…and those big, wonderful 60’s boobies that they apparently don’t make any more.
This made me laugh. I too have always noticed the hair/makeup thing. I recall westerns in the 60s (“Daniel Boone”, “The Wild Wild West”, etc.) where the women would always have these big bouffant hairdos–the kind my mother would go sit at the “beauty shop” for hours to have done (then spend the rest of the week sleeping swathed in toilet paper to maintain the style). Even as a little kid I knew it was wrong!
Women’s, too. Most films set in the 1800s, for that matter, get this wrong. In those days, grown women (who were not homeless, crazy, the town slattern, running into the street to escape a burning building in the middle of the night, etc.) did not wear their hair down in public. Even Deadwood got this wrong (re: Alma Garrett…characters like Trixie were okay styled like this).
That bugs me almost as much as seeing 1940s red bee-stung lips in a Western.
I always get a kick out of old Glenn Ford westerns: Shortest Hair in the West!
(Well, almost.)
Yes! This bugs me no end. At a certain age, a girl put up her hair and would never go around with her long hair flapping (like Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain!). And even cowgirls, off the range, didn’t go gallumphing around in an athletic manner - slow and stately (because of the ubiquitous corset and long skirts) was the demeanor of a lady.
Wild Bill Hickock and General Custer had long curled hair, apparently kept in place with bear grease or something - you can always pick them out of a crowd in a movie no matter what year it was made.
I notice this far more frequently with women than with men, for whatever reason. It was always my impression (or my assumption) that it was mostly due to movie-star-prima-donna vanity. Some people are seriously serious about their hair, and I could see an actress pushing her hairdresser to please please please make her hair as flattering as possible, the definition of which of course is always subject to contemporary fashions. So in the 60s, for say a Roman epic, sure OK we’ll make little spit curls like on the statues, but let’s see how high a beehive we can get away with and still stay in the historical ballpark. Thus, looking at it later, when maybe beehives are way, way out of fashion, and women are wearing their hair very short and close, that beehivieness, no matter how subtle the hairdresser thought it was, will stick out like a sore thumb.
Short story long, we see things in a contemporary context, and if women on the street are wearing beehives, half a beehive doesn’t seem like such a stretch. Until that context changes, and we look at an older movie with the current styles in mind.
I remember reading an article about painting forgeries, saying that if you look at old forgeries, what’s striking about them is how ‘of their time’ they look - eg, a Vermeer forgery from England in the late 19th century looks like a late 19th century English painting to us now, even though when it was new, it completely fooled people into thinking it was 17th century and Dutch. I think that to a large extent, hairstyles fall into the same category. Whatever we’re used to seeing now is, on some unconscious level, ‘normal hair,’ and so while we’d react poorly to a modern film that put women in beehives in the Old West, in the sixties, beehives might have been thought of as normal hair, not worth really noticing.
I’m not sure what a “quiff” is, but I don’t think you saw any under the Hayes Code. 
I agree with those who’ve said that modern hairstyles are “invisible” to a point where things like clothing are less so.
Yeah, I’d be afraid to google “quiff.” I think he meant “coif.”
I just rewatched The Lion in Winter and found it amazing how much Eleanor of Aquetain’s coif looked like a '50s movie star!
I’ve always thought it was an actor’s thing. For the smaller parts it was “hey, I’ve just got a three-second walk-on on the Waltons; if I get a bowl haircut for that, I’ll blow the audition for the beach comedy I’m up for.” And on the other end of the scale, starlets had the power to promote their own brand, and would not have to wear a “what were they thinking?” old hairstyle.
Notable exceptions that come to mind was il-gattopardo and Holly Hunter in The Piano, displaying the fact that for most of the 19th Century, women wore their hair up and parted in the middle, tight to keep it as tangle-free and clean as possible in an era and climate when wet hair was dangerous to the wearer’s health; not as flips or shags or wedges.
No, he meant quiff.
Barbra Streisand’s costumes in Funny Girl were gorgeous, but her 60’s hair, makeup, and nails drove me to distraction.
I think it was Ben Hur that had Jean Simmons in a ponytail.
Me too, but I thought it was historically accurate. Her hair was almost totally covered in most of the scenes – under a wimple(?) – except for one scene where she was brushing her hair and she looked gorgeous. I interpreted that as adapting to a 20th century audience. We wouldn’t have believed she was beautiful unless we had at least one scene where she was beautiful by 20th century standards.
Hollywood still screws this up. The posters for the recent Sherlock Holmes movie bugged the hell out of me because apparently none of the leads could be bothered to comb their damn hair.
This is what a publicity photo of a Victorian concert singer looks like, for Og’s sake, not this. Slatternly harlot.
I don’t know exactly what kind of hair styles women had 2,000 years ago, but I’m pretty sure there have been ponytails since caveman days.
… but it’s from a painting of the star dressed as a character from an opera set in the mid-1800s (La Traviata). I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison to a 2010 promo image of McAdams dressed as Irene Adler circa 1890. Styles changed a lot in forty years.
This is Miss Patti in a bit more contemporaneous dress/hairstyle – not sure of the date, but looks like 1870s. I don’t think she’s so very different from McAdams as Adler. Here’s another one from 1895.
The thing is, Irene is supposed to be “real” in this promo shot; she’s not perfectly coiffed and posed, the way Miss Patti is in these photos. So of course her hair is going to be a bit more touseled, less rigidly styled.
Actually, choie, I was initially going to use the first Patti link that you found for the comparison in my previous post. I don’t agree with you at all that Patti’s hairstyle there is “not that different” from Rachel McAdams’s hair in the Irene Adler role. That Patti hairdo has got a bit more curl in it than the one in the pic I posted, but it’s still much more groomed than the rat’s nest McAdams is sporting. It’s clearly an actual combed coiffure, not an artfully tangled mess.
The audience does care and the Hollywood producers care about what the audience thinks. The audience want their movie stars to be attractive by today’s standards of attractiveness. So they ain’t putting ugly hair on the movie stars.
And what about the dazzlingly white, straight, even, full set of teeth on everybody?