Films! I really do love leafing through (or pressing the 'to
the right' button through) these old movie magazines. So many absurd ads and
glamour photos of film stars whose names are mostly forgotten...
This week in movie magazines, from Motion Picture Classic
magazine (vol 9-11, 1920):
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| Stripey dress courtesy of Internet Archive, as usual |
This article is an interview with actress Edith Storey and
her super cute dog. It begins with the fabulous hook: "Have you ever
stopped to think how many different kinds of love affairs there are? But of
course you have; everyone does at some time or another!"
Don't be silly, of course you have!
Apparently one of these kinds of love affairs is a love affair with a
favorite acting part. And Edith Storey's was with the part she played in
"Dust of Egypt", a comedy. As Edith describes it: "In the
beginning of the picture, I was an Egyptian princess. Nothing could stand in
the way of my getting anything I wanted. I could take it or have it brought to
me. My will was law absolute. And then the Princess died and her mummy came to
life in the present century. (In the end it turns out that she was the creature
of a dream)".
It's not quite clear to me how this adds up to 'hidden Egyptian', but I suppose it's close enough.
Ancient Egypt is a perennial theme for films and was very
popular in the 1920s - especially after the discovery of King Tutankamun's tomb
in 1922 by Howard Carter (and his sponsor Lord Carnavon). Portrayals of 'the Orient' are often very much fascinated
with the past, ancient-ness, and so on... Often the East was imagined to exist in a kind of perennial past or even state of timelessness.
And, for your entertainment, an advertisement for Palmolive
which epitomizes this theme:
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| http://archive.org/stream/motionpicturecla1920broo#page/n331/mode/2up |
Palmolive had a series of ads in the 1920s which portrayed the
company as following in the footsteps of ancient Egyptian use of palm and olive in beauty regimes. Often the
ads paired an image of a modern American woman with an ancient Egyptian one.
They're pretty amazing...and often quite startling?
Can I mention that I just noticed that she's standing in the mummy coffin?! Is that the right word? Mummy case? Why would she be doing that? Why, Palmolive, why?
Next up, another Violet Winspear novel...
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