 Movie stars were always willing to give each other a hand. 
Once again we've been struck, so to speak, by the sheer number of cinema promo images featuring actors and actresses pretending to slap each other. The just keep turning up. The above shot is more about the neck than the face, but it still counts, as Gloria Swanson slaps William Holden in 1950's Sunset Boulevard. Below we have a bunch more, and you can see our previous collection at this link. Since we already discussed this phenomenon we won't get into it again, except briefly as follows: pretend slaps, film is not reality, and everyone should try to remember the difference. Many slaps below for your interest and wonder.   Diana Dors smacks Patrick Allen blurry in 1957's The Long Haul.
 Mob boss George Raft menaces Anne Francis in a promo image made for 1954's Rogue Cop.
 Bud Abbott gets aggressive with Lou Costello in 1945's Here Come the Co-Eds.
 Jo Morrow takes one from black hat Jack Hogan in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley.
 Chris Robinson and Anita Sands get a couple of things straight about who's on the yearbook committee in Diary of High School Bride.
 Paul Newman and Ann Blyth agree to disagree in 1957's The Helen Morgan Story.
 Verna Lisi shows Umberto Orsini who gives the orders in the 1967 film La ragazza e il generale, aka The Girl and the General.
 What the fuck did you just call me? Marki Bey slaps Betty Anne Rees loopy in the 1974 horror flick Sugar Hill.
 Claudia Cardinale slaps (or maybe punches—we can't remember) Brigitte Bardot in the 1971 western Les pétroleuses, known in English for some reason as The Legend of Frenchie King.
 Audrey Totter reels under the attentions of Richard Basehart in 1949 Tension. We're thinking it was probably even more tense after this moment.
 Anne Baxter tries to no avail to avoid a slap from heel Steve Cochran in 1954's Carnival Story.
  Though Alan Ladd was a little guy who Gail Russell probably could have roughed up if she wanted, the script called for him to slap her, and he obeyed in the 1946 adventure Calcutta.
 Peter Alexander guards his right cheek, therefore Hannelore Auer crosses him up and attacks his left in 1964's Schwejk's Flegeljahre, aka Schweik's Years of Indiscretion.
 Elizabeth Ashley gives Roddy McDowall a facial in in 1965's The Third Day.
 Tony Anthony slaps Lucretia Love in 1972's Piazza pulita, aka Pete, Pearl and the Pole.  André Oumansky goes backhand on Lola Albright in 1964's Joy House.
 Frank Ferguson catches one from Barbara Bel Geddes in the 1949 drama Caught.
 This looks like a real slap, so you have to credit the actresses for their commitment. It's from 1961's Raisin in the Sun and shows Claudia McNeil rearranging the face of Diana Sands.
 Gloria Grahame finds herself cornered by Broderick Crawford in 1954's Human Desire.
 Bette Davis, an experienced slapper and slappee, gets a little assistance from an unidentified third party as she goes Old West on Amanda Blake in a 1966 episode of Gunsmoke called “The Jailer.”
 There are a few slaps in 1939's Gone with the Wind, so we had our pick. We went with Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard.
 Virginia Field takes one on the chin from Marshall Thompson in Dial 1119.
 Clint Eastwood absorbs a right cross from nun Shirley MacLaine in 1970's Two Mules for Sister Sara.
 A long time ago in a hairstyling session far, far away.   
And you thought the people at Lucasfilm thought up Princess Leia's double-bun hairdo. Nope. We'll admit they tightened it up a bit, but the earliest version of the style we've ever seen is in the above test shots with Peggy Cummins made for an unidentified movie. We thought we'd be able to identify the film because there are other shots from the session, and in some the slate being held in front of her bears a character name—Betty Cream.
But a scan on the interchannels shows no character by that name ever played by her. Possibly, it was a character whose name changed or whose part was cut, but here's what we think really happened. The only character in Hollywood history named Betty Cream was played by Helen Walker in 1946's Cluny Brown. That year was just before Cummins began scoring featured roles, so it's possible she did the hair/make-up sessions, but was axed. It happens, for various reasons.
