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Betty Grable: An American Icon in Wartime Britain

2011; Routledge; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2011.620838

1465-3451

Melanie Williams, Ellen Wright,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Robert B. Westbrook, ‘I want a girl, just like the girl Harry James married’: American women and the problem of political obligation in World War II, American Quarterly, 42(4) (December 1990), 587–614; Jane Gaines, The popular icon as commodity and sign: the circulation of Betty Grable, 1941–45 (Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1982); Jane Gaines, In the service of ideology: how Betty Grable's legs won the war, Film Reader 5 (1982), 47–59. 2. Quigley's International Motion Picture Almanac http://www.quigleypublishing.com/MPalmanac/Top10/Top10_lists.html. Accessed 18 April 2011. 3. See, for example, David Thomson's emblematic account of the star: ‘Her huge wartime fame was all based on leggy virtuosity and her very good-natured, long-distance sexiness … a tribute to the taste of GIs everywhere.’ A Biographical Dictionary of Film (London, 1995), 298. David Shipman's resume runs along similar lines: ‘While the armies of the Allies drooled over those legs, on clippings pinned above their beds, she cheered them in escapist nonsense’. The Great Movie Stars: the golden years (London, 1970), 251. 4. Campaign book for Moon over Miami, BFI Library. 5. Westbrook, ‘I want a girl’, 596–600. 6. Ibid., 599. 7. Quoted in Shipman, The Great Movie Stars, 250. 8. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd-Green, Notable American Women: the modern period. A biographical dictionary (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 290. 9. Richard Schickel, The Stars (New York, 1962) and quoted as authoritative in Shipman, The Great Movie Stars, 250. 10. Westbrook, ‘I want a girl’, 596 11. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: women, movies and the American dream (London, 1973), 208 12. Picture Post, 8 January 1944, 1. 13. Kinematograph Weekly, 11 November 1943, 5. 14. Pinning Up Records, Kinematograph Weekly, 7 September 1944, 6 15. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: the Hollywood ‘British’ film 1939–45 (Manchester, 1999), 27. 16. Sue Harper, Fragmentation and crisis: 1940s admissions figures at the Regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26(3) (2006), 361–394. 17. Our Gold Medal Winners, Picturegoer, 8 July 1944, 11. 18. The Bernstein report, 1947, M/O FR 2464, Mass Observation Archive, Sussex. It might be borne in mind, however, that Sarah street suggests that Bernstein was ‘biased towards British films, glossing—and even mis-reading—its tables with patriotic commentary’. Sarah Street, British Cinema in Documents (London, 2000), 167. 19. John Y. Stapleton, Ladies or Dames?, Picturegoer, 10 November 1945, 11 20. Street, British Cinema in Documents, 100. 21. An accusation specifically levelled at Grable a few years before in the same magazine, with Lionel Collier pondering ‘Does Grable need a change?’ in Picturegoer, 20 February 1943, 6. 22. Tom Ryall, Britain and the American Cinema (London, 2001), 33. An overview of British fears of Americanisation and cultural homogeneity is provided by the editor's introduction in George McKay (ed.), Yankee Go Home (and Take Me with You): Americanisation and popular culture (London, 1997). 23. Ryall, Britain and the American Cinema, 154. 24. Paul Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain (New York, 1987), 18. 25. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, 1960), 155. 26. Quoted in David Reynolds, Rich Relations: the American occupation of Britain 1942–1945 (London, 1995), 241. 27. M/O 1095, 16 February 1942, 11, quoted in David Reynolds, Rich Relations, 37–38. 