Long Cool Ava

She was a long cool woman in a black dress
Just a 5'9, beautiful tall
With just one look I was a bad mess
'Cause that long cool woman had it all

The Go West Dress

The 5'1" Diana Lewis (aka "Mousie," aka Mrs. William
Powell) in a Dolly Tree-designed dress for the 1940
Marx Brothers film Go West.

Peeping Through Keyholes

Lulu Baines

Shirley Jones as Lulu Baines in Elmer Gantry (1960).

"..and the first thing I knew he rammed the fear of God into me
so fast I never heard my old man's footsteps. The next thing
I knew, I was out in the cold, hard snow in my bare little soul."






Clip is HERE.

Symmetry and Balance #12

We haven't done this in a while.

Some Dresses To Keep Us Warm

They call this "Sunday," but it's been a Gray Day,
a Cold Day, a Rainy Day, and now it's freaking
snowing. If you're having a cold and icky day
where you are, maybe these dresses will help
keep you warm.

Dorothy Shay

Singer-actress Dorothy Shay.

CYDX5

Cyd Charisse

Looking Sharpe

Texas girl Karen Sharpe, who eventually
married producer-director Stanley Kramer.

Orbik's Dangerous Dames

Glen Orbik

From the Wardrobe Department

And Who Could Possibly Forget. . .?

María Eugenia San Martín from Three Sad Tigers
(1961), Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs the Aztec
Mummy (1964), Santo in the Witches Attack (1968),
or Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & the Wolfman
(1973).

Keywords: aztec ape, aztec mummy, blue demon, deadlicious,

dracula, el santo, lucha libre, mexican movies, mummy, rock

and roll, santo, tigers, witches, wolfman, wrestling women,

zippo lighter.

750,000 visits!

Whew!

Three quarters of a million hits!

Thanks for visiting.

Thanks for coming back.

Thanks for the comments and feedback.

Just THANKS!

Higher and higher

The Obligatory Shower Scene

Jocelyn Lane

Jocelyn Lane was called "the British Bardot,"
although she was born in Vienna. She was in
Tickle Me (1965) with Elvis. And she married
a Spanish Prince in Las Vegas. Today she sells
feather necklaces.

Tickle Me is remarkably dumb, even for an Elvis

movie. But it features Julia Adams and Jocelyn

Lane and contains one pretty decent song.
Feels So Right

Sexy Romy

Mmmm...Romy Schneider again.

A Morning to Sleep Late

I woke up this morning.
I looked out at the chilly, rainy day.
I looked out at the grim, gray Rust Belt.
The airways are filled with dire predictions.
The hallways are filled with rumors of cutbacks
and downturns and layoffs and demotions.
There is talk in the elevators of massive
reductions, foreclosures, and homelessness.
The crime rate skyrockets. Lists of Most
American Dangerous Cities pop up online.
They're killing children. They're killing cops.
They're killing each other.
They're killing you and me.
Everybody's in Hunker Down And Wait mode.
We nod at the latest bad news.
We find the good news suspicious.
Fear and bitterness reign.
I went back to bed.
I slept in. (I'll go to work later.)
Glad I'm not 18 and looking for a job.

18

Girl-Girl #14

Lydia the Tattooed Lady

Last night I was watching At The Circus (1939), in which Groucho Marx sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." Me, I don't go for tattoos much. I've got some good scars but no ink. Getting the scars hurt bad enough. I'm hoping the current ink craze will pass. For a lot of tattooed ladies, it will be a painful passage, I'm afraid. I know a guy who's got a big tattoo of his last dog on his upper arm. The damn dog's dead, but the ink lives on. Glad I didn't go that route; I've had, let's see, like about eight cats. I think a lot of people with tattoos will come to that day where they say, "What the PHUCK was I thinking?" I mean, we all have moments like that in our lives. Like some of my scars, for instance. But when you have words or names or phrases written on you that you thought were cool ten years ago, well, that's a whole different WTF moment. Alas, I digress.
Anyway, here's Groucho:

(Doesn't seem to have hurt her looks any.)

Wild Child Alice White

More Alice White.

Prehistoric Joan

I know that it's hard to imagine, but. . .
Long before she was a 1980s living fossil,
Joan Collins was a 1950s living doll.
From the (NSFW) femina site.

