Clara Bow, Jane Russell

http://cinemasmear.blogspot.com/2011/02/jane-russell.html




I was awake in the middle of the night watching a young Clara Bow in a 1932 movie. It was pre-production code. And it was quite evident that she was not wearing proper undergarments. In one scene, she wrestled with a large dog. The camera angle on the dog was rather immodest, too.

Contrast that with Jane Russell in The Outlaw, made eleven years later and banned in a number of jurisdictions because of an ill-fitting top:
I had a teacher in high school who told us that he and his friends drove across state lines to see The Outlaw. They were all disappointed.

There's not steady progress toward greater and greater freedom. It fluctuates.