A Stranger on a Train

Reprinted from PoP--An Emporium of Popular Culture

Pop Eye
By Scott Duhamel



Among true aficionados Strangers on a Train (1951) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) are considered among the famed British directors most resolutely American films (notably, the former was co-scripted by Raymond Chandler, the latter by Thornton Wilder), both of them smaller movies that brilliantly illustrate Hitchcock’s talents before his populist career turn that came with big budgets, big stars, and well-earned box office lionization.

Strangers on a Train also remains as one of the more lucid examples of Hitchcock’s long term thematic fascination with both doppelgangers and the wrong man theme. The plot revolves around an enigmatic exchange of words between one Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) and Guy Haines (Farley Granger) during a random train ride, a meeting that results in a murder and a falsely accused protagonist fumbling nervously to protest his innocence. In the words of the film, criss-cross.

While Robert Walker’s obviously deranged Bruno character, with his mile-long oedipal complex propelling the movies’ plot, has long been the weirdly compelling figure that audiences and critics have focused on, it is Farley Granger and his portrait of tennis star Guy that actually surfaces as the lynchpin of the Hitchcock’s moral and psychological game playing. Granger’s Guy is fit and particularly handsome, yet he wears his neuroses on his sleeve, and sends off palatable vibes of both self-loathing and social climbing desperation. The movie’s resonance rests upon the fact that despite the fact that the wild and wooly Bruno is the actual killer of uptight and out-of-sight Guy’s slattern wife, Guy undeniably wanted himself rid of her. The suggestion of an overt homosexual attraction between the two men flavors the film strongly also, all the more ironic because Granger would eventually come out the closet while still active in his acting career (his 2007 memoir was entitled Include Me Out).

Granger--whose name begs the question who the hell’s parents name a kid Farley?-- died in March, was born in San Jose, California in 1925, and was signed by Sam Goldwyn as a contract player in the early 1940’s, as a skinny but pretty tow-headed young lead. After a somewhat checkered 40 plus year stint in the movie biz, the actor found decent success on the stage. He did carve out a small place for himself in the overall Hollywood firmament with strong appearances in Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Nic Ray’s They Live by Night (1949), and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), but we will always remember him as the cocky but hapless Guy, a bit more than a mere stranger on a train, quivering impotently with anger and frustration (and a deep blotch of black guilt) as Bruno’s dancing eyes gaze upon him trapped in the frame of Hitchcock’s accusatory lens.

Inception Lite

The following column is reprinted from the April issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):




Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel


Christopher Nolan’s Inception was a grand rush of a sci-fi movie, overflowing with eye-catching visuals, brimming with storytelling brio, and offering (for the many true believers) just enough emotional fission to mark it as a truly distinctive cinematic offering. Obviously, Hollywood (always know for it’s unabashedly and constant self-cannibalization), did more than just note the critical hosanna’s and major box office bugaloo of Inception, and we, the sturdy film going public—particularly those with a propensity towards the fabulist movie tale—must prepare ourselves to keep plunging down the movie-movie rabbit hole. In fact the last month, has seen not one, but two (almost three if you would like to stretch the boundaries a bit and include the Bradley Cooper vehicle, Limitless), variations of Inception Lite, The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code.

Let’s examine the elements of the Inception Lite soup: mucho digital action, jigsaw puzzle plotting, godlike overseers, big themes swirling around matters of destiny and choices of free will, mind bending spatial or time travel, ever shifting narrative twists and shouts, artificial structural roles guided by the premise, intermittent gaping holes of logic, unintentionally preposterous leaps of movie going faith, and , always, a cool youngish (interchangeable) white male (Leo DiCaprio in Inception, Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code).

The Adjustment Bureau, written and directed by The Bourne Ultimatum’s scribe George Nolfi, stars the aforementioned Damon, alongside John Slattery, Anthony Mackie and Emily Blunt as, well, as pretty much par for the course in this breed of film, The Girl.Based (but largely altered) on a short story by sci-fi guru and visionary Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report), The Adjustment Bureau means to be part fabulist thriller and part Kafaesque nightmare, with Damon as an ambitious politician who manages to discover that there are bunch of officious government types running around in fedoras controlling and altering people’s fates. Of course, after running into The Girl in a public bathroom the hat guys emerge to inform him that his pursuit of the free-spirited woman is a definite no-no and, more importantly, a shake-it-up life changer that will forever imbalance some sort of pre-written destiny.

