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M A M I E V A N D O R E N
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| Photograph by Thomas Dixon |
Barry's New Book - Atomic Blonde The Films of Mamie Van Doren
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ATOMIC BLONDE |
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The Films of Mamie Van Doren |
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McFarland & Company, hard cover, 2008 |
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By BARRY LOWE |
| FOREWORD BY MAMIE VAN DOREN |
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Photos, appendices, notes, filmography and bibliography
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| ISBN:978-0786431380 | |
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Born Joan Lucille Olander in a small South Dakota town, Mamie Van Doren rose to “Blonde Bombshell” status in Hollywood when she signed with Universal Pictures in 1953, right on the heels of Marilyn Monroe.
This comprehensive biography explores Van Doren’s early life and career, spanning from her start as a bit player in Howard Hughes’ Jet Pilot to her significant role as the last surviving member of Hollywood’s infamous “Three M’s”: Mamie Van Doren, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield.
A complete filmography lists Van Doren’s roles in film and television. Entries include a plot synopsis, cast and crew details, and in many instances recent and contemporary reviews. | |
REVIEWS OF ATOMIC BLONDE
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Well it wasn’t the face that launched a thousand ships exactly, but the face and body of this gorgeous blonde certainly had their effect on young males during the Fifties. In her short career, Mamie Van Doren left her mark on sex and rock and roll in such films as Untamed Youth, High School Confidential and Running Wild. She and fellow blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield were the first American mainstream actresses to appear nude on screen. Australian author Barry Lowe recounts Van Doren’s cinematic adventures in Atomic Blonde: The Films of Mamie Van Doren (McFarland & Company).
“A friend introduced me to Mamie’s movies in the early ’70s when
a number of them were popping up on Australian TV,” says Lowe. “I particularly remember Born Reckless which is a favorite and I’ve been collecting Mamie material ever since. The other one that became a favorite, and is one of Mamie’s best early performances, is Yankee Pasha, especially for the cat fight with Rhonda Fleming.”
Lowe had collected a mountain of material on the actress over the years, but it was Van Doren herself who provided first hand information. “Mamie was incredibly gracious with her time,” Lowe says. “I spoke with her on the phone on a number of occasions and she’s quoted extensively throughout the book. Plus she generously allowed me to quote from her four autobiographies (My Naughty, Naughty Life!, I Swing, My Wild Love Experiences and Playing the Field) as well as from her website. Plus she wrote the book’s foreword and I have to say it will surprise many who think of her as merely a blonde bimbo.”
The screen was full of blonde sex symbols in the Fifties, but it was the iconic Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Van Doren who made a lasting impression. “I think she spoke to teenagers, to the drive-in mentality,” Lowe says. “I think she was the blonde for the atomic age. Marilyn was much more middle-brow and Jayne was almost a parody of womanhood - a pneumatic blow-up doll of a woman. Mamie was about real sex, she was dangerous, she was aggressive, she was a bad girl but not irredeemable. Her characters smoked a little sometimes, but they were usually drug and alcohol free - their drug of choice was sex. She was in the perfect spot at the perfect time - the 1950s. And if she isn’t the ‘Girl who Invented Rock and Roll’ as she sings in Teacher’s Pet she’s at least the girl who gave it a significant nudge along.”
While the book leads off with Van Doren’s biographical information, the main feature is Lowe’s discussion of her films, many of which never get covered elsewhere. “Mamie gave two of her best performances in her early films: Yankee Pasha and All American,” he says, “but the films that interest me the most are the early entries she made for producer/director Albert Zugsmith, particularly High School Confidential, College Confidential, Girls Town, The Beat Generation and The Big Operator. They are powerful films, well executed, sometimes excruciatingly silly, but Mamie and the cast bring enough gravitas to them to actually make them work. They’re shot economically but with a great deal of skill and everything in them seems to work. That’s testament to Zugsmith’s skill as a producer. He’s on somewhat shakier ground later on when he turns his hand to solo directing.”
