The typical plot hinged on the wildly arousing violation of a beautiful and innocent blonde by a dark beast of massive sexual potency. Posters advertising The Blonde Captive of 1932, for example, showed a gorgeous bare-breasted blonde being dragged off by a simian aborigine. Trader Horn of 1930 tells the story of a missionary’s daughter kidnapped as a child by cannibals with less than chivalric intentions. She grows up to rule over their tribe, her voluminous blonde hair acting both as an improvised halterneck top and as a symbol of white superiority amid black savagery. And in Blonde Venus of 1932, the blonde goddess Marlene Dietrich, who insisted on wearing $60 worth of powdered gold in her wig to give herself a little extra sparkle, appears in a gorilla suit among a chorus-line of gyrating blacked-up beauties. As she peels off her skin she sings ‘Hot Voodoo’, voicing subliminal desires of miscegenation.
But the film offering the most outrageously heavy-handed dose of racial paranoia was King Kong. This grew from an impressively kinky image in the mind of producer Merian Cooper, of a colossal racially coded beast, a gorilla, ‘so large’, he told the Hollywood Reporter in February 1933, ‘that he could hold the beauty in the palm of his hand, pulling bits of her clothing from her body until she was denuded’. In the voodoo steaminess of Skull Island, the beautiful blonde Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray, is kidnapped by natives and sacrificed to the beast, who whisks her away and defends her from dinosaurs and other hideous primeval predators. Acting on his rights of possession, King Kong begins to peel off scraps of her dress, ratcheting up the sexual tensions until eventually he is subdued by white technology, a gas bomb. Chained and enslaved, the gorilla is taken to America, where he escapes to run amok in New York City, throwing cars at the New York Stock Exchange, smashing trains, chewing New Yorkers and eventually climbing the Empire State Building, still clutching his blonde. The film was a box office bonanza and went on to become a global hit. But there was one exception. In Germany, Goebbels banned the film on the basis of the ape’s alluring power. But through neutral Sweden he obtained blackmarket copies for the Fiihrer and himself to enjoy. It was still one of Hitler’s favourite films at the end of the war when he used to sit in his bunker on the eastern front, watching screenings late into the night.
King Kong was made in 1933, but within a year of its production, American cinema had changed. In July 1934, the Production Code Administration, under its chief censor Joseph Breen, began systematically to regulate the content of Hollywood films. The red-blooded diet of raw sex, vice and violence, offered in a frantic attempt to drum up trade in the face of plummeting depression-hit audiences, was reined in by a new rulebook dedicated to public restraint and social control. Portrayals of abortion, incest, miscegenation, drugs and excessively lustful kissing were banned, as well as the words ‘damn’, ‘God’, ‘floozy’ and ‘sex’, and any bedroom scene unless both parties had at least one foot on the floor. Comic confusion resulted. While MGM was handing out false breasts with erect nipples to any of its actresses who needed them, the censors were ordering Disney to remove the udders from its cartoon cows.
Pre-code vamps, the blatantly erotic Jean Harlow and Mae West and their dozens of blonded imitators, who had been specifically coloured and shaped as the comically vulgar saleswomen of sex, were forced to transform themselves in the new puritan climate. Harlow succeeded in changing herself from modern brassy bad girl into a softer, more wholesome blonde. She became something of a ditzy screwball heroine until she died unexpectedly in 1937 at the age of twenty-six. Some newspaper reports claimed she had been poisoned by the toxic hair dye that for years she had applied every few days to her scalp. Harlow had in fact worn a wig during her last years, having reduced her own hair to the consistency of bristles using a diabolical mixture of peroxide, household bleach, soap flakes and ammonia. But that hair, wig or not, with its numinous screen magnetism, had already irreversibly transformed cinema and with it the self-image of women. Harlow’s hair has been imitated with varying degrees of knowing irony ever since.
