t sexuality. She is sweet and innocent and mainly pure no matter what variation of this role she is assuming, “This Girl-Woman had many variations; three detectable subtypes are the pure and capable young woman who through spirited activity helps to shape the world around here; the pure but helpless victim; and the pure victim who is strong and enduring” (O’Connor and Jackson 11). Actresses like Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Pearl White and Joan Crawford made a great success of playing these types of roles where the range of emotions ran from the spunky adventuress who never loses like Pearl White to the pure but spirited flapper types like Crawford and Bow. There is also the Lillian Gish type of character who demonstrates that a women could have hidden reserves and that women are capable of enduring great suffering and still triumphing over life’s travails, “an admirable woman who transcends society’s view of her…The woman as survivor, despite ill fate, is an enormously appealing image of women to women. She does not become self-pitying, spiteful, or hostile. She endures and, by so doing, using Faulkner’s phrase, she prevails” (O’Connor et.al. 12).
The Bad Girl role was more sophisticated and worldly. There was a polished charm to these women who were well aware of the ways of the world, even the most sordid ways. They were not girlish nor innocent and they existed as temptresses to men and audiences reveled in their preoccupation with entrapping the male figure as long as they paid a price for it by the last reel. Women like Great Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson marveled audiences in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and beyond in the case of the latter two with their portrayals of exotic, world-wise woman who were as weary with men as they were with the world. Dietrich was perhaps the greatest embodiment of this type of sexual creature who lived but for the attentions of men. In 1932 Shanghai Expres...