Jane Russel : An actress of paradoxes

Maybe some of you know who Jane Russel is, others might have heard her name snapping in a very Anglo-Saxon and somehow obsolete fashion, like the vestige of an era of which the charm remains, provided that it still echoed in the present.

Nonetheless, one might wander what is the place, nowadays, of Jane Russel, that American actress who broke-through in the 1950’s like Marilyn Monroe with whom she co-starred in the Howard Hawks’ movie Gentlemen prefer blondes, released in 1953.  

Posterity had been more clement to Marilyn as her aura had overcome the status of sex-symbol, despite the limited kinds of roles she embodied. In opposite, Jane Russel is just remembered for her physical appearance: her beauty which may appeared cold under some perspectives, her great size and here sporty and haughty slender gait. However, that selective memory kept by mass medias and even a certain press specialized in cinema doesn’t do justice to Jane Russell’s acting skills and her contribution in shaping a new image of women in cinema.

Indeed, she has not been always well-advised when choosing her roles and the films she played in, although she was inspired by her will to experiment new projects with some film directors.

One must also acknowledge that the first film where Jane Russel appeared played a significant role to shape the image she gradually created throughout her career.

Hence, the western movie The Outlaw (1943) directed by the aviator billionaire Howard Hughes owns a great deal of its success, besides its cinematic qualities, to the attraction exerted by the tall brunette actress over American watchers who weren’t used, in those years, to that new fashion of filming women in movies.

Howard Hughes was even asked to answer the questions of a censorship board as Martin Scorsese showed later in his biopic dedicated to Hughes.

Jane Russel declared afterwards that she didn’t expect such an uproar provoked by The Outlaw, especially in regard to her own performance. However, this is what has, undoubtedly, made her famous among the mainstream.

In 1946, the Minnesota-originated actress played in a drama called Young Window where she asserted her acting skills in a sober role, very nuanced, with that typical grace of Classic Hollywood actresses of that period of which Jane Russel seems to be the quintessence in this movie.

In 1948, she embodied the Wild West pioneer Calamity Jane, in the comedy Pale Face. Doubtless this film gags are not the best in cinema history, but it’s enhanced by the performance of Jane Russel who managed to marry glamour and humor in this type of comedies which will flourish later in American and world cinema, not to mention that dynamism and relentlessness rarely observed in actresses before, paving the way for Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, then Sigourney Weaver and Angelina Jolie. 

After Pale Face Jane costars with Robert Mitchum in His kind of woman (1951) a successful “film noir” where she embodies an ironical femme fatale, and she will play that kind of role rather frequently in resembling movies until the eclectic film director Howard Hawks chooses her to face Marilyn Monroe in the musical comedy Gentlemen prefer blondes (1953) which is probably the more famous film where Jane Russel played, and even the one she is identified with.

Despite its light title and its looks of obsolete musical comedy that film tackles, before time, feminine love and desire under different aspects, with two very opposite characters both in their gait and their attitude, especially towards men.

The character of Lorelei embodied by Marilyn Monroe seems to be just attracted by the material wealth of a companion when Dorothy (played by Jane Russel) believes in love with all its aspects, especially in its emancipating role and one might say feminist nowadays. Here we can notice the acting talent of Jane Russel, her ability to embody the different facets of one personality and to master nature human nuances, and particularly feminine nature. Dorothy’s character believes in love but not in a naïve kind of love, she doesn’t wait for prince charming, because that will make her similar to her friend Lorelei who runs after jewels and diamonds, which are “a best girl friend” as she sings it in one famous song.  Since Dorothy is romantic and independent at once, only Jane Russel could embody that rich and complex personality, notably thanks to her gait and allure that can seem sometimes sporty and relaxed, and sometimes academic and haughty. This is peculiarly obvious on dances scenes which are not superfluous at all in this movie, not to mention the imitation of Marilyn Monroe by Jane Russel at the end of the film, showing all her talents scope.

In the same year, the tall brunette plays in The French Line then a few years later in some films more or less successful where she, nonetheless, doesn’t demerit.

Afterwards, she plays in The Tall Men directed by the acclaimed Raoul Walsh in 1955. The film is a western where Jane plays a determined, uncompromising and hard bargain woman, who deals with men as equals to protect her interests, though she has, at one moment, to change appearance and style when coming to town, she is to “play the lady” if one might say, and that results in very funny scenes, underlying once again the burlesque potential of Jane Russel, as a Femme Fatale who doesn’t really take herself too seriously, always prompt to self-mockery as she did in the film called  The Fuzzy Pink Nightgoan where she incarnates a pretentious and capricious actress (blonde this time) who his kidnapped for ransom while nobody really cares about her…

This will be maybe the last good movie of Jane Russel who will take, increasingly, quite right-wing positions, she who had always been an outspoken Republican, member of a Christian actresses’ group without her career being impacted by that, although the dance scene she played in The Frech Line earned her the wrath of American virtue leagues and a part of Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Jane Russel complained later on that it’s not easy to be a Christian in Hollywood…

This is just one of the paradoxes of an actress maybe too often praised for her beauty only, when she widely contributed in changing the way of conceiving female roles in cinema, while assuring that Hollywood studios had never imposed anything to her.

Lyes Ferhani