#ziegfield girl

[thegloriousolivethomas]

1915, Sarony Studio: Olive Thomas photographed for the Ziegfeld Follies

[silentdivasblog]

Lady of The Day 🌹 Harriet Hoctor ❤️

[photos-black-white]

[fashionbooksmilano]

Vargas

Alberto Vargas and Reid Austin

Foreword by Hugh Hefner

Bell Publ., New York 1978, 128 pages, 23x31cm, ISBN 0-517-3365X Edges of boards are faded and slightly soiled.

euro 50,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982) was a Peruvian-American painter of pin-up girls. He is often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists. Numerous Vargas paintings have sold and continue to sell for tens of thousands around the world.

For more than sixty years, Alberto Vargas has been celebrating the American woman in all her beauty and sensuousness. Now, accompanied by his remarkable life story, 160 of Vargas's most lushly alluring paintings have been gathered together in one exquisite volume. Voluptuous beauties from every period ahead: the Ziegfelde Follies girls, the glamorous Hollywood sex goddesses, and, of course, the inimitable Vargas Girls - those sensational creatures hwo have been gracing the pages of Esquire and Playboy magazines for nearly forty years. Vargas is a spectacular showcase of the art of the pin-up

20/12/23

[hotvintagepoll]

Jimmy Stewart and Hedy Lamarr (Come Live With Me, Ziegfield Girl)—i will be honest they do not have such good chemistry. however i DO think its very funny to have jimothy "always sounds like hes swallowing some vanilla ice cream" stewmeister across from hedy "literally most gorgeous woman ever maybe?" lamarr. like thats some casting decision for sure.

Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo (Ninotchka, Two-Faced Woman)—no propaganda submitted

This is round 1 of a mini Christmas tournament. Each poll lasts for three days. If you’d like to send additional propaganda supporting your favorite hot couple, you can reblog this post with your propaganda added, send it to my asks, or tag me in it. To vote in all the polls, click here. Happy holidays!

[no additional propaganda submitted]

[gacougnol]

Alfred Cheney Johnston

Ziegfield Girl in Studio 1920s-30s

[masculinepeacock]

goddess given righteous anger

Touching Spirit Bear, Ben Mikaelson // Deluge: 'Questions directed toward the idea of Mary', Leila Chatti // @braveburattino // How to Cure a Ghost; 'after the loss, take two', Fariha Róisín // Show Your Fangs, The Crane Wives // @dateamonster // Medea, Euripides // Ziegfield Follies // The Myth of Devotion, Louise Glück // In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

[Image Description: A series of quotes and images combined. 1: "People change two ways - with slow persistent pressure, or with a single and sudden traumatic experience." 2: "And how long before you realized (did you realize?) shame was a blade / you turned against yourself?" 3: Art of a deer with a skull for it's head, with smoke billowing out of it, the horse's mouth is open. The deer is rearing back on it's hooves and there are hills and trees all around it, the deer and smoke are white and everything else is red. The left antler is partially red. 4: "how do i ask to be saved in a world like this? a mysterious bruise, all splotchy, wanting so badly to heal". 5: "With malice, beasts will show their fangs They're in for a surprise Bravely I will wield my weapon I made from fangs of those that died". 6: A tumblr post that reads, "girl transformed by monstrous adolescence x girl killed off by the narrative for having too much sex". 7: "CHORUS LEADER: You would become the wretchedest of women. MEDEA: Then let it be." 8: A photo of Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfield Follies. 9: "because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness" 10: " 'I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn't my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That was my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else's whim.' " /end ID]

[eretzyisrael]

by Michael Feldberg

In 1908, dropping out of school after the eighth grade, the gangly, strong-voiced Fanny Borach worked as a chorus girl in a burlesque revue. By the end of that year, she changed her last name to Brice. Grossman speculates that Fanny probably changed her name to escape limited Jewish stage roles. Ironically, a year later, she would make her first Broadway mark in a musical comedy, The College Girls, singing Irving Berlin‘s “Sadie Salome, Go Home” with a put-on Yiddish accent while dancing a parody of the seductive veil dance in Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. Her act brought down the house. Despite her desire for universality, Brice found her niche as a “Jewish” entertainer.

When Brice stuck to broad farce and Yiddish-accented parodies of other female stars, the critics loved her. When she tried playing non-ethnic roles in Broadway plays, they panned her. Brice starred in the Ziegfield Follies in the 1920s and ’30s and became known for her beautiful voice and limber grace, which she always used in the service of humor. She tried dramatic Broadway roles, but the critics thought her plays unsuccessful.

As Brice’s fame increased, so did her notoriety. In 1918, she married Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, a handsome, urbane, but somewhat inept con man and thief she had lived with for six years. Despite Arnstein’s infidelity and a stretch in Sing Sing Prison for illegal wiretapping, the devoted Brice stayed married to him, had two children and supported him by working on stage almost constantly, almost to the very end of each pregnancy. Brice’s tumultuous relationship with the ne’er-do-well Arnstein gave her material for a rare non-ethnic success: appearing the Ziegfield Follies of 1921 the usually manic comedienne stood nearly motionless on the stage and, singing in a beautiful, unaccented voice, moved audiences to tears with her rendition of “My Man,” with its now-classic lyrics, “But whatever my man is, I am his forever.”