Cummins and Walker had similar careers. They started near the same time, and had nearly the same number of roles, but while Walker did appear in a few notable crime movies such as Nightmare Alley and Call Northside 777, it was Cummins who made an indelible mark on crime cinema by playing the lead in Gun Crazy. It's a movie that remains much discussed today due to its depiction of a character obsessed with firearms, and what it implied about the U.S. You can read a little more about it here.
 Before we go any farther I need to tell you something—I'm loaded with mercury and microplastics. 
Above: Ann Blyth and William Powell in a production photo made while they were filming 1948's fish-out-of-water romance Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. We wrote about it here.
 Shhh! Character assassination in progress.                           
Above are some scans from an issue of the tabloid Whisper published this month in 1963. We've shared hundreds of tabloids over the years, and we always marvel at them. How would you describe the compulsive need to know what's going on in other people's lives? Is it a from of comparison? Is it schadenfreude? Is it envy? The American Psychological Association calls it natural behavior stemming from the fact that humans are social animals curious about what's going on around them. It's why, according to the APA, we gossip about friends and neighbors. Your first thought, in terms of tabloids, might be that celebrities are neither friends nor neighbors. However, the headshrinkers tell us they are. People create parasocial relationships with celebrities, and thus the same dynamic exists. And nobody is immune. Condescending remarks about celebrity gossip are liable to come from people inordinately involved with their favorite baseball player, acclaimed author, or television talking head. Some people let celebrity fashionistas suggest what they should wear, while others who consider themselves above such silliness let television pundits tell them who to hate.
We find mid-century tabloids incredibly interesting, even if everybody being gossiped about is long departed. The robust sales of tabloids on auction sites seems to confirm that we aren't alone. In this issue Whisper digs dirt on numerous titans of celebritydom—Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Audrey Hepburn, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, and others. Editors also let their bigot flags fly by predicting “one of the most sinister trends in history—an organized homosexual drive” to take over the U.S. That one still sells in some quarters. We'll have more from Whisper soon.
 Fame may fade but Hollywood never completely forgets. 
Along with the joys of celebrity are packaged the pains of public life, especially professional failures and personal disasters. Lynn Baggett—sometimes Lynne Baggett—was a rising actress who had accumulated many uncredited roles between 1941 to 1946, had a two year span of no work, then finally scored a major part in the 1949 film noir D.O.A. She was only twenty-six when that occurred, but it didn't put her career on firm ground. She had another speaking role in 1950, and one in 1951, but it was around then that continual domestic problems began to catch up with her.
She had been involved with producer Sam Speigel since 1945, and had married him in ’48, but the relationship was tempestuous. In 1951 Speigel claimed that Baggett trashed the house they shared, and that she deliberately slashed six Picassos. The next year he filed for divorce, claiming that she had cheated multiple times, including with film director John Huston. At that point her show business career was effectively finished, but her celebrity was not. The photo just above is from early 1954 and shows her in Santa Monica Superior Court during her drawn out fight for spousal support. She hadn't acted in three years.
Six months later she was driving from a party when she crashed into a car filled with young boys, injuring four and killing nine-year-old Joel Watnick, who'd been ejected entirely from the vehicle. Baggett sped away from the scene, and it took two days for police to find her car at a repair shop, and subsequently track her down. The photo at top shows her on the day of her arrest, which happened to be the same day Watnick was laid to rest. That was today in 1954. It was nationwide news.
Baggett was charged with manslaughter and fleeing the site of an accident, but was convicted only of felony hit-and-run, for which she was sentenced to 60 days in jail and placed on three years of probation. A term that lenient today would cause an uproar audible on Mars. But if Baggett got off light in court, she paid heavily in life. In 1959 she attempted suicide, and in 1960 she was found dead in her apartment from an overdose of barbiturates. Whether her death was suicide is not officially known.
Hollywood, due to its nature of fairy tale successes, tends to produce spectacular falls from grace, disputed facts, and apocrypha. Baggett's story is more clear-cut than most. She'd suffered from depression, marital strife, and career disappointment. Many articles about her suggest that a bad ending was inevitable, and maybe it was. Maybe she even predicted it. When arrested, she said about fleeing the accident, “When I went back and saw the boy lying there, I knew he was dead. I didn’t know which way to turn. You don’t know what something like that does to you. I wish I’d been killed instead of the boy.” 
 There are worse boyfriends out there, baby, believe me. I don't know of any offhand. But they must exist. 
