Jean Harlow
One of the earliest sex stars of the silver screen was smart-mouthed, 18-year old platinum blonde Jean Harlow, who shocked audiences as a sexy floozy with generous glimpses of flesh and her famous line of dialogue - "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" - in her first major role in Hell's Angels (1930). In Goldie (1931), she was noted as the first woman specifically referred to as a "tramp" in a talking picture. She also appeared as an adulteress in Red-Headed Woman (1932), and had a starring role as a stranded, wise-cracking floozy opposite Clark Gable and a bourgeois, middle-class Mary Astor in a tropical, steamy setting in Red Dust (1932) - Harlow was best seen bathing in a rain barrel. She has often been acknowledged as the first screen actress to place erotic emphasis upon her breasts in a time when flat-chested women were the rage.Marlene Dietrich
In a number of films made by obsessed, Svengali-styled mentor/director Josef von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich played seductive, cool females in sexually perverse melodramas. She was Lola Lola, a cheap, smoky-voiced, sensual cabaret singer with stockinged-legs and top hat atop a beer barrel in the Blue Angel nightclub in her greatest film, The Blue Angel (1930), Germany's first sound film. In the atmospheric, seedy film, she manipulatively lured a repressed and obsessed Professor Emmanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) towards his doom by her teasing exoticism while singing Falling In Love Again.And she scandalously wore a men's tuxedo in Morocco (1930) and accepted both a rose and a mouth-to-mouth kiss from a young lady in the cabaret audience - one of the earliest (if not the first) female-to-female kisses. In the highly-stylized Blonde Venus (1932), she performed a cabaret striptease from her full-bodied gorilla suit and then donned a bushy Afro blonde wig to sing "Hot Voodoo" in a throaty, hoarse voice to the beat of an African drum ("...That African tempo has made me a slave, hot voodoo - dance of sin, hot voodoo, worse than gin, I'd follow a cave man right into his cave"). Adultery and sadomachism were evident in the unusually frank and suggestive The Scarlet Empress (1934), in which Dietrich played Catherine the Great.
