Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
Susan Sarandon, that is. And Sigourney Weaver and Jessica Lange and Debra Winger and the rest of the '80s Hollywood stars who are so much sexier than the bottle-blond Sarahs and Gwyneths and Camerons of today.
Oct 1, 2003 | If life were fair, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Michelle Gellar and every other three-named Sarah guilty of snuffing out what's left of Hollywood's erotic sparkle would be delivered back to the bleach-bottled homecoming queen contests they came from. Then real actresses could return to movie screens so audiences could have what they crave -- good old sexual oomph.
If it weren't for their different shades of hair color and lip gloss, could anyone really tell the difference between Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson, with their big goofy-gal grins? Jennifer Aniston may be a tasteful clotheshorse and a charmer on "Friends," but, along with her sunglass wearing, waif-boy husband, her real personality seems as textured as a bottle of Wite-Out. And Gwyneth? Get rid of the whimpering and the sham English trill and all you've got is a cheerleader who smokes.
The problem isn't only that today's silver screen starlets and grand dames are cookie-cutter, or that the endless parade of cuties who come and go is so boring. The problem is how average they are. They're pretty, in a Midwestern prom-queen kinda way, and they look fantastic on Maxim covers, but watching their mind-numbing performances is no better than flipping through a dog-eared copy of In Style magazine. Movie stars used to leave their corn-picking towns and go to the Big Apple, complete with a suitcase full of titillating emotional baggage, where they put names like Lee Strasberg on the back of their 8-by-10 glossies. Nowadays, girls go from student council meetings and most-popular yearbook photograph sittings straight to Hollywood casting couches.
Skip the acting classes or theater tickets. Who needs craft when you only want to be famous? Meanwhile, the determination to use formulaic plots that only show off the bods of vapid stars (not to mention budget-breaking special effects) has turned Tinseltown into a giant junior-high popularity contest. Gone are the days when normal folk could turn to movies to transcend daily life's ordinariness and disappear into the glow of celebrity where fabulous women gave us unearthly glamour, erotic delight or just plain pizazz.
Kids of the 1980s were the last to see the time when film actresses had as much character as the roles they played. Sure, there were as many helpless damsels, suppliant wives and dizzy sex symbols as there have always been. But the decade's most famous screen goddesses were natural-looking women with supernova personalities, or at the very least, a spark. Of course, some were glaringly beautiful -- Jessica Lange, Kathleen Turner -- but their good looks were shored up by their complexity.
Some of them weren't great beauties -- Sissy Spacek, Sally Field -- but their intense natures, and their talent, were necessary to an industry that told stories of genuine human struggle without the contrivances so rampant today. These women had skills and intelligence, and were backed by clever scripts and directors whose artistic vision wasn't blocked by a paycheck. Most important, they had sex appeal, an allure that didn't need an airbrush, dexterous camera angles, stripteases or cheesy, innuendo-ridden one-liners. Their sexuality was cerebral and physical, as mysterious as it was blatant. And even if their stories weren't about sexual love, they still had full erotic and intellectual lives, and so were like real women whose stories were fascinating to witness.
In 1983, readers of Harper's Bazaar magazine named Karen Allen one of the world's most beautiful women. Karen Allen, of whom most 21st century moviegoers have probably never heard, made her screen debut in 1978's "National Lampoon's Animal House," an important mark on the "American Pie" ancestral line. Though "Animal House" was free of flute sex and pie-fucking, it still succeeded in being a fairly mindless fraternity romp. Allen played one of the main guy's girlfriends, a smart, contemplative student who ends up sleeping with her professor. The kicker about Karen Allen was that she was short and skinny, with plain brown hair and an unremarkable, makeupless face. But even cast alongside cute actresses hired to play sexy sorority girls, she was the most desirable woman in the film.
In 1981, she played Indiana Jones' long-lost girlfriend, Marion, in the legendary "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Instead of being a buxom, screaming wristwatch, she was as fearless as our hero. Marion's spunk causes Indy to say, "Boy, you're something," a phrase movie men used to tell those dames that attracted and matched them in mind and action. The Indiana Jones series' last episode featured a gorgeous bitch blonde who had none of Marion's sass, and thus, barely any chemistry with the G-spot otherwise known as Harrison Ford. True fans always missed Allen.
The '80s saw untraditionally attractive women become mega-sexbombs. Ellen Barkin, with her weird round nose and too-tiny eyes, dropped both "The Big Easy" and "Sea of Love" onto the cultural battlefield. Critics yawned, but moviegoers reeled under the mushroom cloud of her vixenish sensuality. Bug-eyed Susan Sarandon was into her 42nd year when she played frisky, poetry-spewing Annie in "Bull Durham," a flick that had Tim Robbins and stony heartthrob Kevin Costner fighting over her. Two years later, she shagged the bejesus out of a younger James Spader in "White Palace," and became an unmatched sex symbol.
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