Bring me the head of Isela Vega

You might remember Isela Vega from Mrs. Death (1969),
the Samuel Fuller-scripted revenge western The Deadly
Trackers (1973), or Sam Peckinpah's leisurely gringo-with-
a-gun mish-mash Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).

Neck Biters

Wasting a Saturday

There's nothing better that wasting a Saturday
by listening to my Pandora Radio playlist,
smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and
playing Spider Solitaire. This is the life, man.
Current Mood: Blissfully Numb
Current Music: Foo Fighters
Future Plans: Wasting Sunday, too.
Favorite Color: Brunette
(Like you needed to know all this pathetic Twitter
and Facebook type B.S., right?)

Creamy Dreamy Marilyn Maxwell

Marilyn Maxwell (Our second One-Shot post.)

Gilbert Roland's Girls

Gilbert Roland is one of those guys like Edward Brophy, James Gleason, Henry Daniell, Warren William, Allen Jenkins, Ward Bond, Roland Young, and Edward Everett Horton. I'm watching a movie, and they show up, either in starring roles or bit parts, and I think to myself, This is probably going to be a decent movie. Anyway, Gilbert Roland had a huge career...from silents like The Lost World (1925) and The Plastic Age (1925) to "Golden Age" classics like The Sea Hawk (1940), The Furies (1950), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and then a ton of television shows right up to the 1980s. Guys like him worked hard, always seemed to have a job, and saw a lot of Hollywood history. I mean, I'd love to sit down at a table with guys like that, crack a few beers, and listen to them tell old stories about life in the studio system. If this were not Starlet Showcase and just a generalist sort of Hollywood blog, I'd probably post pictures of these dudes, because they were the ones who really made Hollywood work.

So very cool.

Glorious DeHaven

Gloria DeHaven

Honey West

Anne Francis before Honey West.

Balls Out

Girls With Glasses

Uhhh. . . . .The End

Making The Rounds

Hollywood Heyday


Vintage Photographs

Soft Film

Stirred, Straight Up, with a Twist (NSFW)

Vintage Scans (NSFW)

Michelle Pfeiffer, The Face

Hairy Green Eyeball

The Golden Age of Chinese Cinema

The Blog Of Cult Things

Fabulon (NSFW)

Gifts from Ireland

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

(These are pretty and large. Send one to a friend.)

Wet Willy

Esther Williams takes a dip in the pool
for Life magazine.




(Yeah, okay, I colorized a few.)

The Mitzi Mystique

Miss Mitzi Gaynor returns!

Stupid Hat Sunday

Changing Lanes

Dance Me to the End of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
--Leonard Cohen

Madeleine Peyroux's version

Uncommon Colleen

Colleen Moore

I have decided to start a new post category
called One-Shot. It will feature photographs
that don't fit any other category or when I
have only one picture of a particular starlet
or when I find a picture that is so utterly
beautiful that I just can't wait another
second to share it with y'all. Or just because.
It'll be kind of a loose category, as you can
tell. Bear with me.

Stupid Hat Saturday

Visiting Bloodflower's Paradise

Cards from Bloodflower's Paradise

Yet Another Delicious Italian Girl

Just some Anna Marie Alberghetti pictures.




I dunno. Maybe it's the olive oil.

12 Trees

Helen Twelvetrees

Angel Baby?

This is Salome Jens in Angel Baby (1961).
I haven't seen it. Salome's co-star is George Hamilton,
who I often think of as basically some sort of diseased
toad. Regardless. It looks interesting. The only Salome
Jens film I have ever seen is Seconds (1966) with Rock
Hudson, where everybody gets drunk and stomps grapes
to make wine and loses their past and jeopardizes their
future. It's a scary movie on several levels. Seconds has
95 User Comments at the IMDb, by the way. I have
probably seen Salome Jens on television, but don't
remember her specifically. Her appearances include
Naked City, The Untouchables, The Rat Patrol, I Spy,
Bonanza, Gunsmoke, McMillan & Wife (with Hudson
again), Kojak, Barnaby Jones, Quincy M.E., Cagney &
Lacey, The Wonder Years, and L.A. Law.

Wet Gina

Wet Gina Lollobrigida by Life magazine
photographer Peter Stackpole.

L'amour de Lamour

Dorothy Lamour

S-T-R-E-T-C-H

Happy Birthday, Claire Trevor

March 8th is Claire Trevor's birthday. More
than just a wisecracking noir dame, she was
an excellent actress.

Happy birthday, Claire.

