Betty Boop, that innocent, knock-kneed tart, goes all pink in a clueless coquette’s fluster, not quite aware of the sexuality she emanates like a woozy drug. “Oh, my,” she chirps, finger twisting into a dimple. Her itsy-bitsy skirt scarcely hides happy-to-be-glanced garters. Her huge eyelids are fluttering butterfly wings. All things male melt.
Boop, and we love her, was one of crackpot Max Fleischer’s bedazzling weirdos, something between human and funhouse freak — in her case, the mixed-message quintessence of the naughty naif. She was on exemplary, cooing display during a recent program at MOMA highlighting animation shorts by Disney, Iwerks and Fleischer from the 1930s.
Her kind of oblivious sexual heat came to mind watching Jennifer Jones’s plucky, peach-cheeked chambermaid in Ernst Lubitsch’s yeasty final film “Cluny Brown” (1946), which wrapped a run this week at Film Forum. Jones plays Brown as a free, shrewdly naïve spirit, cramped by brittle distinctions of British class on the eve of WWII.
Brown follows her bliss, just up and does what she likes, even if that means assuming the sleeves-up virility of a plumber on occasion. Sink’s plugged, needs fixing, she’s there, why not? (Only the cosmopolitan Charles Boyer seems to find this apt and charming, amid a sea of wrinkled noses and prim clucks.)
Jones’ own Betty Boop scene stops the show early on. It would be funny, as it’s meant to, if it wasn’t so unabashedly erotic. Buzzed on a pair of swiftly quaffed martinis, Jones’ Brown stretches out on a sofa and begins writhing and purring like a post-coital panther. She imagines she’s a cat, breathlessly “meeeoooowww”-ing, her dark eyes half-mast beacons of carnal lust, her figure squirming in heat. It plays, almost shockingly, like a steam blast of screen sensuality that feels positively pre-Code.
Meow.
Later, she and Boyer, during an extended and lively exchange presumably about plumbing, go on and on about “banging” “pipes” and the like.
It’s classic Lubitsch, slipping in sexual innuendo where he can, even when it’s less than inconspicuous. Betty Boop, who didn’t have to worry as much about the censors, would be proud. Blushing, but proud.
