The troops in Vietnam amused themselves with Playboy centerfolds; in Iraq, it’s probably Internet porn. Back in World War II G.I.s consoled themselves with “pin-up girls,” shapely things usually showing a little leg circulated in full-color images. A minor Hollywood actress called Betty Grable became the most popular pin-up in the U.S. military on the strength of her legs. For several years her barracks acclaim transformed Grable into a bankable movie star, usually in light musicals of little enduring artistic value.
One of her hit movies available on DVD, Pin Up Girl (1944), is interesting nowadays for what it reveals about her era’s Hollywood film factory. Cranked out to fill an insatiable demand for wartime entertainment, Pin Up Girl strings together stock elements of the musical genre in glorious Technicolor, a process making any setting look better than it ever could in real life. Although calling the plot slight endows it with unearned merit, the scenario glances at a time when the expectations of love and marriage were pushed by a frenzy of wartime emotional and sexual need. Grabel plays a USO entertainer engaged to dozens of men—just to make them feel good before they embark on their uncertain future in the combat zone. Even with the Hollywood Production Code firmly in place, restricting what could be shown or suggested on screen, screenwriters slipped in many coy suggestions about the raging libidos of soldiers and sailors.
Pin Up Girl contains aesthetically pleasing moments, including an erotically charged song-and-dance number (choreographed by Hermes Pan) and a bit of jumpin’ jive exhorting farm production, which cuts away to a bizarre rural stage set with whirling windmills and a painted Midwest regionalist backdrop. For her part Grable is the slightly ditsy, often street-smart gal whose chutzpah gets her in and out of trouble. At moments she seems like a Marilyn Monroe prototype. It’s not surprising then that Grabel’s final major role, in How toMarry a Millionaire (1953), found her co-starring with Monroe and passing the torch to the postwar era’s rising sexual fantasy for men.
