This LA Times blog entry, whilst featuring the clichéd picture of her from the 1940s, begins by emphasizing her rebelliousness; on the other hand, the NY Times headlines her obit both sultry in the headline and voluptuous in the webpage. The LA Times's obit calls her a screen siren.
The 1943 movie, which highlighted Russell's full figure, was eventually released without code approval and made millions, prompting directors such as Otto Preminger to follow suit and setting the stage for much of what is now a given in contemporary moviedom, which cleverly (and sometimes not-so-cleverly) uses sex to sell new releases.
What she did then and how she was featured is so very tanme these days.
And despite her legacy as someone who challenged a repressive status quo, there was this fact: Russell was actually a deeply religious political conservative. More on a colorful career here.
Drawn by the film's notoriety, moviegoers flocked to see it. It had made millions of dollars by the time censors approved it in 1949. As James R. Petersen wrote in Playboy magazine in 1997, "Hughes showed that a film could ignore the code and make a profit." Other challenges to the code followed —including, notably, director Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "The Moon Is Blue" in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, the code was replaced by the Motion Picture Assn. of America's ratings system, which permitted the release of explicitly sexual or violent movies as long as audiences were restricted on the basis of age.
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