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Hollywood, California 1920-1926 BB20-26BS Costume As the Queen of Sheba: Pasty-bra dress. As Zahrat: Dance bra with longsleeves and fringed miniskirt. Boots. As Ayesha: Pearl strapped bra with a dangling center ornament which covers her navel and a full skirt but slit to reveal her legs when she walks. Headdress, necklace, armlets, and robe. TML. TMLB in see-through. TML. TML. N-2. TMLC. Shaven chest. Actions Blythe's career begins on the theatrical stage, especially in New York, so it was natural for her to enter films working at the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn in 1918 and from there made her way to Hollywood and Fox Studios. This publicity shot is believed to from about this time, c. 1920 (1). At Fox Blythe is cast as a replacement for actress Theda Bara. Like the Vamp before her, Blythe is not sky about exposing her body and becomes famous for her revealing costumes as well as her dramatic skills. Her breakthrough is The Queen of Sheba, a 1921 quasi-Biblical epic in which Blythe's revealing costumes reveal most of her breasts including her nipples in see-through (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Her dance costume for the kidnapped Zahrat, in the 1925 silent movie Chu Chin Chow, is equally revealing (8). In She, 1926, Blythe plays Ayesha, the immortal love goddess, seen here in a bra that looks like pasties connected to strings (9), as she visits her lover, the barechested Kallikrates, played by Carlyle Blackwell, unfortunately shackled to the wall of a cave in his shorts (10). Commentary Blythe, like other movie stars of the early 1920s, wears revealing costumes far more extreme than any sane woman would wear on a beach. Source Aka Bette Blythe. Sources: Vintage Stars CD-ROM. Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert, "The History of Sex in Cinema Part Five: Sex Stars of the Twenties," Playboy, September 1965. Val Warren, Lost Lands, Mythical Kingdoms, and Unknown Worlds, HM Communications, 635 Madison Ave., New York 10022. C. W. Ceram, The Archeology of the Cinema, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1965. Lo Duca and Maurice Bessy, L'Erotisme au Cinema ( 2 volumes), Collections Filmarchives, Sipe-Sima, 92240 Malakoff, France, 1978. 10 pictures. |
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