Nellifer's Belly-Jewel
I've read the people in costuming had trouble keeping Nellifer's jewel from popping out of her navel. I'll bet the person responsible for that never missed a day of work!
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Whoa!
I searched about belly-jewels on actresses at the time, and found they were actually required as to not reveal a bare navel. Ironic, I feel, since Nellifer's large ruby actually draws one's attention to her taut, highly-attractive abs.
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In her autobiography Joan said that she and Sydney Chaplin, who were having an affair while making this movie, spent so much time out in Rome, drinking and eating lots of spaghetti, that they both began putting on weight...to the point where her navel jewel kept popping out of her tummy! Howard Hawks eventually got so angry at the two that he berated them both for holding up production, and forced them to stop their behavior while filming. (Joan said he was right to do so.) If you look closely you can see small but noticeable fluctuations in Joan's waistline during the film.
shareThanks, hobnob53! I've always been intrigued at the thought of Joan's belly-jewel repeatedly popping out during filming, and now I know why! I'll surely keep closer watch on Nellifer's delectable midsection....
shareI never figured out what this insistence on hiding people's navels was. It was one of those lunatic notions from the Hollywood censors but it never made any sense. And it wasn't just women -- even men couldn't show theirs, at least not for a long time. But I never knew the point, even a stupid point.
A more common (and probably easier) way that movies got around the navel thing in films where a woman had a bare midriff was by designing the woman's costume with an ornate bit of material that jagged upward from the waistband and covered the offending orifice. That way, no risk of popping jewels or having to apply glue to the girl's navel.
The restriction against women was finally pushed aside a few years after LOTP, though TV continued to ban belly buttons through the 60s (most famously, with Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie). The poster above was right, having a jewel only drew attention to this mysteriously forbidden spot. But then, censors are notoriously dumb.
For me, at least, it's what's around the navel that counts. Jewel in or jewel out in Collin's case (and Barbara Eden's) it's all perfectly delectable!
And, I'm with you, hob, belly-button censorship is a clear case of censorship run amuck. A below the belt blow . . . so to speak. Whew!!
Well, it's "jewel out" for me. Sticking a cut stone into a girl's belly-button strikes me as being pretty dangerous, especially back in the pre-Band-Aid era.
Of course, they did have mummy-wrap, so that was a substitute, though usually when you put that stuff on it stayed on.
Anyway, in or out, that jewel was a cutting hazard (if she twisted or undulated too quickly), a blinding hazard (if it popped out towards an incautious ogler), and, under certain circumstances, most definitely a choking hazard.
Sort of a diamond in the rough.
I said "rough".
Talk about below the belt.
Of course, had the censors insisted on a high enough belt line, such an edict would have rendered Nellifer's belly jewel superfluous, instead of just plain super.
Not to mention they'd have spared the Pharaoh's "barge" a navel engagement, you know, if you get my drift....
In the beatnik era of the 1950's when I was growing up in Torrance CA, we'd read in the local paper how beats would lick wine out of their girlfriends navels when they'd spend the night on the local beaches. Whenever I read that I often wondered how belly button lint would taste dipped in wine. Ahh, such memories!
Kakistocratic crack-pottery rules!
I suppose the lint would have served the same purpose as a hunk of bread dipped in fondue.
Soviet sex therapists, whom I believed numbered approximately one, used to report that many of the couples who came to see them for help in having a baby explained that the husband had been most careful to ejaculate in his wife's navel, yet alas, still no pregnancy resulted.
No wonder they lost the Cold War.
Thanks, pal, for helping make this thread spiral even further downward than I had imagined possible, and I imagine pretty deep!
I'm sure any jewel cut to be placed in the navel of a princess would be smoothly ground as not to maim her. Nellifer would surely never be seen in public without her royal adornment sparkling from those spectacular abs, so her admirers were surely well aware of the tendency of that gem to pop out at any time. The matter of a choking hazard brings up intriguing scenarios!
shareMaybe having the jewel designed to pop out every so often was a way Nellifer had of endearing herself to her subjects back home in Cyprus. She'd stick a ruby or whatever in each morning, go out among the peasants, and when the jewel popped out some lucky peon would catch it and have enough riches to avoid starvation for a while. Sort of like John D. Rockefeller handing out dimes to poor people as he stolled around New York City a century ago.
shareI get your reasoning, but Nellifer was obviously not one to be charitable. If a jewel had popped out of her navel, she'd have had a subject whipped for daring to take possession of it.
Quite true. On the other hand, that necklace she so coveted that it led her to engineer several homicides (hardly seems worth it) wouldn't fit in her navel, and anyway by then she had taken to wearing less-revealing one-piece garments, so the once-fashionable belly-jewel would seem to have had its day. Besides, it does seem an adornment more appropriate for a slave or belly dancer than for a princess, let alone a queen.
sharePharaoh was undoubtedly choosing her attire at some point. Female royalty in Egypt would have shown far less skin than that in Cyprus.
shareWas there ever actually royalty in Cyprus, and if so what was their culture -- including their attitudes towards female nudity? Women were often "topless", as we'd say today, in Cretan or Minoan culture, and there are pictograph records of women clad in some sort of bikini-like garment in that general area of the Mediterranean, up into Roman times, but I have no idea what was standard for Cyprus. I should think the events in this film predated any Greek influence by centuries. Not to mention the island has been owned by an innumerable succession of outside powers and cultures for millennia, until its independence from the last occupier, Britain, in 1960.
shareThe film-makers were pretty free to do what they liked. There's very little history or archaeology relating to Cyprus pre-dating the heavy influence of Mycenian Greek culture which can be traced to periods after the building of the Great Pyramid. And, as far as we know, the Egyptians came on the Cyprus scene after the Old Kingdom ended. To my knowledge, only a couple of graves and one small neolithic village have been found dating to before or during the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Personally, I doubt there was anything like a nation-state during Nellifer's time. So, a king? . . . And a king's daughter looking like Joan Collins in a tidy little bikini outfit seems equally unlikely. Makes for a hell of a good story though!
shareTrue, but I'm rather disillusioned to find that a movie wouldn't show absolute fealty to historical realities.
shareThey didn't have any problem with the guys' belly buttons showing.
"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"