NitrateVille.com

In Change of Habit (1969), Mary Tyler Moore appears as a nun, but she wears false eyelashes and enough face makeup to rival a figure in a wax museum. Ditto Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story, as well as countless other films throughout the last century. Where were the make-up men?

We've also found that we can date nearly every movie without even checking TV Guide or IMDB by the hairstyles of the leading lady. Yes, there are rugged Western pioneer women on wagon trains with 1940 upswept hairdos, 18th century vixens sporting 1960-ish Rudy Gingrich bobs, and even prehistoric yarns featuring damsels coiffed in ratted and hairsprayed styles that resemble a football helmet.

Is historical accuracy that difficult to achieve in La La Land?

Sometimes the studios feel that promoting a star's glamour is more important than authenticity to sell a film.

It isn't much different for men actors. In 1950's and 1960's Westerns, all of the men are clean-shaven and have short hair, except for the villain who is allowed stubble or the old geezer who has a gray beard.

There are an infinite number of silent films about a poor, naive, innocent farm girl coming to the big city for the first time, or meeting a handsome lug from the big city, and this pure, paragon of unspotted know-nothingness is made-up like the most knowing of big city women who have been around a few blocks: full eye makeup, thick rich lipstick, camouflaging foundation, bright rosy blusher... Heck, in real life they couldn't have afforded all that stuff even if they had known about it.

Last weekend my wife and I watched Design for Living. Edward Everett Horton, as the extremely stuffy and extremely straightlaced prude, inappropriately wore so much obvious makeup it appeared to be almost a plastic mask loosely fitted over his face. A couple of times I was concerned the whole thing would just up and fall off his face in a chunk, but he managed to keep it on by avoiding his usual broad facial expressions.

Jim

Some obvious offenders:
1) Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, supposedly a convent girl in the opening scenes -- I believe she was 30 at the time of shooting, and wearing a complete cosmetic work-up on her lips, face, eyes...ridiculous. She should've been the one to vamp and tackle the officer (was it Walter Byron?) At least the business with her panties looks in character.
2) Brenda Joyce as the second Jane of the talkie Tarzans -- always with perfectly coifed hair, sporting what passed for a permanent wave in the early 50s. I was a little kid hooked on Tarzan, and this rankled me. She looked like all my mom's friends when they got out of the salon. I thought of her as Modern Housewife Jane. (And she was boring, compared to Maureen!) At least they could've spoofed the situation, and had Cheetah doing her rinse 'n' set.
3) Any/all 60s westerns, with the saloon girls all given the complete Max Factor treatment, as if western towns had cosmetics. They may have had powder, but forget the rest. Archival photos of women in the Nineteenth Century tell you everything -- to our eyes, they look plain if not hard-faced, and eye treatment simply didn't exist.
4) Similarly, compare Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde to the numerous photos we have of the real Bonnie Parker. Eyebrow and eyeliner products were not in the real Bonnie's repertoire. Also, all of us buffs know how women really wore their hair in the early 30s -- usually bobbed, or pinned back (as the real Bonnie's usually appears.) Dunaway's hairdresser must have been channeling Veronica Lake. Does all this matter? Sometimes. When Dunaway looks like a fashion model from a 60s Vogue, it does detract from my enjoyment of the film. (Of course, in Heaven's Gate there was a valiant effort to get the period details right, and while it makes for an interesting and reflective view, it doesn't propel that laggard screenplay into a good gallop.)

This topic brings back some memories and laughs for me. When I was little kid and watched the various Tarzans on the screen I used to wonder how they could all be so clean shaven. If they were out in the wild how come they didn't have any beards or even coarse stubble on their faces? No chest hair or even leg hair. My dad would shave in the morning and by early evening he already needed another shave.


Speaking of my Dad he would always laugh when he'd watch films where the women would supposedly be in bed and waking up in the morning yet their hair and make up was perfect. Their lips would be fully red with lipstick, lots of eye makeup and false lashes yet they want us to believe they actually slept that way.

Mother Superior Greer Garson in "The Singing Nun."

smokey15 wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 06, 2019 7:06 pm

This topic brings back some memories and laughs for me. When I was little kid and watched the various Tarzans on the screen I used to wonder how they could all be so clean shaven. If they were out in the wild how come they didn't have any beards or even coarse stubble on their faces? No chest hair or even leg hair. My dad would shave in the morning and by early evening he already needed another shave.


Speaking of my Dad he would always laugh when he'd watch films where the women would supposedly be in bed and waking up in the morning yet their hair and make up was perfect. Their lips would be fully red with lipstick, lots of eye makeup and false lashes yet they want us to believe they actually slept that way.

Not forgetting the number of times folk wake up without the need to 'take a leak'....

Sort of related, but one thing that has annoyed me is the plethora of '60s movies that depict WWII, with most if not all the females wearing the latest '60s hairstyles. Was it that difficult to fashion '40s hairdos? It was all hair-don't! Hahahhaa, I just made myself laugh.

Spy magazine on this topic.

westegg wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 09, 2019 4:56 pm

Sort of related, but one thing that has annoyed me is the plethora of '60s movies that depict WWII, with most if not all the females wearing the latest '60s hairstyles. Was it that difficult to fashion '40s hairdos? It was all hair-don't! Hahahhaa, I just made myself laugh.

The twenties cop it the worst, though. So many pictures between 1940 and 1960 don't even make much of an effort to look right. The Great Gatsby (1948) or The Buster Keaton Story (1957), for example.

I think there'd two reasons for this: one, the era was stranded on the other side of the Depression and World War II and seemed like another world to those observing it. Remember, Norma Desmond was only about 50 in Sunset Blvd (1950). Madonna is currently 60.

The second reason, somewhat related to the first, is that fashion changed more quickly and completely in those days. I remember an anecdote from director Ken G. Hall about the making of the Australian historical drama Smithy (1946). A costume designer went to the trouble of pinning up all the womens' hair into the approximation of a twenties bob, but he had her undo it rather than risk the actresses being a laughing stock.

Yes, the fashions were considered that odd and that amusing, only twenty years later.

In the sixties, style was self-referential, more so than today (today we have more styles going, too, I think -- witness how young folk have no predictable hair style/length, how people out & about are in every sort of clothing, from casual to style-conscious.) So the saloon girls in 60s westerns look like they could jump right into one of Dean Martin's Golddigger sketches. In the sixties, everything was mod, and so the approach to past decades was to treat it as 'camp' (a word that probably died 40 years ago) and spoof it, or at least treat it as an oddity.
In older films, it's startling to see the opposite going on. Pickford in Stella Maris and Shearer in the opening scenes of Let Us Be Gay were pretty brave -- we got see all the angles of their faces without noticeable cosmetics. Claudette Colbert was almost as daring in Three Came Home (a powerful film) in which she plays an internee in a Japanese prison camp. I say 'almost' because, while she uses almost no makeup, in her closeups there is rudimentary eye treatment, which in a prison camp wouldn't exist. Very few actresses would go through a film without at least some eyebrow liner and mascara.