28. A gendered split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Americans informs one of Betty Grable's wartime films, A Yank in the R.A.F. (20th Century Fox; US, 1941). Grable's character Carol defies that period's American isolationism, relocating to Britain to assist the war effort (‘trying to help out’, as she describes it), and she is drawn in stark contrast to her love interest, Tim (Tyrone Power), an arrogant, philandering and mercenary American pilot who only agrees to ferry planes to Britain in return for exorbitant pay (as Carol suggests, he is ‘the boy who blanks out at anything less than a thousand a month’). In the course of the narrative, Tim is ‘re-educated’ into realising the importance of self-sacrifice and team spirit but it is interesting that the same film's American female requires no such tutoring. Indeed, here we see a female star functioning as an ambassador for her country, not only presaging America's forthcoming entry into war but also enlightening her fellow countrymen about the code of values underpinning the war in Europe. However, Grable was far from being an icon of self-abnegation and quiet modesty in the majority of her films. 29. Stephen Gundle, Glamour: a history (Oxford, 2008), 11. 30. Picturegoer, 19 August 1944, 13. 31. Those Critics!, Sight and Sound, May 1943, 12. 32. David Lean, Brief Encounter, Penguin Film Review, no. 4, 1947, 28. 33. For a more detailed account of the methodology of Mayer and its drawbacks, see Street, British cinema in Documents, 139–158. 34. J. P. Mayer, Sociology of Film (London, 1946), 236. 35. Ibid., 119. 36. J. P. Mayer, British Cinemas and their Audiences (London, 1948), 235. 37. Ibid., 178. 38. Ibid., 117. 39. Ibid., 191. 40. Ibid., 47. 41. Ibid., 225. 42. Ibid., 170 43. Ibid., 210. 44. Ibid., 239. 45. Ibid., 171. 46. Ibid., 32 47. Ibid., 66. 48. Ibid., 210. 49. Ibid., 103. 50. Ibid., 168. 51. Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), 272. 52. Ibid., 288. 53. Your Views on Films, Woman's Weekly, 8 March 1946, 5. Other responses to the magazine's request for readers’ opinions on cinema-going included a ‘Mrs John Brown, of Woking’ who said she went to the pictures ‘because I get three solid hours sit down… because they take me out of myself and act as a tonic… Also I like to study the clothes and the way they talk.’ Also ‘Mrs Margaret Howe, of South Shields’ observed rather wistfully that at the pictures ‘for a time I am the glamourised well-dressed actress on the screen… that is why I like romantic love pictures, when I dash home in time to feed baby I am dreamy eyed and peaceful, a much nicer woman for my weekly visit to the cinema.’ 54. It could be that the passage of time (and the historical distance from debates about taste that seemed so pressing at the time) has enabled more free expression of personal tastes. Or that Stacey's research has simply reached a different self-selecting demographic from Mayer's 1940s research; one which just happens to be much more sympathetic to Grable's films. Conversely, it might be that the retrospective prominence of Betty Grable as exemplary star of the 1940s—the wartime pin-up girl in histories of the period—has meant that she is privileged in respondents’ recollections above stars who may have had more resonance with them at the time but are less well remembered today; one of the problems inherent in memory work. 55. Anonymous respondent quoted in Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood cinema and female spectatorship (London, 1994), 111. 56. Ibid., 146. 57. Ibid., 152. 58. Diana Dors, Dors By Diana (London, 1981), 24. 59. John Wilcox, Bombs and Betty Grable (London, 2010), 47. 60. Quoted in Westbrook, ‘I want a girl’, 613. 61. John Costello, Love, Sex and War: changing values 1939–45 (London, 1983), 181. 62. Picture Ballot Aug–Sept 1944: Soldiers and Pin-ups, M/O A1/2/52/1/E1, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. 63. What is a pin-up girl?, Picture Post, 23 September 1944, 14–15 and 25. 64. Ibid., 14. 65. Ibid., 15. 66. Ibid. 67. Picture Ballot Aug–Sept 1944: Soldiers and Pin-ups. 68. What is a pin-up girl?, 25. 69. Ibid. 70. Picture Ballot Aug–Sept 1944: Soldiers and Pin-ups. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. What is a pin-up girl?, 25. 75. Picture Ballot Aug–Sept 1944: Soldiers and Pin-ups. 76. Ibid. 77. What is a pin-up girl?, 25. 78. Stacey, Star Gazing, 160. 79. Iona and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (St Albans, 1982), 115. 80. Ibid., 134 81. Ibid., 135 82. Ibid. Another variant has it that ‘she cannae boil an egg’. 83. Iid.