The Breast Chronicles

While he was planning his film "The Outlaw", Howard Hughes knew exactly where the film's appeal lay - below Jane Russell's chin and above her waist - "There are two good reasons why men will go to see her," he said. Russell's breasts were to be the focus of the movie. He devoted take after take to shots of the starlet leaning over the wounded Kid's bed, fussing and fretting, re-shooting, realigning the camera until he got just the right effect. It evidently worked. At the première, as Russell leaned forward, a member of the audience hollered 'Bombs away.'

Hughes himself was fairly breast-obsessed, to the point of circulating a memo describing in great detail how miss Russell's chest was to be clothed. He decided that, magnificent though her assets were, her chest needed a little more help to produce just the right result. The designer in him came to the fore and, muttering "This is really just a very simple engineering problem," he retired to the drawing board.

Hollywood, too, had by this time become very breast-fixated and the censor had found it prudent to institute an exact – to the inch – ruling as to how low a dress could be cut so that the amount of cleavage on show was not deemed too 'obscene'.
A Pictorial History of Sex in the Movies. London, Hamlyn, 1975. pp.92-95 Credit: Glen Ralph.