Brigitte Bardot really knew how to steam up a camera.
This week’s Goodtime Weekly Calendar image comes from Brigitte Bardot’s 1961 comedy Le bride sur le cou. In the movie she performs a little dance, first while hiding behind a towel, and later undraped. Lots of reviews describe the scene as a nude dance, but it isn’t really. Bardot was famous for showing her lovely backside, but in this particular scene her body is blurred because she faces the camera, and it’s obvious as well that she’s wearing something to cover what would have been a pretty sizeable ’60s bush. If you watch the scene, you’ll think you’ve suddenly developed cataracts. But shooting her through what looks like a thick layer of sauna steam makes sense within the film’s reality because the dance is basically the daydream of another character. Director Roger Vadim, who was also Bardot’s husband, created some sharp focus promo stills, and those are the source of the above image, with tinting and a nuclear explosion added by the good folks at her promotional agency Parimage. A couple of unaltered shots appear below, along with those weekly Goodtime quips we know you can’t live without. Oh, and to our French friends and readers, yes, we know that “bride” doesn’t mean the same in English. We’re just taking license because, hey, after four years of thinking up headers we’ll grasp at anything.
July 14: “Once you’ve seen a Brigitte Bardot movie you’ve seen her all!”—Henry Morgan
July 15: “Foreign pictures are getting so popular, they’re starting to make them in this country.”—Simmy Bow
July 16: Honey-dew vacation: Vacations you spent in hearing, “Honey, do this and Honey do that.”
July 17: “A learned man: One who used to keep his money in his sock till a midget picked his ankle.”—Mitch Miller
July 18: Henpecked husband: A man who gives his wife the best ears of his life.
July 19: Courtesy: Smiling while your departing guest holds the screen door open and lets the flies in.
July 20: Hangover: Something orbiting in the head you didn’t use the night before.
Gowland takes his camera underwater with perfect results.
This week’s image from the Goodtime Weekly Calendar of 1963 features glamour model Joanne Arnold and was made by Peter Gowland, whose name is probably familiar to all the photographers out there, but perhaps not to everyone else. Gowland, the son of actor Gibson Gowland and actress Sylvia Andrew, was not only one of the most famous glamour photographers of the 1950s and 1960s, but he also built highly precise cameras that are still sought after today. These cameras ranged from handheld to studio-sized, and he also built special underwater cameras, one of which we can assume he used in making the image above. Gowland’s work appeared in too many magazines to name, and he shot everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Muhammad Ali during a career that only ended with his death in 2010. There are several more Gowland images in the Goodtime Calendar—none of which have ever appeared online as far as we know—and they’ll be coming up in due time. Calendar text appears below.
May 12: Mother’s Day. Today a fella can tell his wife truthfully that he’s off to see his best girl.
May 13: “A lot of self-made men should deny it.”—Henry Morgan
May 14: A girl used to get her good looks from her mother; now from the beauty parlor.
May 15: Parents used to worry when their teenagers were out driving—now it’s their parking.
May 16: “In Hollywood many a girl carries a torch for a man… she doesn’t trust him in the dark.”—Peggie Castle
May 17: “We doubt that swimming is good for the figure. Ever take a good look at the whale?”—Alex Dreier
May 18: “A deep sea diver got a message: ‘Come up quickly—the ship is sinking!”—Simmy Bow
