Saturdays with the Stars: Jean Harlow

As I mentioned a little over a week ago, I will be doing a new season in 2020 of "Saturdays with the Stars" where I will be profiling the careers of 12 famous actresses most commonly associated with the term "sex symbol," but we'll be looking at the body of work they left behind rather than just the superficial attributes that most discussions of their careers focus upon.  Unlike last season, we'll be approaching these twelve women somewhat chronologically, so as to look at the history of the "sex symbol" trope.  Sex symbols have been around as long as there have been movies, as "pretty girls" are perhaps the most common cinematic cliche.  I theoretically could have started this series with either Theda Bera or Clara Bow, both important sex symbols in their era, but if we want to go with the prototypical sex symbol, one that basically inspired every woman to carry the title after her on the big screen, we turn instead to the early days of sound features, and a gorgeous, fast-talking blonde that died tragically at an early age, but left an indelible mark on the movies that make her moniker shorthand for "gorgeous, young, and glamorous."  We will start our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars" with Jean Harlow.

Born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, Harlow was the daughter of a dentist and the granddaughter of a wealthy real estate broker.  A messy divorce early in her formative years resulted in her spending most of her childhood (and indeed, most of her life) with a protective, doting, but controlling stage mother, who put her daughter through acting lessons at a young age.  She was a reluctant star (despite her mother's insistence that she go into show business likely to live vicariously as "Mama Jean" had missed her window into the movies), but worked briefly with Hal Roach before her big break in 1929 in Howard Hughes magnum opus Hell's Angels.  The film was the biggest of 1929, and though Hughes (terrible at finding projects for the women he had under contract, as we'll see with one of our later stars this fall) didn't have any movies for the starlet, Harlow was able to get work by being loaned out to other studios, frequently for big hits such as The Public Enemy.  But it was after her work with Hughes that she achieved her true peak by going to the studio that finessed the concept of a movie star-MGM.

At MGM, Harlow would make some of the biggest and glossiest films of her career.  Pictures such as Red Dust and Dinner at Eight were made during this time period, and Harlow was one of the biggest box office draws of the Depression.  And yet, critics never gave her her due in her lifetime, frequently assuming her blonde hair & beauty implied that she couldn't have the serious acting ability of peers like Greta Garbo or Norma Shearer.  Harlow never got to prove them wrong while alive, as she died of a cerebral edema (due to kidney failure) at the age of only 26.  Despite critics having saved some of her best films in the years since, Harlow is still mostly associated with her looks, the bright-white hair & the sultry eyes, rather than her cinematic output.  Like we'll do every month in 2020, this month we're going to try approaching Harlow from a different lens, solely looking at her movies rather than the celebrity that they caused, and see what treasures she might have given audiences as an actress, not as a sex symbol.