Rendering Bardot

Get the real thing at emovieposter.

Thick As A Brick

I read this thick, heavy coffee table-style book called You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story by Richard Schickel and George Perry (2008). It is filled with great old photographs. The writing contains an informative and surprisingly objective history of the Warner Brothers and their studio. Some wizard at the publisher decided that text lines should run 6 3/4 inches wide with about a 5/32nds inch high letter height (which is about, what, an #8 font?) for the early historical sections of the book. Very frustrating for those of us without bunny rabbit vision. Later in the book, the text inexplicably goes Bold and is broken up by sidebars and these goofy little what-else-was-going-on-in-1942 kind of boxes. This is much more pleasant to read. However, the sidebar items, usually covering a particular star, film, or director, tend to repeat what's already in the book's main text. And, pretty soon, the text seems to evaporate completely, replaced by sidebar items. And then the subject turns to the corporate 1980s, and the book devolves into smaller pictures with larger captions. It's sorta like starting to read a book written in 1922 and ending up reading USA Today, but without all the pie charts. In any case, thank you to Misters Schickel and Perry for writing it. The cover price is $50, but Amazon sells it for $30, if you're interested.

My problem with books like this (and it's certainly not the fault of the authors or publishers) is that my interest wanes halfway through the history, usually somewhere in the 1960s or 70s. In the case of You Must Remember This, a 479-page book, my enthusiasm ran out on page 227, right after they got done talking about Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. Me, I don't really care about the outer space blockbusters and comic book remakes that bring us up to the present day. I mean, I dutifully read most of it, but it was a waste of my time. A much better book for me was The Movies (Simon & Schuster: NY, 1957) by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer. Good luck Googling that title; the original Library of Congress card number is 57-10977, and a post-1966 edition has an ISBN of 0671221426 . It is 442 pages long, very well-illustrated, the same coffee table size as the Schickel-Perry tome, and is fascinating to the very last page. If you're interested in "the Golden Age" or are buying a book for some kid who's just discovering Hollywood history, this is the book for you. If you can find a copy. I got mine for $10 used. The history is glossed over a bit in a typically pre-Watergate-journalism way, and none of the really down-and-dirty Hollywood secrets are revealed. But it's still fun. One of my favorite parts is a section called Waiting In The Wings, which is about the young stars of tomorrow, kids like Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, Susan Strasberg, Rod Steiger, Natalie Wood, Don Murray, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, Jean Seberg, and Anthony Perkins. At the end of the book, they discuss the various widescreen processes, including 3-D. And that's it. Much more my kind of reading.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Starlet With Shovel

Miss Vera-Ellen

Gold Digger Deco

Gold Diggers of 1933



What a cast! Joan Blondell, Ned Sparks, Ginger Rogers,
Warren William, and Guy Kibbee.

The Buffalo China Party

Photographer Loomis Dean shoots a 1952 Hollywood
party for Life magazine. Everybody who was anybody
was there. So was the Buffalo China. Such heavy-duty
dishware seems a little out of place at this most elegant
gathering, but maybe they were expecting some of it
to get thrown around.

Outstanding in Their Fields

. . .like farmers.

(This is SO not going to translate well for our

Chinese and Romanian visitors.)

Loving Simone Simon

Simone Simon is spelled T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

40-Year-Old Legs

There are plenty of good reasons to watch the 1951 Warner Bros. picture Storm Warning. Ronald Reagan's line-reading performance isn't really one of them. Doris Day's 1950s housewife hair isn't one of them either. Steve Cochran is good as a peckerwood Klansman.
Warner Bros. asked Joan Crawford to play the part of Doris Day's "big sister," but she refused. They wanted 26-year-old Lauren Bacall, but she was with Bogie in Africa for The African Queen shoot. So they got the 40-year-old Ginger Rogers to play 26-year-old Doris Day's sister. They also got a great pair of legs. And they made a decent early film about KKK violence. And, hey, it's a Warner Brothers picture. What's not to like?

Weird Juxtapositions

Every once in a while, the posts on the left line up
in a weird, storytelling sort of way with the right
side column pictures. And it's ephemeral, because
any new post erases the alignment. It's also quite
arbitrary, because Explorer and Firefox and Opera
align Blogger pages in slightly different ways. But
here at Starlet Showcase, it's usually quite pretty,
if I do say so myself.

The Real Neal Deal

Patricia Neal

You're Soaking In It

You're Soaking in It ad