Matt’s politico doesn’t dig that noise, so the movie delineates his impulsive and determined dash away from the fates prescribed and towards the unfathomable possibility of true (and random) love. (And includes a whole lotta hanging out in the rain, where somehow the hat boys can’t see him.)

The ongoing discourse about choice and self-determination remains a wheezy center of the film, while the old school love story manages top generate a decent amount of classical movie romantic tension. Director Nolfi and his cinematographer John Toll craft some better-than-average sequences and a nice overall gray feel but the movie is never as provocative as it wants to be, nor does it succeed in laying out one of these suffocating blankets of paranoiac dread. Damon’s well-acted intensity is certainly a plus, but The Adjustment Bureau is merely palatable.

Source Code heads down yet another dark and deterministic alley as Gyllenhaal’s military man suddenly wakes up on a train with no conception of where is he and why he is there and gets blown into smithereens a mere eight minutes later. Once again, the hands of some mysterious bureaucrats (Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright) are holding onto the puppet strings and Gyllenhal’s gold soldier keeps getting sent back to the same time and place in a repeated loop, sweating and straining to solve the bombing before it goes boom-kaboom and, yup, falling under the spell of The Girl (Michelle Monaghan) he engages with on the train.

The young director behind Source Code is Duncan Jones, whose little seen 2009 effort, Moon, received much praise in certain circles and even gained a small but rabid post failed-release following. The earlier films showed that he was a burgeoning craftsman and perhaps even an original cinematic thinker, and Source Code demonstrates that he can confidently take on bigger material. To his everlasting credit he avoids the videogame stylistics that a movie of this sort could so easily fall into, and while the movie cruises along at an accelerated pace, replete with multiple jump starts, it doesn’t become another case of technical proficiency acing out filmmaking artistry.

Like Damon, Gyllenhall holds his own, as his slow transition from pure befuddlement to focused soothsayer is delivered with panache and his lone seeker figure gains resonance as he ping-pongs through some mind tripping editing and psychedelic explosions. The Source Code also deserves praise for framing it’s build-up of central figure anxiety with a slightly ironic, almost meta, tone.

As with Inception, both The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code are movies far too enraptured with their own too-cool-for-thou structures, and as much as they hint towards a big screen examination of some overwhelming existential morass they remain filtered through the vagaries of commercialism. (In the case of Inception, Christopher Nolan’s superior talents works towards making an audience forget all of that strained seriousness and eventually give in and jump on the glorious –but decidedly pseudo-intellectual—joy ride.) These films strive hard to elucidate and to pose significant philosophical conundrums, yet they ultimately work as entertainment baubles and remain extra sensory side trips with all too little emotional grounding. Presented with the unique opportunity to be given a chance to go backwards and change fate, or go sideways and forward to affect or bypass what supposedly has been determined will remain a lynchpin of both sci-fi and sci-fi cinema. It just ain’t that all-fired effective when the sounds of the whooshing coils and the clatter of the well-oiled machinery keeps unexpectedly protruding into the ever desired dream state.

I don't have a new Pony, but I do have a new Hobby

(Reprinted from PopKrazy)



Forget the burgeoning baseball season, forget rereading Raymond Chandler or keep reading Steve Erickson, forget the Boston Globe sports page, forget continually listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage, forget obsessively filling the backlog of my unseen Gunsmoke episodes, forget making lists of the top ten Warren Oates’ character names, forget buying every single ripped-off, repetitive, and badly recorded Johnny Thunders recording evah, forget checking a few more outré film noirs off the grand list, forget finishing that piece about the stony greatness of Pynchon’ s last book, forget about finally beginning that new David Foster Wallace kinda-last-maybe-baby novel. Fuggedabouit, I’ve acquired a new hobby, another fresh and fertile landscape to explore, somehow a totally new (and astonishingly original) slab of pop cult meat to vulture on.

I do indeed own dogs, and dig those dogs (Boston Terriers named Francis and Alfredo), but I’m not a drooling beastie lover like so many I know, fighting back antic urges to spew baby animal smack tawk or tackle and pet and roll in the dirt with four-leggers behind cages or fences or sticking their heads outta passing car windows. Nor do I go hog wild over the Animal Planet show choices (truth be told, haven’t watched or desired to watch one show on this specialized cable network, so much that even when I was sick and could barely manipulate the clicker I passed it bye-bye), or read any sorta book that has anything to do with wild or tame beasts, or even considered the real life touching or petting of animals that don’t reside in my very own household. Nope, not me, and although I didn’t wanna admit it way back when, I didn’t even dig the whole Lassie scene, never mind the horribly monikered Rin Tin Tin.

