#forties
I don’t know what you think but I think the me on the right looks a whole lot happier, healthier and all around better than the me on the left! PREMIUM NUTRITION!!
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Anesia Pinheiro Machado
Brazilian aviation expert and pilot Anesia Pinheiro Machado (1902-1999) and Junior Pan American Airways Pilot Dean E. Robinson, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Machado was the first person to obtain a U.S. commercial pilot’s license with additional ratings as instructor and for flying on instruments only; she was also an instructor for the Brazilian Air Force and commercial airlines. The Pan American Airways press release accompanying this photograph described how the appearance of the “petite newcomer” with “plenty of aviation ‘know how’” had elicited a sense of wonder among the junior Clipper pilots at the flight school. She had made her first solo flight in 1922, at the age of 18 and was the first Brazilian woman to make a cross-country flight
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“Similar to the transformation of the homosexual pansy to asexual sissy, the sexualized mannish women of the pre-Code era were transformed into asexual tomboys or cold maiden aunts. Lesbian-film theorists Patricia White and Rhona Berenstein have argued that another method for hinting about lesbian desire in Code-era films was to keep the lesbian character offscreen altogether. In Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944), for example, queer women are dead by the time each film begins. As the other characters search for these women (or seek to understand their deaths), a sense of dark and taboo secrecy begins to assert itself, and audiences are left to guess exactly what that secret might be. Various moments in the films imply that the dead women were intimately involved with other women―but neither the films nor their characters explicitly define what those relations were. Letters and memos indicate that Production Code officials were aware that these relations could be read as lesbian and worked with filmmakers to keep them obscure enough to earn the Code’s seal of approval. Rebeccca also has a more obvious onscreen queer―Rebecca’s housekeeper and personal maid Mrs. Danvers, played by Judith Anderson, in a long black skirt and a tightly pulled-back hair bun. In one sequence, Mrs. Danvers takes the new lady of the house through Rebecca’s meticulously preserved bedchamber. Almost as if hypnotized, Mrs. Danvers lovingly caresses Rebecca’s pillowcases, her combs, and even her sheer stockings and underwear, ‘made especially for her by the nuns in the convent of St. Clair.’ Mrs. Danvers never specifically says that she was in love with her former companion, and the word lesbian itself is never spoken. But her obsessive, creepy devotion to Rebecca is made quite clear.”-FromQueer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff
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Lady Scarface now on US DVD
Excellent news for Judith Anderson’s US fans: Lady Scarface (1941), featuring her star turn as Slade, is now available on DVD, thanks to Warner Archive’s made-to-order service.
https://www.wbshop.com/products/lady-scarface-mod
Judith’s gangster movie with a twist (the cops have no idea that the boss of a notorious criminal gang is a woman) was released on DVD in Europe a while back, and now audiences across the pond can enjoy it too.
Judith deserves better material; nevertheless, she gives a performance so strong, you can’t take your eyes off her.
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These are her slippers. ‘Throw me my slips, Danny,’ she used to say. She had little feet for her height. Put your hands inside the slippers. They are quite small and narrow, aren’t they?
She forced the slippers over my hands, smiling all the while, watching my eyes. ‘You never would have thought she was so tall, would you?’ she said, ‘These slippers would fit a tiny foot. She was so slim too. You would forget her height, until she stood beside you. She was every bit as tall as me. But lying there in bed she looked quite a slip of a thing, with her mass of dark hair, standing out from her face like a halo.’
-Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier
I like the echoes in the text: from ‘slippers’ to 'slips’ and 'slip of a thing’. They reinforce the idea that obsessive Mrs Danvers has a one-track mind.
The movie still - rather wonderfully unnerving, with Judith Anderson’s housekeeper ‘watching [the second wife’s] eyes’ - suggests that this moment from the novel was filmed even though it doesn’t appear in the final version of Hitchcock’s Rebecca(1940).
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The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Very Best of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Kama Sutra Records, 1970. 2000 Series label, distributed by Buddah Records.
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Judy GarlandandFred AstaireinEaster Parade(1948)
Scan credit: Classic Film on Flickr
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Listerine - 19440129 Post on Flickr.
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Hotel Last Frontier, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1940s.
The friendly Western hospitality greets you from the moment you enter the lobby at the Last Frontier – postcard.
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