Marilyn is featured among a bevy of Hollywood beauties in Saul J. Turrell’s 1965 documentary, The Love Goddesses, which gets a rare theatrical screening at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California this Friday, July 26 at 7:30 pm, as part of the annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival.
While Marilyn’s career falls a long way outside of the pre-sound era, the documentary also showcases silent film icons Theda Bara and Clara Bow, whom she impersonated in her ‘Fabled Enchantresses’ photo shoot; the Hollywood blondes who preceded her, including Jean Harlow and Betty Grable; and Marilyn’s own peers, such as Brigitte Bardot and Jayne Mansfield.
The short segment on Marilyn includes a clip from Clash By Night (1952), plus still photos and news footage. You can also watch The Love Goddesses in full at the Internet Archive.
“With plenty of clips from (mostly American) movies, The Love Goddesses traces the treatment of sex in cinema … For those who enjoy old movie clips – and who doesn’t? – this is an enjoyable enough approach. Narrator Carl King sets up the context for each little scene, featuring this or that ‘love goddess’ … all iconic for some reason or other, and we get to see them do their thing.
However, the film falls pretty flat in the analysis department. I guess I can’t fault it too much there. As mentioned previously, the majority of filmmakers, filmgoers, film scholars, and the rest of them were not applying all that much critical thinking to their movies during the last years of the studio era … From the 1950s onward, women were – in movies and in life – reduced to their bodies.”
The Marilyn Report 