beauty & the b(r)east

Back in the thirties/forties, if you were in need of a beautiful woman with a working funny bone, Hollywood was an embarrassment of riches: Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Roz Russell, Constance Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Jean Harlow--each in their own way all kinds of beautiful, and all kinds of funny (from martini-repartee to outright slapstick).

That happened (in no small--and back-handed--part) because of the Hays code, a laundry list of prohibitions the industry agreed to follow, to forestall any legislation enforcing censorship:

http://www.classicmovies.org/articles/blhayscode.htm

Hays had a bitter downside: once certain acts were forbidden or minimized ("Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown"), a kind of flashy, jazz age juiciness disappeared from the movies (Stanwyck was never again quite so brazen, so wonderfully in-yer-face cheap) but the Code came with a big upside, a golden trade-off: women got the gift of movie gab.

A cold eye on characters bordering on the salacious meant no tits and ass short-hand in any script: the moment when the female lead established her romantic value came not solely through her sexual appeal--"I'd tap that"--but through a more sly approach. Without the freedom to hook the audience via nudity or guaranteed sexual availability, the only way left to establish charisma, character and romantic inevitability was through dialogue.

So beautiful women talk smart, fast and funny (Roz Russell in “His Girl Friday”, Jean Harlow in “Dinner at Eight”, Ginger Rogers in “Stage Door”) or cool and wry and witty (Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve”, Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night”) or savvy and smart and sarcastic (Irene Dunne in “The Awful Truth”, Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”) and on and on and on: classic Hollywood is breathtaking because women in comedies talk back, talk up--and under and over and through whatever comic obstacle they face--and the talk is funny, smart, goofy, charming and dead to rights.

Romance, in that era of the movies, is all but defined by the sound of a woman talking: as much as the camera loved--adored--their faces and figures, it was always their words that sealed the deal.