Small breasted women in the Golden Era?

[Mervinwaves]

Hello, we often associate the Golden Era, especially the 1950s, with the bosomy hourglass figure. Were there any famous old Hollywood examples of small brested actresses? And what decade would flatter a small bust best? Especially a pear shaped one

 

[Capesofwrath]

Well, Hedy Lamarr’s last big hit was Samson and Delilah opposite Victor Mature. Groucho Marx was quoted as saying that it was the first film he’d seen where the leading man had bigger tits than the leading lady.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Smaller busts were much more the rule than the exception in the thirties and early forties. Film footage survives of some of the topless acts who performed at the New York World's Fair in 1939, and they're extremely flat-chested by modern standards -- the idea of the pneumatic chest didn't really come into wide vogue until after the war.

It's worth taking a look at some of Busby Berkeley's early-thirties musicals for Goldwyn and Warner Brothers -- his chorines tended to be quite small-breasted by comparision with later standards. Look at just about any major female star of this period, and there's far less emphasis on the bosom than there'd be twenty years later. With the exception, of course, of Mae West -- but she was very often marketed as a throwback to the "Gay Nineties," the last period in which large breasts were really fashionable. In most thirties films, the swelling, haughty bosom was more a sign of a Marie Dressler or Margaret Dumont type of elderly dowager than that of a nubile young thing.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

Jean Harlow. Lots of small ones in the 20s and 30s.