Hardy-har-har, the funny part is the whole too-cool-too-be-true hobby kinda centers around animals, although they are as dead as the proverbial doornail or like Barry Goldwater’s corpse. Other killer aspect is that I can do a whole lotta boning up on the art/craft/science of my new hobby, and I don’t usually go near the science thang. (A sign of maturity, perhaps. Somebuddy tell my wife.) Other topnotch debating point: I’ll join a cult of few rather than more, and I’ll jump straight into the gonzo weirdness, immediately staking out the point-of-view of a verified hipster connoisseur and commentator, and that’s tough to do at my age. Further bonus: I also get to apply my finely honed critical skills into a pop culture sidebar that combines photography, absurdism, redneckism, and you just can’t beat the combo, even my pop cult guru Mr. Hull of PopKrazy can’t, and he was born and bred in the South and recklessly celebrates his heritage.

What I am talking about? Forgive me, but I haveta exhort and counsel you all (notice the southern verbiage, although please don’t discount this all those of who reside in Michigan)) about perhaps the greatest blog I’ve come across yet in the grand, vast, empty slop-bucket blogosphere—Crappy Taxidermy. I’m long gone, I’m hooked, I’m over the top, and I sincerely guarantee you that those you’ve long admired—like Lux Interior, Harvey Pekar, Elisha Cook, Jr, Russ Meyer, and RL Burnside—were on to this from the very beginning, no kidding at all. That means something. Trust me bro’s and sis’s.

It’s Crappy Taxidermy, and it should be all the time—stroke those thumbs and go straight onto http://crappytaxidermy.com/.

You won’t regret it, no way Jack (or Jill) or Rover.

Gender Games

Reprinted from PoP--An Emporium of Popular Culture


Pop Eye
By Scott Duhamel

Ken and Barbie have long stood as among the ultimate consumable manifestations of baby boomer gender definers, yet the 50’s and 60’s were abundant with pink vs. blue masculine/feminine boundary settings, emanating from all corners, whether they be comic books, toys, TV shows, or plain old board games. What shall I Be?, manufactured by the Selchow & Richter Company, fits right into those quaint and uninformed times, with “The Exciting Game of Career Girls” arriving in 1966, followed by (note the change in verbiage) “The Exciting Career Game for Boys” in 1968.
SelRight Co. was a fairly big board game player, founded in 1867 in Bay Shore, New York, initially purchasing the licensing rights for Parcheesi in 1874 and Scrabble in 1952, and also producing a wide variety of games, from the known (Anagrams, Jotto ), the little known (Go for Broke, Whodunit, Meet the Presidents), to the truly unknown (Assembly Line, Cabby, Huggin’ the Rail.)

Both versions of What shall I be? are recommend for ages 8-13 and center around the pursuit of adult careers. The boys can aspire to be (yup), a Doctor, Athlete, Astronaut, Scientist, Engineer, and, ahem, Statesman, while the girls (lucky them) get to be a Teacher, Ballerina, Nurse, Model, Actress and Airline Stewardess. As you move around the board cards with character traits are acquired, providing board game guidance to those wonderful careerist aspirations. You get too excited—that’s bad for Astronauts, Doctors, and Statesman and equally bad for Nurses and Airline Hostesses. You are unfriendly—that’s bad for Statesman and Doctors, implying that it’s good for the others and perhaps explaining all those unfriendly astronauts we’ve all run into. You are emotional-that’s good for models and actresses. You are a slow thinker-fuggetaboutit for Astronauts, Docs, and Athletes and equally bad for (once again) Airline Hostesses and Nurses.