“But the films I really find the most interesting are the lesser known films noir: The Girl in Black Stockings is incredible, not only for Mamie, but for the bleak and cynical script and the superb performances of the entire cast. Ditto the two ‘throwaway’ movies she made with director Edward L. Cahn: Vice Raid and Guns, Girls and Gangsters. They were condemned as little more than B movie crime dramas in the style of then current TV crime shows. But they have a grittiness, a spare style of storytelling and photography that makes them stand out. And Mamie gives great performances in them.”
“But top of them all is Running Wild in which Mamie and rock ‘n’ roll first meet and it’s love at first sight. And the quintessential Mamie in Untamed Youth in which she belts out ‘Cottonpicker’ in her slip while she’s in a youth slave labor camp for vagrants.”
Although he tried to run down all of the Van Doren films, Lowe admits there were a few that eluded him. “I found copies of all but a handful of her films,” he says. “Some were never completed, and one or two Mamie herself has never seen. The foreign-language movies were the most difficult to track down and there are still two I failed to locate.”
One of the actress’ more wacky films is the 1960 biblical romp, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, where she shared the screen with Fay Spain and Playboy favorite June Wilkinson. “It’s hilariously bad,” Lowe admits. “Nothing to do with the performances although Mickey Rooney is certainly never going to be up for (good) acting awards as the Devil. It’s a bit of camp fun with Mamie’s rain-soaked plea to God to forgive her for eating the apple probably the campest scene in which she ever appeared - the scene itself is a masterpiece. The film? Full of fake piety and religious claptrap. If you can overlook that it’s worth watching for Mamie’s bikinied Eve and hairy-chested Marty Milner as Adam. Plus June Wilkinson and others as the devil’s familiars.”
Serious discussions of the careers of such sex symbol superstars like Monroe and Brigitte Bardot are common. Lowe felt the same should be done for Van Doren. “I suppose it would have been easy to write the book tongue-in-cheek and pour scorn and sarcasm on Mamie and her movies,” he says, “but I chose to take her seriously as an actress and, I hope, set the record straight. There’s an awful lot of misinformation and second-hand sexist bullshit out there about Mamie. I went to the source material and what I found and, I hope, managed to impart successfully is that it’s time for a reappraisal of Mamie Van Doren.”
By Dan Scapperotti, Femme Fatales |
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"This is a well-organized study of one of the silver screen's blonde bombshells of the 1950s and 1960s whose work is many times dismissed or forgotten by contemporary film historians. Although Mamie Van Doren's image as a sex symbol was compared with that of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, hers was a more singularly modern, aggressive style that appealed to the youth of a post-World War II America already in the throes of increased prosperity, a newly emerging teenage culture, rock 'n' roll mania, anti-Communist paranoia, and overall social change. With this in mind, journalist and playwright Lowe analyzes Van Doren's films in order to clarify their cultural and historical contexts within this era and, at the same time, pay tribute to a unique star of the cinema. He begins with a detailed biographical overview of Van Doren's life and offers a comprehensive reference section focusing on the individual films-including credits, cast, plot, reviews, and commentary for such titles as Running Wild(1955), Teacher's Pet(1958), Girls Town(1959), and College Confidential(1960). Listings of her television performances and vocal recordings are also included and attest to her versatility as a performer. Numerous photographs and a foreword by Van Doren nicely enhance the well-researched and informative text. Film enthusiasts will especially enjoy this book. For circulating libraries and large cinema collections."
By Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal |
SX ARTICLE ON MAMIE VAN DOREN
PREFACE
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Someone once said, ‘Sex symbols are born, not made,’ and I agree with that. I think it’s something you are gifted with – it’s a magic that comes from within. When you walk into a room, you know that you’ll light it up and when I do, I think, I’ve done what I was supposed to do. I’ve done my job.” Mamie to MAO Mag, Spring 2006.
