| Chapter 1: | Sex as Cinematic Capital |
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Plate1. Kitty in her bed (Dinner at Eight, MGM, 1933).
The positioning of Kitty in her luxurious bed is the film's most dominant motif.
Kitty, with the aid of her extraordinary blondness, has used her gold-digging ways to land her husband Dan (Wallace Beery). A miner-turned-businessman moving into politics, Dan has become fabulously wealthy using his mining riches to swoop in and buy up stock in foundering companies at the beginning of the Great Depression. To reflect Kitty's and Dan's lower-class origins, the film's dialogue is spoken coarsely with poor grammar and diction, but performed by Harlow and Beery with deliberate comic wit:
DAN. Remember what I told ya last week?
KITTY. I don’t remember what ya told me a minute ago.
KITTY. I don’t remember what ya told me a minute ago.