The cover graphics spell it out clearly—the boys version depicts a Paul Peterson-type inside a picture frame (or mirror), hand resting firmly on cheek with blue eyes gazing firmly and hopefully forward as he envisions a Doc bathed in white light at the operating table surrounded by concerned hospital help toiling alongside in the shadows, a fullback applying a stiff arm while he thunders down the open field, and an astronaut tethered to a capsule as he floats above a crated and dented surface, all of it boldly inked in a kinda of continuous splash across the oblong box cover. The girls version has within its small frame (or mirror) a young ribbon-attired lass with one finger tentatively inching towards her slightly parsed lips under eyes wide with uncertainty, as an Archie Comics-styled tableau of six costumed woman appears in her quivering imagination, four outfitted with skirts lined right to the knee, all (with the exception of the blond long-trussed actress garbed in what appears to be some kind of Elizabethan sheath) with short, tight, or pulled-back hairdo’s, none of them looking prepared to turn and face the ch-ch-changes that the tumultuous decade that birthed them would eventually bring.

Wherefore Art Thou, Nicky Baby?

The following column is reprinted from the March issue of Providence Monthly (including the stuff my youthful editors somehow deem necessary to leave out):





Eyes Wide Open
By Scott Duhamel


While observing Charlie Sheen’s down-the-torpedoes meltdown, and listening to the various theories ascribed to his transcendentally deer-in-the-spotlights behavior, I can’t help but reflect upon the vast and often galvanizing storied history of Hollywood-styled bad behavior, engagements with law enforcement, and just plain public burn-outsthat some many Tinsletown players have undergone—always feeding the trough of public desire-from Fatty Arbuckle to Mel Gibson, from Errol Flynn to Robert Mitchum, from Joan Crawford to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Equally intriguing to me are the on-screen contretemps often evident when one peers behind the lens of various box office bugaloos; when an actor or actress off-screen neuroses, real life back story, or overall bad acting somehow peeks out from the façade of costumes and settings, plot line or role playing, shining a weird inner light on the big screen thespian’s inner life, as most obviously manifested in the off and on-camera antics of Marlon Brando, the crown prince of Hollywood looniness.

Case in point in one Nicolas Cage, our long time fave-rave Nicky Baby, our own contempo harbinger of big screen noxiousness, who has easily surpassed a near legion of contenders that include (to name a select few) Val Kilmer, Nick Nolte, Sean Young, Vincent Gallo, Crispin Glover, and once kingpin Mickey Rourke. Nicky Baby is once again delivering the damaged goods, back front and way left of center with Drive Angry, a wacky throwback that might even be seen as a high-spirited homage to 70’s drive-in movies if it weren’t so virulently dreadful.

True, Nicky Baby has largely shed himself of real life baggage (obsessive comic book collecting, Brat Pack partying, big league tax problems, a marriage to Lisa Presley), yet he is seemingly hell-bent on forging one of the most implosive and corrosive career paths of anyone regularly working in today’s movies with their name above the title. Face it, if a movie features Nic Cage you can be assured that it will be filled to the brim with a creaky plot framework, misspent and unfulfilled ambitions, and (best of all) full scale glazed-ham acting. To his everlasting credit Nicky Baby seems to sign on these projects with an undeniable (and possibly fevered) work ethic, and then emitted with a ravenous on-screen style that resembles nothing more than an ember-eyed fox circling the open gate of a well- populated chicken coop. Nicky Baby always commits. The question becomes how low can he go?

Let us not forget that, once upon a time, Nicky Baby was considered a committed and highly quirky player, displaying a consistentversatility and continually demonstrating a robust sense of adventure. Nicky Baby ‘s early and middle work was characterized by cool projects and memorable impartment—Rumble Fish,Birdy, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Bringing Out the Dead, all capped off by the wonderful double turn in Adaptation in 2002. Since then, what hath Nicky Baby wrought? National Treasure, The Wicker Man, GhostRider, Bangkok Dangerous, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Season of the Witch, and of course the captivatingly gonzo The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans a non-sequel/sequel with a title as off-putting as Cage’s mesmerizingly off-kilter performance.

One of the essential elements of a Nic Cage performance is the choice of hair. To Nicky Baby, it always seems to begin with the hair, and in Drive Angry it’s blond and spindly, the better to accent his character’s grim (and angry) countenance. Nicky Baby is one John Milton (yet another nod to the movie’s subversively high intentions), and he’s a (angry) granddad in hot pursuit of his grandchild, who has been kidnapped by a satanic cult, led by a punkabilly ringleader named Jonah King (Billy Burke). Nicky Baby is soon joined by that drive-in staple, a comely young waitress (Amber Heard), who sports two eye-raising attributes, denim short-shorts and a cherry 1969 Dodge Charger, and they are in turn pursued by cooler-than-thou professional known as “the Accountant” (William Fichtner), a guy seemingly invulnerable to every sort of weapon of mass or minor destruction with the exception of an antique gun that Nicky Baby stows alongside his changes of underwear and comb collection.

