| Chapter 1: | Sex as Cinematic Capital |
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The character's simple dialogue, combined with Harlow's own tough Chicago accent, suggests not only the character's lower-class origins, but also an assumed lack of sophistication or intelligence outside of a kind of sexual intelligence from which she makes her living. She often speaks to her husband in cutesy baby talk, referring to herself in the third person. Upon receiving a social invitation to a rich man's house, she poutingly says to Dan, “Kitty wants to see all the lords and ladies in the big beautiful house” (Dinner at Eight). She then jumps out of bed only to reveal that she is not wearing a bra or panties under her gown, giving viewers the strangely disconcerting image of hyper-feminine sexuality feigning an infantilized affect in the body of a sexually mature young woman.
Plate3. Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933).
