It's a terrific book, and it makes a lot of interesting points. I was surprised to see how much 1924 resembled 1964. It's as if the revolutionary 1960s actually began in Chicago in the 1920s. Those were strange times. Disillusioned veterans of WW1 roamed the streets. Radio was getting big. Following a century of unprecedented growth, the country was rich, and increasingly urban. A lot of men were clerks, not laborers. Change was in the air.
The drug of choice was alcohol (above), only it was illegal! People drank a lot of fake liquor made of anything the bootleggers could get hold of. Bad liquor addled brains. People did crazy things.
Jazz (above) was their rock n' roll, the faster the better. Records made it possible to listen to it at home.
Girls in particular picked up on the new sensibility. All over the Midwest girls were aching to get to Chicago so they could lead "The Life." That city was to them what San Francisco was to the hippies 40 years later.
Girls made it their business to get to know men with cars. They saw cars as futuristic machines that could whisk them away from suffocating small towns...
...to the giant metropolis of Chicago (above), and the big jazz clubs!
For small town girls the big city was liberating, no doubt about it. The problem is, it was also decadent...and dangerous.
A girl (above) needed a protector.
Some of the girls (above) carried guns. They had to. The violent crime rate among women soared.
Some girls (above) flocked to men they thought were gangsters. Some of the gangsters were reputed to be gentlemen of a sort. Some women considered their men's murders to be funny. It was a weird time. Morality was considered old fashioned in some circles.
Where was all this going? We'll never know because The Great Depression and WWII intervened. But the social upheaval that began in Chicago wasn't exactly canceled...it was just postponed. We'd see it again in San Francisco in the 1960s. Interesting, huh?
I'm really busy, so I hope you won't be offended if I put up something quick and dirty from my file of favorite faces. These are all good subjects to draw, I just don't have the time to comment on them adequately.
I'll start with Victor Mature (above). Now THERE'S a face! A vertical brow (most men have diagonal brows), ears that stick out at the bottom, deep-set eyes with heavy, dramatic lids, big lips, masculine jaw...it's an interesting combination of features.
Here's (above) Richard Widmark.... Aaaargh! Time restraints force me to post him without comment!
One of these days I'll have to do a post about Chaplin's partner, Eric Campbell (above). In the Mutuals shorts Chaplin and Campbell are a team. When Campbell died in an auto accident, Chaplin had to stop making funny shorts. His slapstick style depended heavily on Campbell as a foil, and it just wasn't possible to continue further down that road without him.
Campbell (above, without make-up) was a real pro with long stage experience in the same innovative group that the young Chaplin belonged to.
Here's (above) proof that Wally Wood-type people actually exist. This man even looks like Wally Wood!
Contemporary valentine cards (sample above) can get pretty nasty, but they don't compare in ferocity to Victorian cards. The Victorians were brutal!
So you thought those cards were all cherubs and swans. Well, think again!!!
Here (above) the girl ridicules her boyfriend for being a clerk. Ouch!
The sender of the card above appears to hold postmen in low esteem. I guess she's holding out for a Duke or an Earl.
Don't sell seafood if you want to win the heart of this woman (above)!
Maybe the seafood guy replied to the fish disdainer with a card like this one (above).
Yikes! Here the Battle of the Cards escalates to the final extreme (above)! The recipient is described as a dried-up old spinster who reads silly books all day. Ouch and double Ouch!
I wish I knew how people responded to cards like these. Did they laugh them off or resort to fisticuffs?
I can't believe I'm putting up a blog post only hours after I put up the previous one. I only just realized that Valentine's Day is coming up! Good Grief!
I'll post again on Monday morning!
Above, a poster for last year's Valentine's Ball. It's out of date, but I like the way it looks.
I started to write about femme fatales, but after thinking about it, I've decided to write instead about something similar in cinema, the phenomenon of the "strong woman."
I can't stand movies about what feminists call "strong woman." The strong concept doesn't bother me, but the term is usually applied to women who don't deserve it. They appear strong only because the story surrounds them with weak and ineffectual men. Surely a genuinely strong woman would seek out the company of strong men. A woman like that isn't relatively strong. She's strong because the word is meaningless if it doesn't apply to her.
Boy, imagine lungs that could hold all that smoke (above) inside!
Genuine movie strong women are sometimes crazy and evil, like the hitchhiker (above) in "Detour"....
...or like Gogo Yubari in "Kill Bill" (above).
Come to think of it, Kill Bill was full of strong women (above).
One strong woman who wasn't crazy was Angelina Jolie in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." The film was horrible, but Jolie was great in it... as great as she could be, given the script.
She played the super-efficient commander of a private air force where the pilots were all women. Their propeller-driven aircraft carrier took them on adventures all over the world, mostly hidden in the clouds. The women were fanatically devoted to their leader, calling to mind the crew of the Nautilus, who would do anything for Captain Nemo. It's wonderful to imagine a world where adventures like that would be possible.
The amazing thing is that the writer could come up with a great idea like this, then fail to give it a context that would make it interesting to an audience. I felt sorry for Joli. She did a good job in "Tomb Raider" too, but once more she was the only good thing in an otherwise unwatchable film.
The last picture I saw which contained a genuine strong woman...as opposed to the phony feminist stereotype ...was "True Grit." Hailee Steinfeld was great as the single-minded kid who wouldn't be deterred from her mission. She instinctively sought out men she believed had noble qualities. Surely that's what real world strong women do. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a try.
