Femmes Fatales

May 4 2025

SPECIAL J

Small but with decent stopping power. The gun too.

Jane Powell, née Suzanne Lorraine Bruce, brandishes a .38 pistol in this promo image from around 1957. It doesn’t correspond to any film as far as we can tell. That sometimes happens. Photographer during promo session: “Let’s get a few of you in femme fatale mode, you know, with a gun or something.” Powell was making lots of musicals in 1957 and before, and though she made The Female Animal in 1958, she spent most of the film in a swimsuit. So we’ll see if this turns out to be a production photo. Someone out there probably knows. It’s nice, is all we can say.

Jane Powell, Suzanne Lorrriane Bruce

Femmes Fatales

April 24 2023

A BEAUTIFUL APPROACH

Jane Powell makes the cut on the screen and on the green.

Jane Powell shows her best form with a driver in this fun promo image made on a golf course the like of which we’ve never seen, in terms of the actual golfers. Maybe we don’t hit the links enough. An interesting aspect of the shot is that Powell is wearing a bathing suit with a shirt over it. We know because she wore it in her 1958 movie The Female Animal, which we talked about and shared images from here. This shot is generally credited as being from 1959, so maybe she hung onto the suit.

The Female Animal, Jane Powell

Vintage Pulp

January 22 2021

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

Competition for mates gets vicious in the Hollywood jungle.

This poster really catches the eye. It was made for The Female Animal, Hedy Lamarr’s last motion picture, filmed when she was forty-four. It’s the story of an aging star who finds herself a younger man, but watches him immediately become the target of her sexpot daughter.

The age issues strain credulity a bit. The younger man is played by George Nader, who’s only seven years Lamarr’s junior, while twenty-nine year old Jane Powell plays Lamarr’s adopted daughter. But okay, they were the ones cast, so we have to go with it. And really, who’s going to complain? Nader is a muscular uberhunk who’d fill out a Marvel superhero costume no problem, and Powell is dangerously cute straining the seams of a form fitting swimsuit.

And incidentally, speaking of casting weirdness, Powell—yeah, that’s her in the polka dots—had three children of her own by the time she played this troublesome stepdaughter role. Yes, three. There’s no substitute for lucky genes, an adage doubly proved by the fact that Powell is still kicking around today at age 90.

Moving on to the performances, Lamarr does fine in a sort of detached way, and Nader is solid enough, but it’s Powell who’s asked to spark the movie as the daughter determined to steal her mom’s man. She’s required at turns to be blind drunk, violently angry, coquettish, sexually predatory, and disconsolate. She mostly hauls that heavy load, but in the end the movie is still pretty lightweight. Probably part of the problem is the scripting by Robert Hill. Some of his other screenplays include Sex Kittens Go to College and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, so his insights into the female animal are negligible. You may want to seek your own, though frankly, we personally have never figured them out and have abandoned any expectations that we ever will. To be fair, they probably feel the same way about us. The Female Animal premiered in New York City today in 1958.

The Female Animal, Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Hedy Lamarr, Jane Powell, Jan Sterling, George Nader, poster art, cinema, movie review

Femmes Fatales, Musiquarium

February 28 2020

SWEET JANE

Sugar and spice and everything nice.

Above is a shot of cinematic girl-next-door Jane Powell, who rose to fame in Hollywood musicals such as Holiday in Mexico, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Royal Wedding. While Powell is fondly remembered for those and similar roles, she found it ridiculous that she played teenagers into her mid-twenties even though she had children of her own by that point. Under the studio system she had little choice, but later she did manage to expand her repertoire, co-starring in the Hedy Lamarr melodrama The Female Animal.

Afterward she turned her attentions mainly to television, with guest slots on everything from Goodyear Theatre to Fantasy Island. She also had stage and singing careers, and scored a top 20 hit with 1956’s “True Love.” The photo you see here was made to promote her 1957 musical The Girl Most Likely, and a shot from the same session appeared on the cover of the soundtrack album, which you see below. We don’t generally do musicals here, but we will certainly check out her dramatic turn in The Female Animal. Meanwhile you may want to check out this rare photo we shared a couple of years ago.

Holiday in Mexico, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Royal Wedding, The Girl Most Likely, The Female Animal, Goodyear Theatre, Fantasy Island, Jane Powell, Hedy Lamarr, television, album art

Femmes Fatales

August 29 2018

FULL POWELL

Enough wattage to light all of Hollywood.

This promo image features U.S. actress Jane Powell, née Suzanne Burce, who started in show business as a child, as an adult appeared in films such as Holiday in Mexico, Rich Young and Pretty, and The Girl Most Likely, and eventually was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Powell played mostly wholesome good girls, which is why this striking shot of her in a skirt way too short for the period is such an interesting rarity. It was made in 1954.

Hollywood Walk of Fame, Holiday in Mexico, Rich Young and Pretty, The Girl Most Likely, Jane Powell

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

May 13

1960—Gary Cooper Dies

American film actor Gary Cooper, who harnessed an understated, often stoic style in numerous adventure films and westerns, including Sergeant York, For Whom the Bell Tolls, High Noon, and Alias Jesse James, dies of prostate, intestinal, lung and bone cancer. For his contributions to American cinema Cooper received a plaque on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is considered one of top movie stars of all time.

May 12

1957—Von Stroheim Dies

German film director and actor Erich von Stroheim, who as an actor was noted for his arrogant Teutonic character parts which led him to become a renowned cinematic villain with the nickname “The Man You Love to Hate”, dies in Maurepas, France at the age of 71.

May 11

1960—Adolf Eichmann Is Captured

In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been living under the assumed name and working for Mercedes-Benz. Eichman is taken to Israel to face trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.

May 11

2010—Last Ziegfeld Follies Girl Dies

Doris Eaton Travis, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, dies at age 106. The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. Inspired by the Folies Bergères of Paris, they enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, became a radio program in 1932 and 1936, and were adapted into a musical motion picture in 1946 starring Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne.

May 10

1924—Hoover Becomes FBI Director

In the U.S., J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he retains until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. But he also used the agency to grind a number of personal axes and far exceeded its legal mandate to amass secret files on political and civil rights leaders. Because of his abuses, FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.

May 10

1977—Joan Crawford Dies

American actress Joan Crawford, who began her show business career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies, but soon became one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, dies of a heart attack at her New York City apartment while ill with pancreatic cancer.