We talked about the revered film noir Night and the City last year and had absolutely nothing new to say about it. Some it's like that. But we'd never seen a color (or possibly colorized) promo image from the movie before, so we've looped back to share this great shot of stars Gene Tierney and Richard Widmark. In the film Widmark is one of the all-time losers, a guy who hustles to get over but has no luck, no momentum, no self-control, and—ultimately—no scruples, even where his girlfriend is concerned. It's a heartbreaking, uncompromising film that typifies the darkness and cynicism of film noir, and there's a reason it's considered a top level entry in the cycle. But back then it was too much for most critics. It premiered—to largely negative reviews—today in 1950.
 Hollywood actresses went to the Max to solve their beauty problems. 
We've been seeing this photo online of late labeled as an ice cube mask meant to cure hangovers circa 1947. That seemed unlikely to us, because why would ice cubes on your chin help with a hangover? The only thing that helps a hangover is a sustained interval of unconsciousness. So we dug around and discovered that this is in reality a beauty aid. It was created by Polish inventor and beautician Macksymillian Faktorowizc, who would later become globally famous as Max Factor, and it was specifically made for use by actresses to cool and refresh their faces after being under the hot lights of Hollywood movie sets. Back then (and even today for all we know) actresses constantly washed their faces with cold water, but this required fresh applications of make-up after every rinse. So Factor's mask theoretically was both a time and labor saver. Believe it or not, it wasn't the craziest contraption he invented. In any case—not a hangover cure, but another small internet mystery solved.
 Any kind of work is good work. 
Probably needing no introduction, above, is Hawaii born actor Toshiyuki Sakata, who performed as Harold Sakata. We ran across this 1964 promo image on an auction site and had to share it. Sakata rose to fame initially as an Olympic weightlifter and professional wrestler, but was coaxed in front of the movie camera to play Oddjob in the film Goldfinger. He was one of Bond's most formidable foes, fighting with brute strength and his deadly top hat, which had a razor sharp steel brim that could take the head off a marble statue. Unfortunately, that same hat led to his character's demise when he was electrocuted inside Fort Knox. After that ugly death Sakata went on to amass more than thirty credits in cinema and television—a successful career by any measure. But he'll probably always be best known as Oddjob.
 
 And now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I'm overdue for a flight on Wacky Backy Airlines.   
In Hollywood, everything is a photo op—even one's own embarrassing release from the stifling clutches of state confinement. Above you see a progression of three press photos made today in 1949, featuring famed stoner Robert Mitchum being freed from the lock-up after his marijuana conviction. Mitchum makes the most of the moment, looking dapper and unruffled despite PTSD over some terrifying episodes in the prison laundry and a few narrow escapes from damage to that pretty face of his. Actually, we have no idea what he went through. We suspect it was reasonably untroubled, but probably only Mitch and his ganja dealer ever knew the truth.
These shots are a follow-up to our look at Mitchum going into jail on February 9. He was supposed to serve sixty days, but earned an early release for good behavior and unshakable cool. We don't know if an early release was also granted to... to... we've forgotten her name—that chick he got caught smoking with who was sent to jail the same day. Anyway, just look at ole Never-Let-Em-See-Ya-Sweat. Doesn't he look great? The hair. The perfectly tailored suit. The roguish gleam in his eye that says he's going to get miiiiiiiles high as soon as he gets home. You know what we love about Mitch? Nothing could keep him down for long.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1937—The Hobbit is Published
J. R. R. Tolkien publishes his seminal fantasy novel The Hobbit, aka The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Marketed as a children's book, it is a hit with adults as well, and sells millions of copies, is translated into multiple languages, and spawns the sequel trilogy The Lord of Rings. 1946—Cannes Launches Film Festival
The first Cannes Film Festival is held in 1946, in the old Casino of Cannes, financed by the French Foreign Affairs Ministry and the City of Cannes. 1934—Arrest Made in Lindbergh Baby Case
Bruno Hauptmann is arrested for the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., son of the famous American aviator. The infant child had been abducted from the Lindbergh home in March 1932, and found decomposed two months later in the woods nearby. He had suffered a fatal skull fracture. Hauptmann was tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and finally executed by electric chair in April 1936. He proclaimed his innocence to the end
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