1930s’ screen sirens - don’t fancy yours much!

Ask contemporary women if they fancy any major male movie stars who emerged in the Thirties and I bet most of them would come up with a few names (for instance, someone with whom I am on terms of some intimacy just mentioned Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and, very definitely, James Stewart).

Ask contemporary males about major female stars of that time and I bet most heterosexuals would be hard pressed to single one out. (If any man tells you he simply adores Greta Garbo’s cheekbones, by the way, he’s gay. Very.) 

Louise Brooks

The Silent Era produced some very cute, round-faced girls (Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, for instance) and the Forties were crammed with stunningly attractive women: I realise it’s hard to apply objective standards in this area, but I reckon most red-blooded males would have found themselves attracted to several, if not all, of the following: Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Joan Fontaine, Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward or Veronica Lake, to name just a few.

Sophia Loren

Leslie Caron

Brigitte Bardot

Silvana Mangano

The Fifties, of course, gave us Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron, Silvana Mangano and Sophia Loren! I mean, caramba!

Please move along, sir!

I just don't get it!

But, chaps, can any of you put hand on heart and tell me you get all hot and bothered watching Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ruby Keeler, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard? I’m not saying there aren’t some great actresses in there (and some pretty rotten ones as well) or that some of them don’t display vibrant onscreen personas, but do they have your tongues hanging out? Really? To be fair, there are a few sirens of the era I can imagine garnering the odd “hubba! hubba!” these days – Fay Wray, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, for instance, but none of them were really big stars.

Many things might account for the absence of the phwoarrh! factor amongst leading ladies. First, the Hayes Code - introduced in 1930 in response to official disapproval of the lewdness of some Silent Era films and a series of steamy Hollywood sex scandals – might have prevented studios from hiring the sort of sexy little wenches who had enlivened the previous decade. 

Then there were the voices - maybe pretty girls tended to have squeaky, high-pitched ones back then.

Then there’s the fact that many of the women I’ve cited were genuine actresses - they could turn their hand to a whole range of parts, rather than just hang around looking decorous. 

Perhaps female picture-goers were more important to the success of movies during the Depression – if the Twenties were about Sex (which would, one presumes, have appealed mainly to men), the Thirties seem to have been more about Glamour, which is of more interest to women. (Interestingly, the most overtly sexual star of the 1930s was Mae West, who reduced sex appeal to pure comedy.)

What seemed to define the most popular actresses at the time was strength rather than girlish softness – character and making the best of whichever physical assets you possessed, no matter how evidently limited, was definitely in. Perhaps, with so many men out of work, women were being thrown back more on their own resources. (This is wild conjecture, I’ll admit.)

Then again, could it just be that the 1930s were a time when men’s tastes were very different from what they had been, and would later become? After all, taste in these matters does seem to change markedly with each decade. But I really doubt there was ever a time when many male heterosexuals would have genuinely fancied Greta Garbo or Joan Crawford – it’s no accident that they both turned into gay icons. Garbo is a female fantasy of feminine allure, all languid and sleepy-eyed and exotic without actually being in the least bit sexy - and Joan Crawford generally played the sort of ruthless, nut-cracking, manipulative schemer most of us boys would run a mile from.

          

       

The main exception to all this, I suppose, was Jean Harlow. While she looks too much like a sulky Essex shopgirl for my tastes, she seems to have been a throw-back to the fun-loving ‘20s. I bet she got 1930s blokes in a lather while leaving women cold. 

Claudette Colbert

            

But surely, Scott, I hear you ask, you must fancy someone from that decade.  Well, yes, I do – Claudette Colbert, who you’ll remember as Clark Gable’s sparring partner in It Happened One Night (see above). She had a pretty face (which could only be photographed from one side, apparently). As for Glamour – my favourite is that supremely talented, long-legged tap-dancer, Eleanor Powell, who was at her glittering best here, in Broadway Melody of 1936. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, but, goodness, she lit up the screen!

Eleanor Powell

In case you didn’t grow up in a movie-mad household or are simply too young to know who the hell I’m talking about, most of the actresses I mention are to be found at this website. The only one to whom I have a genuine aversion - to the extent that I’ve only ever been able to watch one of her films all the way through (the superb Ninotchka, with a sparkling screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder) - is Greta Garbo, and for that I blame Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who did a wonderful hatchet job on the whole Garbo mystique in Not Only But Also.