Mae West, America’s hip-swaying queen of sexual innuendo, for a while fared more successfully in dealing with Hollywood’s new codes. Having built herself up as a sassy, sexy, fast-talking comic vamp, West refused to change. She fought with the censors for hundreds of lines, and, even when she lost, the censors could not control her suggestive sing-song delivery. She was even banned from radio after her lubricious rendition, as Eve, of the line ‘Would you, honey, like to try this apple?’ With a censor stationed on set for each of her films after 1934, checking every line and intimation she inserted, West’s public image was gradually being cleansed around her. That year she posed for a Paramount publicity shot as Liberty, in a clear blueprint of the new cleaner blonde look. She stands alone against a black background, boned and corseted into her clinging dress. Her crown is lit up to proclaim her position as twentieth-century American woman. She is a camera creation, a lustrous blonde parody beauty queen, one hand on the contours of her rolling hip, the other holding the symbolic flame, her face gazing up in the smiling knowledge that Paramount Pictures, and indeed the whole film industry, would survive the Great Depression. She is one of America’s first blonde pin-up girls.
Mae West’s appearance as a clean-cut blonde was a sign of things to come. Within a year, a monstrous, perpetually sparkling golden-haired child actress by the name of Shirley Temple had bounced on to the Hollywood stage. Temple was the archetype of the banal, cuddly doll-blonde whose manufactured optimism was designed to lift a depressed society. She set to work immediately to bludgeon the home front into a state of good cheer. Hollywood’s film producers, an ardently pro-Roosevelt clique, had been directly instructed by Washington with the task of cheering up America. They took their orders to an extreme with Shirley, who was allowed to reign as a focal point of Hollywood from 1935 to 1938. The irrepressibly chirpy Shirley leaped out of bed each morning trilling songs or reciting the lines she had memorised for her day’s work. She received $10,000 a week, an almost inconceivable sum to the twenty million Americans on relief; but she barely knew the difference between a nickel and a dollar.
Ideological pressures shaped the themes of Temple’s films. Her typical role, carefully positioned as the orphan or adopted child, was to soften the hard hearts of the wealthy, to encourage them to charity, and to intercede on behalf of others more needy than herself. It was no coincidence that dimple-cheeked Shirley and her capacity to encourage love and generosity appeared at a moment when public sources of charity were drying up. Shirley always ended up with the person who needed her unlimited supply of love most. Whoever possessed her owned a magic wand whose touch changed darkness into light. And her golden hair played a vital part in her fairytale goodness. It signalled riches, represented her promise of plenty, symbolised her status as treasure. Arthur Miller, the Fox Studios cameraman entrusted with the young Shirley’s look, recalled, ‘I always lit her so she had an aureole of golden hair. I used a lamp on Shirley that made her whole damn image world famous.’ The Roosevelts were not blind to Shirley’s golden ability to tap-dance the public out of their depression, and when Eleanor Roosevelt invited ‘film folks’ to the White House to lend FDR a touch of glamour, Shirley was among the chosen. Roosevelt was projecting himself as a man discreetly in touch with the cultural and racial expectations of his time.103
In the Soviet Union, too, film reflected political imperatives. Stalin considered the cinema to be an excellent instrument with which to spread his message to the people, and he aimed to use it more than any other artistic medium for creating the ‘new Socialist man and woman’. With the decision in April 1932 by the Communist Party Central Committee to force the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all the arts, Stalin was able to pursue his desire to create a Socialist state cinema which would extinguish all the experimentation and distinguished avantgarde work of the 1920s. The vision, poetics and intellectual scope of this earlier Soviet cinema, which had turned it into the most innovative film industry in Europe, were replaced by uncritical
ly affirmative social stereotypes. A few film-makers were brave enough to circumvent bureaucratic pressures and preserve their integrity, but most applied the doctrine blindly and produced films of extraordinary tedium and official conformity. In 1935, Stalin wrote an article for Pravda congratulating the Soviet cinema on its fifteenth anniversary. ‘In the hands of Soviet power, cinema constitutes an enormous and invaluable force. With unique opportunities for spiritual influence over the masses at its command, cinema helps the working class and its party to educate the workers in the spirit of Socialism . . .’