Drive Angry boasts one of the greatest scenes in recent Nicky Baby history, wherein he puffs up a cigar while swallowing dollops of whiskey and picking off a pack of cultists armed with gardening tools while having sex. Trust me, that’s a cinematic conception that needs no such frothy underlining like special effects or effective acting.

I’d personally like to see Nicky Baby reunited with his equally downward spiraling uncle, Mad Francis Ford Coppola, to add to the legacy that they have already begun, collaborating before on Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and greatest of all, Peggy Sue Got Married. With their potent mix of deteoriating taste, talent and all out chutzpah, they may indeed be capable of carving out a spot in the annals of directorial-acting partnerships, joing such luminaries as John ford and John Wayne, Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock, or Marty Scorsese and Robert DeNiro.

For now we simply have Nicky Baby in all his glorious and unabashed badness, keeping it unreal in Drive Angry, a movie so overtly dumb, so inscrutably wacky, so blithely idiotic that it’s virtually bad cinema nirvana. In 3-D, no less.

RIP Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

Reprinted from PoP--An Emporium of Popular Culture

La Liz. Arguably the first of the imperial-celebrities and the last of the great movie stars. An iconic screen beauty, a living, fire-breathing personification of American womanhood, glamour, and (yup) personal drama, she grew upright in front of the peepers of the masses, going from child actress to dowager spokesperson, all the while hip-hopping through eight marriages (two to Richard Burton, with whom she also made eleven movies), befriending and mentoring the self-named King of Pop, Michael Jackson , getting nominated for five Oscars and actually winning twice (for 1960’s BUtterfield 8 and 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), singlehandedly raising the national consciousness about AIDS, becoming an everlasting gay icon (and standing up in public for closeted stars Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson), and ,for a while, becoming the highest paid actress in the Hollywood Dream Factory while being denounced by the Vatican, all the while her black-haired beauty and infinitely deep violet eyes searing an indelible image that will forever remain in big screen perpetuity.

Born in London, the daughter of a St. Louis art dealer and his actress wife, she wound up in Los Angeles at the age of 7 as her parents left England to escape the war, and then, at 11-years-old, grabbed a role as Roddy McDowall’s pre-teen honey in Lassie Come Home in 1943. It was National Velvet in 1944 that put her on the star-watching maps, and a central role in Father of the Bride (’50) that kept her there. Initially Taylor was a luminously pretty face and highly radiant presence, but working with strong directors and making good choices solidified her as something much more than another prefab confection, and screen goers (particularly woman), heaved, and sighed and hurt along with her as she executed more complex roles in strong pictures like A Place in the Sun ( ‘51 ), Giant (’56) (in which, tellingly, she was actually a year younger than her newcomer co-star and blazing constellation, James Dean), Raintree County (’57), Suddenly Last Summer (’59), the aforementioned BUtterfield 8 (’60), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’61), and finally her ultimate role as the harridan-like wife and hard-fading beauty of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (’66).

While Taylor , however historically and physically inauthentic, will always remain the living, breathing, eye-batting incarnate of Cleopatra; somehow her failed 1963 opus of the same name turned her career (and life) into something broader and more wide-ranging than cinematic stardom, as she began a new phase of perpetual public scrutiny, with hash-throwers, cosmetologists, and garage mechanics dishing the collective dirt on her romances, hairstyles, public drunkenness, diamond obsession, and seemingly dozen of visits to hospitals and doctors for a never-ending variety of ailments. Through it all, she managed to be simultaneously glamorous and thoroughly down-to-earth, consistently feisty and almost preternaturally sultry, unabashedly voluptuous and forever rash, a radiant diva with down-home urges and next-door neighbor actions, a public sinner and unknowing embodiment of feminine independence.

Her screen career may have actually topped off as the 1970’s arrived, but good work still remains here and there with films like Reflections of a Golden Eye (’67), Secret Ceremony (’68), and A Little Night Music (’78), yet she never suffered anything close to a career burn-out, making TV movies and commercials, advocating for charities, and continually making a splash when she deemed it worthy to step out into the public eye. Elisabeth Taylor (she personally disliked “Liz”), began her career as an emergent screen goddess with every view of the camera rendering her more emblematic , yet she wound up being a more than respectable actress, arguably ranking in the nether regions with the likes of Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis. It’s doubtful whether will ever see the likes of her kind of outsized vocational orbit today, although one can certainly recognize elements of her success surfacing in the movie oeuvres of Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, while such contempo growing-up-in-public female celebs like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, or even Madonna couldn’t collectively cause the commotion that the notorious single bat of a long eye-lash flickering past the deeply emerald eyes of Taylor’s could accomplish—it was a cinematic knock-out punch delivered with guile and ease.