[touteslefemmesdumonde]

Promotional poster for "The Great Ziegfield" (1936)

The '30s to the early '50s were truly a wonderful time for Hollywood musicals. Amazing artists, directors, musicians, scenographers and dance directors came together to create the routines, wich are still to this day some of the most breathtaking display of female beauty in cinema.

All these gorgeous chorus girls, brunettes on the left, blondes to the right, all sitting so pretty and composed. Their smiles to the viewer feel welcoming and warm, as if they were inviting you to join them.

Everything in the picture is made to achieve the famous "MGM look": bright, luxurious, massive. From the detail of the champaigne bottles in the foreground, as well as the scenography in the background, with beautiful baroque designs and the silk curtains. Everything looks very soft and cozy.

I must admit, I usually don't enjoy watching these kind of musicals, I find the plot and characters are usually pretty shallow and boring. But when i see the dance routines, I'm immediately captured by the staggering beauty of the sequences. A triumph of femininity and human creativity.

Sometimes I imagine what it was like for people living in rural parts of the States in the 30s, where most people were still working in farms, to then go the movies and seeing stuff like this. It must've looked from another planet!

[kvetchlandia]

Poet Delmore Schwartz, New York City Uncredited and Undated Photograph

Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore Or near the bank of a woodland lake Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's Foolish Follies.

They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness Of their youth and beauty In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of awareness Heightened, intensified and softened By the soft and the silk of the waters Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the nakedness of the body,

Electrified: deified: undenied.

A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance. He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars. He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains Beholding them. Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful? They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance. For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes perception too vivid, The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness. For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America…

What he has said is not entirely relevant, That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.

Where is he going? Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them? They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them. He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation: This is his enchantment and impoverishment As he possesses them in gaze only.

. . .He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness The warmth surrounding him crackled Held in by the mansard roof mansion He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year's brittle leaves fallen, Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death, Winter's mourning and the May's renewal.

-- Delmore Schwartz, "A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir" 1962

[sealedintime]

Louise Browne was a dancer and musical comedy star, who went on to encourage many young dancers in Britain. American-Born, Browne's career began in the Ziegfield Follies. She starred in many musicals at the Gaiety Theatre, London, including The Girl Friend in 1927. In the 1930s she held the world record for pirouettes (over 80 consecutive spins). Browne married an English diplomat, and began a long association with the Royal Academy of Dancing, initiating scholarships and directing the prestigious summer school.

[thegloriousolivethomas]

1916,  Campbell Studios: Olive Thomas photographed for the Follies in a more candid pose.

[silentdivasblog]

Lady of The Day 🌹 Gilda Gray ❤️

[photos-black-white]

[merverb]

Judy Garland for Ziegfield Girl https://www.thejudyroom.com/ziegfeldgirl/gallery.html

[hotvintagepoll]

Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd (Let's Do Things, Catch as Catch Can)—[a Vanity Fair article was submitted that was paywalled, so I'm putting the text of it under the cut]

Jimmy Stewart and Hedy Lamarr (Come Live With Me, Ziegfield Girl)—i will be honest they do not have such good chemistry. however i DO think its very funny to have jimothy "always sounds like hes swallowing some vanilla ice cream" stewmeister across from hedy "literally most gorgeous woman ever maybe?" lamarr. like thats some casting decision for sure.

This is round 2 of a mini tournament. Each poll lasts for three days. If you'd like to send additional propaganda supporting your favorite hot couple, you can reblog this post with your propaganda added, send it to my asks, or tag me in it. To vote in all the polls, click here. Happy holidays!

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut]

Pitts and Todd:

Here is the text of the Vanity Fair article that was submitted, written by Donald Liebenson:

Before Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, or Mary and Rhoda, there were Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts. Separately, they were journeymen character actors in 1930s Hollywood. Together, they became the first major female comedy team, appearing in shorts that found them bonded as friends and career women struggling to make it on their own—the Depression-era answer to Abbi and Ilana of Broad City.

Over a two-year period, they made 17 shorts rarely seen since their theatrical release—and now collected for Thelma Todd & Zasu Pitts: The Hal Roach Collection 1931-33, a two-DVD set. They’re revelatory viewing, progressive, and proto-feminist portrayals of two career girls in the big city, defiantly dependent on each other.

Hal Roach, the legendary producer who teamed up Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, envisioned Todd and Pitts as a female equivalent to his marquee stars. Blonde-bombshell Todd was a beauty queen plucked from Massachusetts by a talent scout and brought to Hollywood in the 1920s, where she primarily played comic relief in other people’s films. Kansas-born Pitts was a prolific character actress, so typecast as a comedienne that few directors took her seriously for dramatic roles (though her finest hours were in Erich von Stroheim’s epic, Greed). The contrast between them was more about character than looks. Todd was brash and confident, and Pitts a more dithery presence; think Olive Oyl.

