A Venus in marble and Bakelite: Ava Gardner and One Touch of Venus (1948)

Abstract

ABSTRACTOne Touch of Venus is a musical comedy starring Ava Gardner as an ancient statue of Venus brought to life in a department store. The film’s release coincided with the rising late-1940s press discourse of the screen ‘goddess’ and ‘Venus’, as well as that of the ‘war goddess’, a figure closely aligned with the femme fatale of film noir.This article discusses how Universal-International’s campaign exploited Gardner’s rising profile, including the Bakelite figurine of the star distributed to exhibitors, and beauty contest tie-ins where fans could measure themselves up against star and sculpture alike. This Bakelite Venus mediates between the marble fantasy of Gardner’s screen Venus, the authorship of the star, and the enveloping myth of screen stardom.But Hollywood pedestals are built to crumble, and the constructed ideals of classical beauty are here also exposed as a commodified travesty in marble, flesh and Bakelite. While Gardner was ‘built-up’ as a goddess, like her peers Rita Hayworth and Maureen O’Hara, this patriarchal construct of female beauty was also repressive, disempowering and de-humanising. This article uses the Bakelite Venus as a case study into the still-resonant divinising, and desecrating, connotations of such publicity.