Although the heavy hand of the party was already visible in Soviet cinema, its audiences were not discouraged. They craved movies. They wanted to be whisked away from their everyday miseries into some shining fantasy world peopled by the beautiful and the heroic. They also wanted hope. Going to the cinema was one of the few forms of entertainment available to the urban masses and Stalin catered carefully to their hunger. Historical spectacles were churned out, great epics such as Aleksandr Nevsky and Peter the Great, which were designed to rekindle patriotism with old-fashioned appeals to national glory. The Revolution was also reviewed as a theme, hammering home the rightful establishment of Soviet power; and there were numerous films set in the contemporary world. In spite of the paramount importance of economic propaganda, surprisingly few were set in factories, considered even by the party to be too barren for good cinematic fun. But plenty were set on collective farms, many of them musical comedies which gave the impression that life in the countryside was a constant merry round of dancing and singing. Grigori Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga of 1938 was one of these, made at the height of the Stalinist purges. Some of the people who worked on the film were exiled, their contributions never credited. But Volga-Volga is said to have been Stalin’s favourite film and to have received a certain amount of his personal guidance. It starred the blonde Lyubov Orlova, the most glamorous and most popular actress of Soviet cinema, in a classic fairytale story of a girl from a small town who carries a letter to the capital and successfully challenges and confronts the capitalists who have taken charge of an amateur theatre.
Lyubov’s dazzling career as top Soviet blonde was not harmed by her marriage to her director, Aleksandrov. He, like Stalin, was an ardent fan of Hollywood and its products, and had travelled to America in the early 1930s as assistant to Sergei Eisenstein. He had been particularly impressed with the volume of output of the Hollywood studios, and also by the lavishly choreographed productions of Busby Berkeley, full of crystal chandeliers, endless corridors of mirrors and pyramid patterns of sniiling, scantily dressed blondes. Back home he set out to develop the Soviet musical as a combination of entertainment extravaganza and ideology. He began casting Orlova in leading roles and within a couple of years she had captured the spotlight in his 1936 film Circus, playing the dazzling Marion Dixon, a blonde circus performer. The film incorporated some memorable dance numbers, redolent of the Busby Berkeley routines, and featured songs which became some of the most popular of the period. But it was Orlova, with her intoxicating blonde hair, bright eyes and abundant charisma, who from this time on became the darling of the screen and the embodiment of Stalin’s ideal Soviet woman.
By the time Aleksandrov cast Orlova as the star of his musical Shining Path, in 1939, Stalin was actively involved in Soviet cinema. From the mid-1930s he had routinely interfered in the scripting and casting of films, often changing their titles and endings. But by the late 1930s he had become the supreme cinematic censor, who watched and approved every film released. He micro-managed the industry, supporting favoured directors and actors. When Aleksandrov’s 1939 musical was dismissed by the party censors as unsuitable, Stalin countermanded them and not only approved the comedy for release, but thought up twelve different titles for the film, eventually choosing Shining Path in preference to Cinderella. It is a classic Soviet rags-to-riches tale, in which Orlova plays a simple weaver in a textile factory near Moscow who becomes an exemplary worker and ends up in the Kremlin, where she is awarded the highest Soviet medal, the Order of Lenin. Sent by her comrades to train as an engineer, she is finally elected as a member of the Supreme Soviet. The film represents the epitome of Stalinist glorification.
In Germany, too, film played a key role in the political agenda. Under the Nazis the German public thrilled to the medium of cinema. They flocked to see historical romances full of bewigged courtiers, First World War heroic epics, pastoral tales of creamy milkmaids in dirndl dresses and plaits, soul-warming stories of bullied adolescents making good as members of the Hitler Youth, and accounts of the sisterly solidarity of wives left behind by men at the front. Comedies were churned out as well as adventure stories, crime thrillers and musicals which imitated Hollywood’s troupes of high-kicking showgirls. Over a thousand films were made during the Third Reich and they met every monumental cliche of Nazi ideology. Good German girls and heroic lads were blonde; Jews and enemy forces were dark.
