#pre code actresses

Fredric March, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins for a promotional shoot for Design For Living (1933).

Lady of The Day 🌹 Alice White ❤️

Facial studies for Mae West and Greta Garbo

The Norfolk Daily News reports that while Buster Keaton was away boating, his St. Bernard, Elmer, wandered off and "became notorious in a fight with a Culver City canine and landed in jail, the town having no pound. Elmer ate at the rate of three dollars' worth of meat a day--and Buster's bill, when he returned to the rescue, was $25."

Mary Astor and Edward G. Robinson in “The Little Giant” (1933)

Joan Blondell and Bette Davis for Three On A Match 1932 💋

“This is a woman who is fine with transactional sex even if she rolls her eyes at some of the men after her, and this is partly because Lady Lou (West’s character in She Done Him Wrong (1933)) loves sex so much that even bad sex with a seemingly unattractive man excites her. It is this above all that makes West still seem as dangerous as she ever was, and as threatening to conventional morals … Some of her older screen men are physically repulsive, yet she seems to respond to their sleaziness just as enthusiastically as she responds to the pretty boy looks of Cary Grant and Gilbert Roland … West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work it.” / From the essay “Mae West: Pleasure Woman” by Dan Callahan in Bright Lights Film Journal, 2022 / Remembering cinema’s incomparable and risqué High Empress of Sex Mae West (17 August 1893 - 22 November 1980) on the anniversary of her death. As film historian Ken Wlaschin concludes, “She could be considered the Lenny Bruce of the 30s, daring to talk about the unmentionable.” Pictured: portrait of West in 1935.  

Gloria Stuart in The Old Dark House (1932)