Orson was very compelling in Jane Eyre - no reason to be embarassed.
I must confess, however, that I find Rick Moranis to be kinda sexy.
I once began a serious romance when a guy I met at a party told me I looked like Rhonda Fleming.
I’ve never been so flattered.
The first time he calls Jane into his study and makes her stand there in front of the fire place…I’m pretty sure there was no humiliating physical examination of the new employee scene there but somehow I remember one very clearly. Then later there’s a spanking scene that I can’t find again. I see it so clearly in my mind but I guess I imagined it. I’m glad I’m not the only one who loves him in that movie.
I guess if he was good enough for Rita Hayworth I shouldn’t be ashamed. But it’s funny because in Lady From Shanghai I can’t work up any feelings toward him.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned Jane Greer from Out of the Past. I think she is my idea of perfect-looking.
Yeah, Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey has definitely got something. She’s not ditzy (which is good, cause I can’t stand that), but is somehow cleverly absurd. And she gets the best closing line in movie history.
A vote for Greer Garson, too.
And I would suggest that The Big Sleep deserves some kind of honorary title as the first James Bond movie. Every drop-dead gorgeous woman in L.A. is throwing herself at Humphrey Bogart.
Clark Gable. Sigh.
Another vote for Brooks, Loy, Charisse, Goddard, Garson, and Malone.
Some others:
**Joan Blondell (!)
June Duprez
Vera-Ellen
**
Ah, yes, I was wondering if anyone would mention Joan Blondell. There’s a famous photo of her walking across a movie set stark naked with a big smile on her face. Yowzah!
And I don’t know if I would call her a hottie, but I love Jean Arthur with a sick, sad, passion.
Ann Sheridan
Irene Dunne
Grace Kelly
Myrna Loy
Shirley Temple (As an adult, esp in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer)
Jeanne Crain
Leslie Caron
(In fact, anyone who ever appeared with Cary Grant as a headliner… damned but he got some great co-stars…)
I think the bookshop clerk that throws herself at him looks exactly like Alicia Silverstone from Clueless. Only in the movie though, not in any photos I’ve seen of her.
I hate to be attracted to Humphrey Bogart because he was somehow in style when I was a kid in the 70s and so he’s associated in my mind with macrame belts and potted ferns and orange courdory sectional couches. But he was hot so I have to grudgingly understand why he came into style in the 70s.
(One thing that bothers me is that in the 70s, 1930s and 40s stuff was in style, as being so old fashioned and “golden agey” but it was only 30 years old at that time. So that means if I look back at the 70s I should be looking as far back in history as people were looking back then. And that puts my mortality into perspective which I don’t like.)
Yeah *pokey hearin’ that loud and clear.
Rather sobering.
An early and memorable role for Dorothy Malone, and more than qualified for this thread. She did go blonde later in her career, but from the still photos anyway, it just wasn’t the same.
And I agree about the shifting nature of nostalgia. I remember when I was a kid, my mother loved old movies. (And that was when you had to wait for Gone With the Wind to come to the revival theaters.) I could never really understand what she saw in them. Now here I am on the 'net singing the praises of My Man Godfrey. There’s nothing wrong with old movies, I just had to find my own old movies.
Couldn’t resist doing a Google image search for “Joan Blondell Nude” and all I can say is :eek: ! And 
Jane Russell. Wasn’t there trouble with getting her first movie The Outlaw past the censors? It’s an otherwise terrible movie, but Jane Russell is great.
I haven’t seen the movie, but why wasn’t she portrayed in The Aviator?
May I just hijack and say the two bookstores sequence in The Big Sleep is brilliant and my favorite part of the movie. It goes from the unforgettable sight of Humphrey Bogart pretending to be an efeminant book nerd to that incredibly sexy scene with Dorothy Malone.
And that’s why I mentioned both Dorothy Malone and Martha Vickers earlier, and I shouldn’t have left off Sonia Darrin. Darrin was Agnes, the high-toned one who worked for the bad guys and didn’t know her books (which always made me wonder why they would run a bookstore front with people who didn’t know books). She’s very sleek. And thin. Her outfits made her waist look as tiny as a corset-bearing Victorian maiden’s. She looks thin standing next to Lauren Bacall, not an easy feat. (I had thought only Slim Keith could do that. Imagine what it took to be nicknamed Slim in those days. Anyway the connection is that fashion model Nancy Gross changed her name to Slim Keith, married Howard Hawks and recommended another fashion model to him: Lauren Bacall.)
Anyway Bogie goes across the street to a real bookshop where Dorothy Malone works. She lets down her hair - literally - and Bogie’s eyes light up. She drinks too, and she closes down the store and shuts the curtains to give us a while to exercise our imaginations.
Martha Vickers plays Carmen, the trampy younger daughter, who throws herself literally at Spade, showing lots of leg and tousled hair. Probably a hundred of today’s actresses could have played her part, but none of the others.
Even Carole Douglas, in her only role, played a pretty librarian who caught Bogie’s eye.
But actresses were already looking different post war than they did prewar. Something changes that I can’t put my finger on. My hunch is that they were taller and thinner yet curvier, with longer and more interesting hair styles but I’m not an expert on those subtleties.
The young Gregory Peck was just a dreamboat. <sigh>
Heck, the old Gregory Peck wasn’t half bad either. Wonderful voice, too.
Call me crazy, but I always thought Maureen O’Sullivan and Johnny Weissmuller were pretty hot.
That’s Hedly.
Marc
Manduck, I spent an hour or so last night looking, and except for a shot of Joan in a bathtub that shows the side of her right breast, I couldn’t find anything even slightly racy. Certainly nothing like Rube describes.
Could you please help us serious film scholars find this important historical document? For reseach purposes only, of course. Thanks.