Flatland

      It has doubtless been noticed, mostly by men I'm sure, that the great dramatic actresses of the old and the new Hollywood were/are, despite the serried ranks of starlets with bodacious racks, about as bosomy as the average female marathoner.  I've often wondered if there is any intentionality in this phenomenon or if a logical sorting process is at work.

     Either way, it's inarguable that if one crowded the entire female dramatic cinema varsity squad of the thirties and forties into a room they might collectively add up to a D-cup.  It's not that they weren't all good looking.  As a group they were some of the most sublimely beautiful female creatures ever to walk the earth, but very few indeed could have snagged an endorsement deal with a brassiere manufacturer.

     I don't really think there was, or is now, any conscious intentions, even at the margins.  I doubt that a casting director or producer contemplating candidates for a serious roll ever thought to themselves, let alone said out loud, What I definitely need is an actress with no tits.  More likely, if presented with an actress whose charms were the size of grapefruits, or even oranges, they would have thought, What I definitely need is her telephone number.

     What they would have actually thought, if casting a dramatic role, is, What I need is a Stanwyck or a Davis or a Colbert or a Hepburn or a Garbo or a Crawford or a Garson or a Loy or a de Havilland or a Tierney, or a Bacall or a Bergman or a Kelly."  Or one of the other towering above-the-title  dramatic talents of the silver screen who all shared one salient attribute.  They had no tits, a veritable sea of fried eggs, scarcely a B-cup in the lot.  They all possessed faces of astonishing beauty, waists that wasps envied, slim delectable hips, killer gams, scrumpdillyumptious buttocal regions, and although they could be most powerfully sexy, they all had virtually, oh what's the phrase I'm looking for?  Oh yeah, no tits.  Maureen O'Hara seemed to be busty but in reality it was her lush hips and cinched waist that  gave the impression she had a large bosom, which she manifestly did not, although it was slightly larger than average.

     Some, like Kate Hepburn, Greta Garbo, or Grace Kelly were practically concave.  Only the most arcane and padding-centric Hollywood magic could bestow a noticeable front porch on most of these paragons of loveliness.  There may have never been two more strikingly beautiful women to ever breathe air than the young Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, but if ever there were two women who had not even the remotest need for a bra, it was them.  In the silent era, from available evidence, even a full A-cup was a rarity.  Of course the clothes of that era were beyond the powers of language to describe their tubular ugliness so there was that.

     Comic actresses seemed to be under fewer restrictions.  Witness Ann Southern and Martha Ray, who included among their talents the ability to at least moderately fill out a Maidenform.  But the most towering comic actress of them all, Lucille Ball, was nearly ruler flat.

     The bombshell class of actresses in the thirties, Harlow, Landis, Lombard et. al., is something of a special case.  They were not well endowed, but they very effectively employed the technique of going braless underneath thin fabric.  Braless bitty boobs flouncing and bouncing beneath soft shimmering silk, in the pre-Code era, proved able to increase blood flow to male antipodal regions just as well as C-cup cleavage.  What you sure as hell weren't going to see, with the Hayes commission all up in Hollywood's grille after the mid-thirties, were unconstrained C, or God forbid D-cup, honkers tectonically boobeling 'neath said silk.

     The great movie singers, Judy Garland, Doris Day, Shirley Jones, Jane Powell etc. etc., were also mostly decollete free.  Ironically, although Judy had a very modest bosom, it took prodigies of Hollywood legedermain to minimize her frontal area for her role as Dorothy in TWOO.   In any case, all of their incidentals were definitely no bigger than two lentils, regardless of what movie magic appeared to inflate their charms.  Special note:  Doris Day may have been topologically challenged above the waist, but she did have a truly exquisite ass.  Not a derriere or a backside or a tookus, but rather a gorgeous round plump and perfect pro-boner ass.

       Uh, where was I?  Oh yeah. The great movie dancers, Cyd Charisse, Ginger Rogers, Anne Miller, Eleanor Powell and so forth, were negligibly bosomed, but as a practical matter it could hardly have been otherwise.  Even the alleged sex-bomb Mae West was much more about 'tude than boob.  A cylinder with a bulletproof corset was always how she struck me.

     The fifties graced us with somewhat more mammalian toothsomeness. To wit: Janet Leigh, Marilyn, Sophia, Jane Russell, Liz Taylor, but they were still a small minority.  Hell, even Ava Gardner, about as iconically erotic as an actress ever got, would have rattled around inside a B-cup.  However, by that time producers had gotten a clue and dressed the stunning creatures to emphasize their charms instead of disguising them.  It is instructive to remember that Taylor, Leigh, Loren, and even Marilyn only ranged from B to C-cups, or in other words positively immense by Hollywood standards.  A woman with a D-cup bosom, or quelle horreur larger, would have been entirely relegated to comic relief, or the casting couch.

