A Venus in marble and Bakelite: Ava Gardner and One Touch of Venus (1948)

ABSTRACT

One Touch of Venus is a musical comedy starring Ava Gardner as an ancient statue of Venus brought to life in a department store. The film’s release coincided with the rising late-1940s press discourse of the screen ‘goddess’ and ‘Venus’, as well as that of the ‘war goddess’, a figure closely aligned with the femme fatale of film noir.

This article discusses how Universal-International’s campaign exploited Gardner’s rising profile, including the Bakelite figurine of the star distributed to exhibitors, and beauty contest tie-ins where fans could measure themselves up against star and sculpture alike. This Bakelite Venus mediates between the marble fantasy of Gardner’s screen Venus, the authorship of the star, and the enveloping myth of screen stardom.

But Hollywood pedestals are built to crumble, and the constructed ideals of classical beauty are here also exposed as a commodified travesty in marble, flesh and Bakelite. While Gardner was ‘built-up’ as a goddess, like her peers Rita Hayworth and Maureen O’Hara, this patriarchal construct of female beauty was also repressive, disempowering and de-humanising. This article uses the Bakelite Venus as a case study into the still-resonant divinising, and desecrating, connotations of such publicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Stardom
• classicism
• Ava Gardner
• divinisation
• sculpture
• desecration

Acknowledgments

Thanks to editors Sean Redmond and Romana Ando, the anonymous reviewers, and the Celebrity Studies journal team and the participants of the 2018 conference where a version of this paper was presented. Particular thanks to Lucy Bolton, David Cobbett, Andrew Moor, Louise Revell, Ken and Sandra Williams and the great students at Southampton with whom I have discussed the Bakelite Venus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mary Pickford had secured the screen rights in 1944 for a Technicolour adaptation for United Artists (FD 1944). Ginger Rogers was soon associated with Venus as well as Mary Martin, who originated the role on stage, but who pulled out after becoming pregnant. After further delays, Hedy Lamarr was linked to the project in the trade press in 1947, but after fraught negotiations Pickford sold the rights to the film in a deal with United-International. Deanna Durbin was rumoured to be cast as Venus before Gardner was finally borrowed from M-G-M in December 1947, but by that point, the film would no longer be in Technicolour and the budget was evidently reduced after reportedly being as high as $2,500,000 at one point (Variety 1944, 1947, Showmen 1945, 1947, FD 1947, IEFB 1947).

2. For further discussion of this context with respect to Rita Hayworth and the ‘Love Goddess’ concept, see Williams (2018), pp.97–130. Dyer (1998) also summarises later critical discussion of stardom’s apparent historical shift from ‘gods to mortals’, pp. 21–23.

3. See Williams (2018) for more on the link between the femme fatale and the figure of the ‘war goddess’.

4. Similar strategies were used in the marketing of Tarzan films, where male cinemagoers were asked to compare their bodies to the likes of Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. See Williams (2018), pp. 59–93.

5. Gordon Campbell, The Grove Encyclopaedia of Classical Art and Architecture, Volume 2 (See Campbell, p.5).

6. For further discussion on these ancient/modern framings, see Williams (2013a), pp. 1–24.

7. Notably, Gardner is first seen in Mogambo when Eloise is discovered in the shower by Clark Gable’s Victor. Thanks to Lucy Bolton for her comments on Gardner’s wider image, and for sharing her paper, ‘Virgins, Whores, Actresses: Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner in Mogambo’, BAFTSS Conference, London 24–26 April 2014. As Bolton argues, in these later roles Gardner’s performance, and persona, would foreground the tensions in her characters.

8. There are many variants of this myth, but this is the basic version usually recounted, and I here draw on Bullfinch’s popular Victorian account (Bullfinch, 1979 p.88).

9. See: ‘Flying Nike (Victory), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/flying-nike-victory-152131 [Accessed 17 April 2019].

10. Thanks to my postgraduate ‘Screen Stars’ students for the comment on the viewing angle of the figure.

11. See @JRhodesPianist on Twitter on 4 November 2017. Thanks to Andrew Moor for highlighting this newspaper story on Instagram when it went viral (@andrewmoor, 6 November 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Williams

Michael Williams is Professor in Film at the University of Southampton. He is author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past: Idols, Artefacts and Epics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism: The Rise of the Hollywood Gods (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He has widely published on stardom and cinematic uses of the past, and is also author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (BFI, 2003) and co-editor of British Silent Cinema and the Great War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).