Girls Can Play

I bought this poster in a used bookstore in Corpus Christi in the early '80s. It may have been the best 5 dollars I ever spent; it's been up every place I've lived in since.

I've never seen the movie, but that's okay; stories about dying beauties aren't exactly my thing. But I love that 1930s design, and I love the title.

The Depression years were my favorite period for Hollywood movies. It's partly the sense of style -- the dresses, the clean geometric lines of those Deco sets, the melodramatic intensity of movie posters like this. But mostly I love the fast-talking couples in the great screwball and remarriage comedies of the '30s and early '40s.

Cary Grant and Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday and Philadelphia Story, Irene Dunne and Grant again in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach Story, Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve... If you've seen these movies, you know what I mean. If you haven't, go find them; you're in for a treat.

Those girls could play.