RIP Jane Russell

There were always at least two reasons to watch Jane Russell on screen.  Her natural endowments became the obsession of one of the 20th Century’s great eccentrics.  Inventor-cum-billionaire madman Howard Hughes personally designed a bra to best show off the Russell norks.  After a fashion he directed her in a minor western, a version of the Billy the Kid story called “The Outlaw”.  On the strength of plunging cleavage and the Hughes publicity machine it became a major sensation.  A star was born.

Russell’s career was short but not without achievement.  A competent comedienne, she held her own with Bob Hope in the pleasant western parody “The Paleface” and its sequel.  An alluring femme fatale, she partnered Robert Mitchum in the film noir classics “His Kind of Woman” and “Macao”.  A singer and busty dancer, her performance of “Looking for Trouble”  in the otherwise forgettable musical “The French Line” is the most mammary quivering number ever by a golden age star.  Russell had the equipment and knew how to use it.

To a wider public Russell will be remembered as Marilyn Monroe’s co-star in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”.  It is a performance of wit and sophistication in one of the key sex farces of the 1950s.  Other than the “A Little Girl from Little Rock” opening number Russell’s finest screen moment is perhaps the comic lament “Anyone Here for Love?”, an ironic song sung in a gymnasium against a backdrop of toned but disinterested body building men.

Russell retired from the screen in 1970 and became a particularly poisonous political reactionary.  Lamenting the passing of key Hollywood conservatives like Hughes, Chuck Heston and John Wayne, she bemoaned licentious trends in contemporary film, only dimly perceiving that she had a hand - or a breast - in starting it all.  The hypocrisy was breathtaking, her “born again” christianity reflecting residual guilt at being a sex symbol just as her vehement “pro-life” attitudes had their origin in a botched abortion when a teenager.