“They have gumption; they’re unflappable,” explained Molly Haskell, film critic and author of the seminal book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. “They’re looking out for each other; you could just feel the value of the twosome. . . . They are modern women. Hopefully, they will rise to the top—but in the meantime, they’re just going to wing it and figure things out.”

The duo’s first short, Let’s Do Things, establishes their dynamic. Thelma and Zasu promote sheet-music sales in a department store. Pitts moons over her boyfriend, but a disapproving Thelma prompts her to remember why the two came to New York in the first place. “To advance ourselves, to meet the best people, and to do big things,” Pitts responds. By the end of the short, the boyfriend gets a pie in the face, courtesy of Todd.

“They’re always going to have each other’s back,” Haskell noted. “I don’t think there’s any of the shorts where they fight over a man.”

Todd and Pitts’s gender alone made them somewhat revolutionary in their day. Comedy teams were primarily the province of men: the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy. “Slapstick was what men loved, and women didn’t because the whole core of it was tearing things up,” Haskell said. “It was chaotic and women wanted order. The defense of the domestic was a woman’s role . . . and slapstick violated the sense of order and decency and uprightness. They didn’t find it funny.”

But Todd and Pitts were both game for the physical stuff. In Let’s Do Things, Todd suffers a throw-about throttling from a quack osteopath; in the courtroom comedy Sneak Easily, juror Pitts throws a murder trial into chaos when she swallows a piece of the evidence—an explosive.

But in their best shorts (which, like the rest of their work, were written and directed by men), the mayhem is mostly in the service of a female narrative, observed film historian Jeanine Basinger. “It’s situational comedy,” she said. “If you’re going to make a plot centered around women, what the heck is she going to do just sitting around the house? They have to get out there in some way. . . . When you look at these films, what you see is what [the creators] thought was a good comedy female situation in that era. You have the chaos over Zasu’s hat in the boxing arena in Catch-as Catch-Can, the high-society party in which they are fish out of water in The Pajama Party, and the department-store melee in The Bargain of the Century. . . . The American woman on film is really a pretty active person, unless she is just stooging it in a male genre. Things have to happen to them, and they have to react. These shorts reflect that very clearly.”

More than 80 years on, the Todd-Pitts shorts play surprisingly well. Their appeal, talent, and chemistry elevate even the most dated material. “I like [Todd and Pitts] so much, and enjoy watching them,” said Leonard Maltin, author of the recently published anthology, Hooked on Hollywood: Discoveries from a Lifetime of Film Fandom and the essential 1970 book Movie Comedy Teams.

“I cannot tell a lie: the shorts are not all good. The gag men had a hard time coming up with suitable material that wouldn’t de-feminize them or make them look outlandishly unladylike, but [Todd and Pitts] play well today because [the characters] aren’t so different from two young women trying to make their way in the world in 2018. The struggles they have by and large tend not to be sexist. If they lose a job, they are comically inept, or it’s a blown opportunity.”

Max and Caroline of 2 Broke Girls, which ran for six seasons on CBS earlier this decade, could be the granddaughters of Thelma and Zasu. Beth Behrs, who played fallen privileged high-society woman Caroline, formed a formidable odd-couple relationship with Max (Kat Dennings), a street-smart waitress trying to start her own cupcake business. Their chemistry, Behrs said, was instant, and their real-life friendship informed their on-screen rapport over the show’s six seasons.

Though the actress was previously unfamiliar with Todd and Pitts, she watched a couple of their shorts on YouTube and saw a kinship with those aspirational woman. “It was important [Caroline and Max] were full-fledged women who really were entrepreneurs,” she said. “We never had a love interest for more than a season. It wasn’t about finding a man; it was about loving each other and building the business from nothing, and the two of them going after the American Dream together.”

For Todd and Pitts, the dream ended when Zasu left the team in 1933. Hal Roach replaced her with Patsy Kelly. Todd, who had appeared in some Laurel and Hardy shorts, is perhaps best known today for her two films with the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Her career was tragically cut short in 1935 when at the age of 29 she was found dead in her car. A grand jury ruled her death a suicide, but that did not explain bruises around her throat, a broken nose, and other injuries; her death remains one of Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries.

What do these 80-plus-year-old shorts have to tell us in 2018? “They show us what all old movies show us,” Basinger said. “They show us how it was, and they show us how it is. . . . We can see attitudes, we can see women out in the world doing things, having ideas and speaking out. And they show us how we are today.”

Two Broke Girls ended its run in 2017. Behrs currently stars with Max Greenfield and Cedric the Entertainer in another CBS comedy, The Neighborhood, about a white couple that moves into a predominantly black neighborhood. The first season’s initial episodes have already glimpsed the comic possibilities in her character’s relationship with her next-door neighbor (Cedric’s wife), played by Tichina Arnold. “There is an electricity between us,” Behrs said. “The writers saw it, and are exploring turning us into a Lucy and Ethel.”

No propaganda was submitted for Lamarr and Stewart.