the time, Life predicted Lana's all-white wardrobe would 'become historic.' More recently, director Garnett recalled the incentive for this striking conversation piece: 'The white clothing was something that Carey (Wilson) and I thought of. At that time there was a great problem of getting a story with that much sex past the censors. We figured that dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did seem less sensuous. It was also attractive as hell. And it somehow took a little of the stigma off everything that she did. They didn't have 'hot pants' then, but you couldn't tell it by looking at hers.' "The 'hot pants' referred to by Garnett was actually a two-piece playsuit designed by MGM's Irene and her associate, Marion Herwood Keyes. It was so effective at the time that it helped popularize the vogue for women's shorts. This is the outfit that Cora is wearing when she makes her first breahtaking entrance into the film. The scene begins as a lipstick rolls across the floor. Frank Chambers (Garfield) stoops to retrieve it and his eyes hit upon a figure in the doorway. At first glance, it appears to be an apparition. The camera slowly scans the figure from her white high heels, up her slim naked legs, to her white form-fitting shorts and well-filled blouse. Finally, it settles on her face and her lush, platinumed hair, so perfectly encased in a white turban." -Lou Valentino

LANA TURNER in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE — 1946

FILMS IN 2023: → A Free Soul (1931) — dir. clarence brown