The late screen siren Jane Russell was never very proud of her career. Reflecting on her life in a 1985 interview, she said: “I think I’d done so many dumb pictures that I never got to do a good one.”
Famously introduced by the comedian Bob Hope as “the two and only Jane Russell”, it was her 38D bosom that cemented her superstar status rather than her acting ability. The French Line, the 1953 musical comedy from which these stills are taken, was a quintessential Russell film. A technical experiment by her Svengali, Howard Hughes, the film had a tagline that proclaimed: “J.R. in 3-D! It’ll knock both your eyes out!”
The obituaries that commemorated Russell’s recent death reflected her inability to shed her pin-up image, but as Russell herself once wryly observed, “Publicity can be terrible. But only if you don’t have any.”