     Fortunately Leigh, Loren, and Taylor, if not Marilyn, had acting chops of Oscar caliber.  But here's the thing.  As great as the acting talent of those women was, it was simply impossible for any straight man with a pulse to avoid looking at their relatively fulsome busts.  Thus a woman with a larger bosom than that would never have appeared in front of a camera that wasn't employed in making stag films.  The women listed above were all beautiful, shapely, and stupefyingly sexy, but to aver that their lovely full bosoms enhanced their acting, or even their sexiness, is to assume facts not in evidence.  It may well have enhanced their bankability, but that is not the issue in question here.

     From the twenties yet unto today very few, if any, major dramatic actresses have had anything resembling a righteous rack.  To be sure the screen is awash in bare boobery these days, but even there the female names above the title possess little in the way of distaff bas-relief.  Interestingly, the modern actress is actually at a significant disadvantage.  Actresses of the 20s-30s-40s-50s, great and not so great, never had to be fully naked on screen and thus could benefit from artificially maximizing and/or minimizing their figures as professional circumstances necessitated without giving the game away with nude scenes.  Girdles and cinchers wasped their waists and padding accentuated their fried eggs.  It was quite convenient.  From colorless drab to femme fatale in an hour with a costume change.

     Perhaps the most glaring exception to all this was the incomparable Sophia Loren.  Now she never appeared nude on screen in a major film, but she came damn close a few times, and did not need any technological trickery to emphasize her mammalian magnificence.  She was a neutron bombshell who could emote with the best of 'em and is the exception that proves the rule.  I would go so far as to say unique.  Even then she frequently was dressed to overemphasize her C-cup bosom to extravagant prominence.  Luckily her acting talent towered to the skies, thereby making her (real) hourglass less of a negative factor than it would have been otherwise.  Contrast Sophia with Audrey Hepburn.  Who was an elfin waif-like creature with all the curves of a twelve year-old, but without doubt a truly sublime actress and an ineffably sexy woman.   Whether or not she was in Sophia's exalted acting talent class I leave to the judgement of the reader.

     And here we come to the, er, nub I believe.  In general, if a moviegoer is focusing on an actresses' frontal generosity, they are paying much less attention to the emotions rampant upon her face and the set and demeanor of her body language.  In other words, tits can't act,  Therefore a dramatic actress not only has no need of a protuberant forecastle, it can be positively poisonous to her performance.  Additionally, it tends to severely limit the rolls available.  There have certainly been a few bosomy famous actresses, but not a single one of them was considered to be anywhere near the top rank of dramatic actresses.  Outliers such as Loren will never produce much more than very minor spikes on the bell curve of dramatic actress bosom size which was, and still is, predictably, flat.  In short, an actress is not going to find much work in dramatic films if she sports a balcony you could do Shakespeare off of.

     A good example of my thesis is Janet Leigh.  She did not often, if ever, play glamorous women.  In the fine little film Holiday Affair she played an ordinary sales girl, and did an excellent job.  However, in many scenes she wears clothes that cling to and accentuate her form.  I assure you a guy will require the focus of a Buddhist monk to avoid staring at her proud and prominent torpedos.  In this role she was hourglassy in extremis, although doubtless some artifice was employed.  Most of her roles downplayed her figure, but in this one it was, er, front and center.  Incredibly sexy, but also extremely distracting.  Her performance hit the ball over the centerfield fence, but even Rex Reed would have been ogling her chest at least some of the time.  Quod erat demonstrandum dont'cha know.

     To be entirely fair about all this, in decades past both men and women were in general much thinner that most people one sees these days, to put it as kindly as possible.  I've seen thousands of pictures from the teens through the 1960s, and the average female norm was slender and small bosomed.  In fact this was the case in antiquity as well.  Even in the plump nobility, protuberant bosoms, based on centuries of portraiture, were exceedingly rare.  Virtually non-existent in fact.  Overall, only the rare outliers were women with ample bosoms and well padded figures.  Well padded, the most gentle euphemism I can muster, affects/afflicts the majority of women today, not to mention everyone else, of all ages. 

     On a personal note, I have been married to a bosomy woman and (much earlier) been quite desperately in love with a delightful woman who was not at all bosomy.  I can testify that their respective cup sizes had less than zero to do with how sexy I thought they were, or how well the relationship went.  In point of fact the considerably less endowed lady was the one that had me utterly prostrate with desire and adoration.  How's about them apples, er, tangerines, er, limes?