VOLUME THREE

THE BLONDE MENACE

By the early thirties in Hollywood, you could get away with a lot on-screen. After Will Hays’s crackdown on on- and off-screen immorality in the early twenties, the studios began a gradual process of boundary testing. Sure, there were rules for what they could and couldn’t show or suggest on-screen—but enforcement of those rules was nearly nonexistent. Thus emerged a motley genre of films, today known as Pre-Code Cinema, that weren’t so much before the code as flaunting it. Gangster films, “kept-woman” films, films depicting insurrection and drug use and “white slavery,” also known as prostitution—they were the hottest thing in theaters. At the forefront of this assault on American morals: Jean Harlow and Mae West.

Other female stars played hussies and harlots, but no one did it with more verve, or fewer apologies, than Harlow and West. Both served as an affront to traditional notions of female respectability: Harlow’s platinum hair was unnatural, even an abomination, and she had a terrifying way of giving men the once-over that made them seem like little more than her next meal. She was a classic vamp with the face of an angel, and the confusion between how she looked and what she did was part of what made her so effortlessly beguiling. As for West, she was a bulldozer in a skintight gown, equal parts wit and sexual appetite. With her “dangerous curves,” West reset beauty standards, forcing men and women to forget the flapper silhouette with the power of her well-sequined, voluptuous hips.

Harlow and West were either the most glamorous, beguiling thing to hit the screen in a decade—or a blonde menace, out to sully impressionable minds and turn them toward sin. Or they were both: female stars whose images exploited Depression-era appetites for the sumptuous and the suggestive. But as protests against the so-called immorality of the screen began to gain traction, Harlow, West, and their studios had no choice but to soften and desexualize their images—a shift that Harlow, who had always proved herself amenable to MGM’s manipulations, survived, but West, at least in the short term, did not. The combustive sexual energy manifest in the performances of Jean Harlow and Mae West, and its brief tenure on-screen, forms a persuasive argument for the very real, very robust sexual appetites of audiences . . . and how the female star so often becomes the locus of the terror and confusion that ensues.