40’s Movie Stars: Better in Bed, Better on the Battlefield

I have been watching a lot of 40s movies lately. Being radically anti-celebrity, I was taken aback by how easily mesmerized I was by the movie stars of that period. 

After all, why wouldn’t any man (straight or gay) imitate Cary Grant’s walk up the stairs to save Ingrid Bergman at the end of Hitchcock’s “Notorious?”

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And why wouldn’t any honest woman try to talk and look like Barbara Stanwyck? 

I was at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills once where agressive supermodels were trying to seduce fake producers. That entire pack of semi-nude nymphs had less seductive power than the play of the anklet on Barbara Stanwyck left leg in Wilders’ “Double Indemnity.”  (more…)