DEAD FASHION GIRL: ARCHIVE
The curvy corpse (extract from Fred Vermorel's Dead Fashion Girl)
A sub-genre of the Pam Green look was the curvy corpse.
This was ubiquitous in the fifties, plastered over cheesecake and men's mags, movie posters, pulp fiction covers, even science fiction.
Women spread-eagled and splattered, with dead eyes and scarlet lips, often in lingerie – details of cleavage, garter and thigh lovingly picked out.
From left. Detective Tales, 1948. Undated, c.1951. Mystery Magazine, 1954. The real thing: Betty James, murdered by Raymond Barker in 1953.
Pam Green was a dead ringer for a curvy corpse. The film director Michael Powell thought so. He cast Pam in his classic of murderous voyeurism, Peeping Tom, 1960. [Her only appearance in a mainstream movie]
Green plays a busty beauty being photographed in a soft porn photo session - wearing lingerie carefully selected by Powell from Green’s exotic wardrobe.
Then her character is murdered by the deranged serial killer.
Pam Green:
"Having seen all the Hammer Horrors, where there was Eastman Blood all over the shop; this story was different. I had been secretly hoping that my end would be bloody, but I was told that after my last line, the camera would cut away to a shot of a policeman looking down at me with the brilliant dialogue, ‘She's dead’…
"Not even one drop of blood would come my way."
In the movie, Pam’s last words to the killer as she sinks onto a bed in a "revealing" shortie negligee are:
"Are you safe to be alone with?"
A long pause as she lies against the pillows.
"It might be more fun if you weren’t".
We don't see Pam's corpse. But we are meant to deduce it as an afterglow of her previous sensuality.
The curvy corpse (extract from Fred Vermorel's Dead Fashion Girl)
A sub-genre of the Pam Green look was the curvy corpse.
This was ubiquitous in the fifties, plastered over cheesecake and men's mags, movie posters, pulp fiction covers, even science fiction.
Women spread-eagled and splattered, with dead eyes and scarlet lips, often in lingerie – details of cleavage, garter and thigh lovingly picked out.
From left. Detective Tales, 1948. Undated, c.1951. Mystery Magazine, 1954. The real thing: Betty James, murdered by Raymond Barker in 1953.
Pam Green was a dead ringer for a curvy corpse. The film director Michael Powell thought so. He cast Pam in his classic of murderous voyeurism, Peeping Tom, 1960. [Her only appearance in a mainstream movie]
Green plays a busty beauty being photographed in a soft porn photo session - wearing lingerie carefully selected by Powell from Green’s exotic wardrobe.
Then her character is murdered by the deranged serial killer.
Pam Green:
"Having seen all the Hammer Horrors, where there was Eastman Blood all over the shop; this story was different. I had been secretly hoping that my end would be bloody, but I was told that after my last line, the camera would cut away to a shot of a policeman looking down at me with the brilliant dialogue, ‘She's dead’…
"Not even one drop of blood would come my way."
In the movie, Pam’s last words to the killer as she sinks onto a bed in a "revealing" shortie negligee are:
"Are you safe to be alone with?"
A long pause as she lies against the pillows.
"It might be more fun if you weren’t".
We don't see Pam's corpse. But we are meant to deduce it as an afterglow of her previous sensuality.