American Letter

Bring back the girl

Al Capp

Theatre oWners in the US are mystified, and the Women's Lib groups are surly because, again, there are no girls in the Top Ten list of our cinema stars. And once you leave the cinema, the situation gets worse. Out on the streets, there are no girls at all. Females, yes. Masses of them, wide-bottomed in their slacks, pastyfaced in their disdain for make-up, flat-footed in their sandals. To be chic today a girl must be sternly herself. And to be sternly oneself for most girls is to be mighty dim. They all need help.

There was a time when no American girl was dim. Her face was decorated with fetching colours. Her hair was cleverly converted and coiffed. No matter how uneventful her figure, American dresses made her look different from a man, and that, after all, is what the game is all about. No matter how utilitarian her legs, nylon stockings and high heels made the least of them worth glancing back at.

The American girl's mother still fights to look pretty and her grandmother keeps up as well as she can, poor dear. They were brought up in a day when it was a girl's duty to look so different from a man that we never ceased being astounded at our luck at inhabiting the same planet Some satanic conspiracy swindled our girls into accepting the idea that looking feminine got you treated as a mere female, and that, if you wanted equality with men, you mustn't look any better than one. And so the American girl, with the most cunning and inexpensive beauty aids at her fingertips, turned away from all that, let her eyebrows roam unplucked, let her hair grow uncut and unbrushed, donned her brother's dirtiest shirt and threadbare jeans, turned in her French heels for muddy sneakers, or muddy bare feet, and a generation of young men has grown up wondering to whom all that poetry ever got written. And the cinema, whose mission it is to create the super-symbol of all the average girl aspires to be, has replaced Marilyn Monroe with a procession of blue-jeaned creatures with hair over their faces, probably named Pamela Sue, and whom we never see again because, in the

next film, she is replaced by one as hairy and messy, but who must be different because her

name is Mary Jo, and we don't worry much

about ever seeing her again because there are plenty more where they came from. What

worries us is where do they go? How manY Pamela Sues and Mary Jos have you seen, and never seen again? Where are they now that they are forever spoiled as waitresses?

In another day the appearance of a Pamela Sue in a feature film was an important event,

not only to her, but to us. The Pamela Sues of that day were built to last. No matter how inadequate they may have been in their first several appearances, the studio's publicity department didn't permit us to forget them, the front office made it impossible to see their movies without them. In the end they turned out to be Lana Turner, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak. No studio gave just any Pamela' Sue a lead in a feature film, and a

publicity build-up, to abandon her. Bette Davis, for example, was hopeless as a pretty ingenue,

Her studio nonetheless kept casting her in

picture after picture until one turned up — The Petrified Forest — that gave her a chance to act.

This was, of course, the last thing the studio expected, but they rolled with the punch and instead of tossing her away, they found scripts

for her which required acting, and the bleak blonde ingenue became the cinema's greatest dramatic actress, but more importantly, Made millions for her wise and tenacious studio.

Lana Turner was not a natural actress, but she had a natural bosom, and her studio kept photographing that in film after film until it became a legend that cheered us all and sold millions of tickets.

But today, the hair-over-the-eyes, bosomless, blue-jeaned Pamela Sues and Mary Jos are

getting roles that Marilyn Monroe, if she were

born fifteen years later, would be denied. Monroe's delirious legs, her wet eager mouth,

her uncontrollable wiggle, all of it faked and all, of it delicious, would be rejected today as all too obvious by any casting director. Today Raquel

Welch is financing her own pictures and Mia Farrow gets all the big studio parts. Miss Welch's handicap is that she looks like a girl, whereas Miss Farrow has the advantage of looking like a boy. It is, I think, because it is unchic for a girl of the 'seventies to look like one that films have gone back to the 'thirties, 'forties and 'fifties. In those times, it was permissible for girls tia,,Aook like girls, and they are all having a heav,eniY time getting their hair done, getting out of blue jeans, and wearing lipstick. When will it occur to film-makers that what we enjoy most about .nostalgia is the nostalgic look back at workers?timeswhen girls didn't look like sewer Al Capp, the well-known strip cartoonist and creator of Lil' Abner, devotes an increasing amount of his time nowadays to writing and contributes regularly to The Spectator from the US