Subtlety was not a renowned characteristic of Nazi cinema. Typical of the standard fare is Annelie, a romantic drama set in the 1870s starring Luise Ullrich, which tells the story of a young German girl, bright-eyed, blonde and bedirndled, who rebels in adolescence, but then grows up and is transformed into a heroic wife and mother. This patriotically heart-warming film was one of the most successful made during the Nazi era and took 6.5 million marks at the box office. But there were many more repulsive vehicles for Nazi ideology. In 1936 Paul Diehl made a puppet film of the familiar Grimms’ story ‘The Tale of One Who Went Forth to Learn Fear’. The boy leaves home, sleeps under a gibbet, enters a haunted castle, breezily defeats a succession of monsters over the course of three nights and survives to claim his reward, the hand in marriage of the princess. The boy is blond, his assailants are hook-nosed, dark and swarthy, and the princess is an uncanny premonition of the Barbie doll, blonde and kookily wide-eyed with perfect bee-stung lips. The film was used as a propaganda vehicle for racial indoctrination and for inculcating fearlessness in the Hitler Youth.
Many of the leading German actresses of the 1930s and early 1940s were, or made it their business to be, blonde. Lois Chlud, Carola Hohn, Trude Marlen, Dorit Kreysler and Hilde Weissner all gaze out of their publicity photos with the fine arched eyebrows and knowing superiority of Aryan goddesses. Zara Leander, a dark-haired actress with a remarkably expansive decolletage, stood out as the exception. But she made her way towards the top playing foreign women, not quite pure, who indulged in adulterous affairs. For a party aristocracy almost entirely devoid of allure, these stars were dazzlingly attractive and many were invited into top Nazi circles to lend a little of their sparkle.
Hermann Goering, the wildly sybaritic economic leader of the Third Reich, was the one senior Nazi who did go to great lengths to develop his own personal glamour. He bred bulls on his hunting estate, owned the biggest model railway in the world, and had a pot of diamonds carried near him at all times by a special servant in case he felt the urge to run his fat fingers through the sparkling stones. After his first wife, the beautiful blonde Swede Carin von Kantzow, died of tuberculosis in 1931, Goering married a second deluxe blonde, an actress by the name of Emmy Sonnemann. In Heinz Paul’s 1934 film Wilhelm Tell, Sonnemann played the heroine in peasant smocking, her blonde hair carefully plaited and wreathed over her head. It was one of the few Nazi-period films that became a success in America.
Germany’s top star was the blonde Kristina Soderbaum, an aristocratic, pretty and talented performer possessed of a sexy purring accent. She became a star overnight with her debut in 1938 as the heroine in Jugend, married the director, Veit Harlan, and within a few years had become the most popular actress on the German screen. She starred as the stereotypical pure Nordic maiden in dozens of films, but her most memorable role was as the heroine of the crudely racist film Jud Siiss in which her ravishment by a Jew is the climax of the film. For good measure, Soderbaum was made to commit screen suicide to atone for her own defilement.
In Germany
the cinema’s function was, as anywhere else, escapism. Rising cinema attendances throughout the Third Reich demonstrated a national desire for such ‘entertainment’ and the annual number of cinema-goers quadrupled to one million between 1933 and 1942. Of course, their diet of films was minutely controlled according to strict rules laid down by Goebbels’s ministry. No film could go into production before its plot had been presented – in thirty-four nineteen-syllable lines per page of typescript – to the ministry for inspection and approval.
Hitler was fully aware of the power of the medium, particularly its indoctrination potential, and even attributed Nazi victories to the strengthening and morale-boosting powers of the cinema. Like Roosevelt and Stalin he arranged for propaganda newsreels to be shown as part of every cinema programme and became something of a film nut himself, occasionally intervening in casting decisions. He used to watch films late into the night, often those of Marlene Dietrich, his personal screen goddess. (That Dietrich had deserted Nazi Germany to join America’s booming film industry in Hollywood seems not to have affected the Fiihrer’s admiration for the star.)k
Arriving in Los Angeles in 1930, Dietrich had entered a world already familiar to her from Germany, in which racial politics and popular entertainment had seemingly fused in the highly visible symbol of the blonde film star. In an industry whose first principle was profits, Hollywood studio policy and audience expectation dictated a constant flow of long-limbed blonde women on screen to represent the American dream. The image of women in film was being dictated by the blondes. In the footsteps of Harlow and West came Joan Blondell, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Alice Faye, Marion Davies, Constance Bennett, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and the occasional blondes Marlene Dietrich, Irene Dunne, Bette Davies, Barbara Stanwyck, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford.
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