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| Ed Wood pays tribute to three great stars. Or six great stars, depending on how you look at it. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "The Fabulous Jane, Jayne & Marilyn." Originally published in Dynamic Films (Pendulum Publishing), 1972. Credited as Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Excerpt: "We must remember that the breast work on most women were tied down to the boyish look during the twenties and the early thirties, so by the time the forties came there was a new generation coming along and they had not been so flattened out. Then the fifties and the sixties and they were well out in front again."
Reflections: First of all, let's get something straight. In the history of cinema, there are a few examples of alleged "one-film wonders," i.e. actors and actresses who are only widely known for one role: Klinton Spilsbury (The Legend of the Lone Ranger), Haing S. Ngor (The Killing Fields), Harold Russell (The Best Years of Our Lives), etc. As critic Merwyn Grote put it, there is a "tendency of actors plucked from obscurity for a once-in-a-lifetime role to be just as quickly drop-kicked back into obscurity."
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| Jane Russell in The Outlaw. |
Jane Russell (1921-2011) should never be counted among their ranks. While it's true that the Minnesota-born actress is most closely associated with her cleavage-bearing role as Rio McDonald in Howard Hughes' infamous Western The Outlaw (1943), she acted in films for three decades and appeared sporadically on TV after that, finally retiring in the mid-1980s. The Outlaw isn't even Jane's only appearance in a classic, since she also starred with Bob Hope in The Paleface (1948) and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
Over the years, despite her infamous screen debut, Jane Russell even managed to gain a measure of critical respect. In the book Cult Movie Stars (1991), Danny Peary attests that Jane is "the funny, sexually aggressive, confident female Jayne Mansfield might have played, if she had Russell's talent."
In "The Fabulous Jane, Jayne & Marilyn," Ed Wood revisits the controversy surrounding The Outlaw and its innuendo-laden advertising campaign. (Sample slogan: "What are the two greatest reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?") Although this article is largely affectionate in its tone, Eddie seems to feel that this notorious movie was the actress' only claim to fame and says that "many of the young today won't remember the name of Jane Russell." Keep in mind that Russell had been appearing in films until just a couple of years before this article appeared. In retrospect, it's difficult to fathom that The Outlaw caused such outrage among censors and religious groups, just by featuring some cleavage and some innuendo-laden dialogue. It took a lot less to get people fired up in the 1940s, I guess.
Free-associating as usual, Ed uses the Outlaw brouhaha as a jumping-off point to talk about various sex symbols in the movies, particularly those with large breasts (or "mammary globes" in Wood speak). Although they're given equal billing with Jane Russell in the title of this article, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield are basically afterthoughts here. Of Ms. Mansfield, Ed writes about how well the busty, bubbly blonde actress filled out a sweater: "She could make the fuzziest and the bulkiest knits look like they had been molded to her frame." As for Marilyn, Ed says she "achieved much more of the stardom status than did most of her counterparts" but was "ill-fated."
Even more interesting, toward the end of the article, Ed Wood starts talking about "underground films" as the new vanguard for sex on the big screen:
The underground films make no pretense at being anything but what they are. They are making sex pictures and in order to show the realism they profess to show, they've got to come across. Not all of the girls are fine actresses, in fact most of them can be considered hard-down bad. But they are both beautiful of face and body, and that's what the audience wants to see. Therefore the underground producers are showing life in the raw . . . but life as it is. And they are showing the naked body of the girls, as well as the males in order to get their point across.
I'm not exactly sure which films he's referring to. It seems unlikely that he was discussing the boundary-pushing 1960s art flicks of Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising), Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), Andy Warhol (Chelsea Girls), the Kuchar Brothers (Sins of the Fleshapoids), and John Waters (Eat Your Makeup). While those "underground" movies—and others like them—did feature sexually-explicit content, it's not the kind that would get Ed Wood's blood boiling. Perhaps Eddie is simply using the term as a catch-all to describe any hardcore and softcore films being made outside the studio system by indepdendent producers.
Next: "The Sweater Girl" (1973)