And, indeed, Mamie Van Doren does light up a room, the cinema, every time she appears on screen. That she has never been given her due as an actress is apparent from entries (or lack thereof) in film histories. They are either superficial:
“Platinum blonde bombshell often referred to as the poor man’s Lana Turner … is best remembered for a series of showy roles in cheap 1950s melodramas that emphasized her physical endowments rather than her somewhat meager dramatic abilities.” Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia
or just plain wrong (and downright nasty)
“As another Monroe spin-off Van Doren starred in around twenty exploitation flicks during the Fifties, all of them purelydesigned to give audiences a long, lurid look at as much of her body as the Production Code would permit. Of all the Bombshells she was the only one who really looked dirty. Glamour and insensibility were her trademarks, along with a huge pair of knockers that seemed endlessly to be tumbling out of her clothes.” George Robert Kimball, The Movie #55, pages 1091-1092
This book is an attempt to counteract the prevailing attitudes to Mamie Van Doren’s film career and to put paid to salacious nonsense like the above. It’s an attempt to place Mamie in the context of her era, to examine her good, bad and indifferent film output, and to show she was an much an auteur as any other actor in Hollywood.
Critics, film historians and even fans seem to project their own fantasies and/or moral biases on Mamie and, in so doing, feel no compunction in using the most demeaning and sexist of terms to describe her attributes. Some believe she has probably brought this on herself with her progression of lurid “tell-all” biographies. But this is to confuse the actress with the woman.
Mamie was very much a product of post-World War II America. She was very much a part of the atomic age. She was its number one blonde. She resonated with popular youth culture of the era in a way that the more middle-brow Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield did not although, in all fairness, it’s doubtful that they were inclined to pursue this demographic. Mamie’s career may have been (mis)guided by the whims and fancies of middle-aged and middle-class men but they were astute enough, nonetheless, to recognize the talents that made Mamie so appealing to a subculture for whom she was not only a star but an icon of the under-estimated B movies of the period.
This book, an attempt to place Mamie at the centre of youth oriented movies of the 1950s, is split into two major sections: Mamie’s biography, then a film-by-film analysis of her films including cast and crew lists, plot synopsis, song lists and who sang them (when the movie contained songs), notes on each film including comments from Mamie and her co-stars wherever possible, memorable quotes, and reviews of the period as well as more recent reviews to show how opinions have changed, or hardened, about her work.
Because there is so much second-hand paraphrasing when it comes to Mamie’s films, as so few of them are available, I have gone back to the originals, not always easy to find and sometimes bootleg copies of poor quality. To date very few of her films have been reissued on DVD. A few of the films I have not been able to find and some, The Candidate for example, even Mamie has never seen. For these films, I have relied on publicity, plot synopses and interviews. For the others I have taken cast and credit lists from the actual film as well as augmenting them from sources such as Internet Movie Data Base where they could be verified. A list of Mamie’s television work and her recordings rounds out this volume.
Like any such work, mistakes will inevitably creep in and I gratefully seek any corrections of fact. However, opinions, like sex appeal, are very much in the eye of the beholder.
I have credited magazines from which I gleaned reviews and, where possible, attributed dates but some libraries have clippings which are minus this important information or page numbers. Rather than leave such vintage material from the book I have included it date free. I have referred to Mamie as Joan Olander, her birth name, in the biographical chapter up until her name was changed by Universal Studios. I have also standardized different spellings in the credits of films. For example, makeup is spelled variously as make-up, make up and makeup on film credits and, rather than change spellings each time I have resorted to the simple expedient of using “makeup.”
This book is an historical and critical homage to one of the great blonde bombshells of the screen and if her career never reached the heights of a Davis, a Crawford or a Garbo, Mamie is none the less as distinctive and iconic in her way as these other screen goddesses. To some of us, more so. |
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| Photograph by Alan Mercer |
Photograph by Thomas Dixon |
Photograph by Thomas Dixon |
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