Jane Russell: Mean, Moody, and Magnificent

(Reprinted from PopKrazy)



Obviously, once upon a time there were no Kardashian sisters, no up skirt websites, no mass produced semi-celebrity sex tapes, and no instantly publishable photographs of the glitterati sans underwear. Way back in the not-so-long-ago 1940 and 50’s, except deep under the furtive shadows of the deviant underground and the back room demi-monde, overt sexuality on display was unheard of. Unlike today, it was about suggestion, aura, dress style, costume, pose-- all of it artful artifice--with the exception of the somewhat innocent concentration on the one lowest-common-dominator feminine psychical characteristic commonly referred to as “curves”. Jane Russell, perhaps one of the greatest of all Hollywood Va-Va-Voom girls, had every ingredient listed in that last sentence, and she had ‘em spades.

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born deep in the middle of America, in Bemidji, Minn., in 1921. She and her family moved to SoCal when she was 9-months-old, and after graduating high school she enrolled in acting classes at Max Reinhardt’s theater workshop, also doing some minor league modeling. While working as an assistant in a chiropodist’s office a photo of her found its way to one of the US’s most infamous wayward sons, Howard Hughes, then beginning his filmmaking period, and he cast her at the age of 19 in 1940 as the temptress in his much ballyhooed western The Outlaw. Of course, the movie was plagued with Hughes’ usual weird karma, only getting a strange initial run in San Francisco in 1943, another one in New York in 1947, and it did not get an actual national release until 1950. Not of that seemed to matter, as it was unleashed with a torrent of publicity and controversy, much of it over a poster featuring Russell with the caption: “Mean…Moody..Magnificent,” and Russell immediately became part of the nation’s collective big screen firmament, with the actress’s charms labeled as particularly overt and unusually bourgeoisie (and somewhat scary since she came across as so fiercely carnal), undeniably a new breed of the long-standing movie-movie tough and glamorous broad.

The Outlaw poster might still stand as an appropriate visual definition of sultry, as it depicted Russell lounging in a haystack, eyes smoldering, a gun in one hand, and her open-topped skirt falling off one shoulder to focus attention on semi-bared breasts that looked more powerful then M-1 missiles. The Roman Catholic church made a hue and cry, stories surfaced that Hughes, the movie’s producer and boy genius (after casting Russell when supposedly spotting her himself at a doctor’s office) designed his own special contoured bra, although Russell long contended she never actually wore it, rendering each part of the tale equally apocryphal yet still long preserved as Tinseltown lore.

Russell was no great shakes as a dramatic personage, but her incandescent sexuality, a powerful mix of otherworldly knowingness, a sizzling personality, and torrid airs, virtually leaped off the big screen and she became a pin-up fave rave. She is wonderful teamed with Bob Hope in The Paleface (‘48) and inexplicably enough, fortuitously partnered with Marilyn Monroe in the Technicolor gem that is Gentleman Prefer Blondes (’53). Russell also acquitted herself quite well in Macao (’52), Son of Paleface (’52), The Las Vegas Story (’52), The Tall Men (’55), and The Revolt of Mamie Stover (’56).

The vagaries of pop culture are often windblown and propelled by avarice, but somehow Russell remerged in the70’s and all the way through the 80’s as the television spokeswoman for Playtex bras, which she touted on the small screen as the perfect accouterment for “full figured gals” like herself, thus becoming an extreme feminine object of desire and commerce twice in her public life. By then her big screen career had faded into the rearview mirror, and eventually both her looks and politics grew harsh; but, as always, we are blessed to keep her image fixed in a time and place where she stood tall as a Lioness among kitty cats, as among the most red-blooded of the screen sirens, as the magnificently full figured gal posing knowingly in the stable, ferocious, challenging, and notoriously exuding the deep mystique that signifies forbidden pleasures. Russell stands forever shimmering and perpetually radiant, an absolute knock-out, while never a knock-over.