Iolna Massey, Madam Egelichi, Madam Lynx

Madame Egelichi, the character Iolna Massey played in LOVE HAPPY, was not forgotten afterwards. She made a sort of comeback in Milt Caniff's comic strip "Steve Canyon".

Ilona Massey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The native form of this personal name is Hajmássy, Ilona. This article uses the Western name order.

Ilona Massey
Ilona Massey, 1941
Born	Ilona Hajmássy (1910-06-16)June 16, 1910 Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Budapest, Hungary)
Died	August 20, 1974(1974-08-20) (aged 64) Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Years active	1935-1959
Spouse(s)	Nick Szavazd (m.1935-1936; divorced) Alan Curtis (m.1941-1942; divorced) Charles Walker (m.1952-1954; divorced) Donald Dawson (m.1955-1974; her death)

Ilona Massey, born Ilona Hajmássy, (June 16, 1910 – August 20, 1974^[1]) was a film, stage and radio performer.

1 Early life and career 2 Politics 3 Death 4 Partial filmography 5 References 6 External links

Early life and career

She was born in Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Hungary). Billed as "the new Dietrich", she starred in three films with Nelson Eddy, including Rosalie (1937), and with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as Baroness Frankenstein. In 1943, she appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies.

In 1947, she starred with Eddy in Northwest Outpost, a musical film composed by Rudolf Friml.^[2] In 1949, she starred in Love Happy with the Marx Brothers. She played Madame Egelichi, a femme fatale spy, and her performance inspired Milton Caniff in the creation of his femme fatale spy, Madame Lynx, in the comic strip "Steve Canyon". Caniff hired Massey to pose for him.^[3]

Beginning on November 1, 1954, she hosted DuMont's The Ilona Massey Show, a weekly musical variety show in which she sang songs with guests in a nightclub set, with music provided by the Irving Fields Trio. The series ended January 3, 1955 after 10 episodes.

Politics

Becoming an American citizen in 1946, she remained strongly anti-communist for what she saw as the destruction of her native country, at one point picketing the United Nations during the 1956 visit of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

 Death

Ilona Massey died of cancer in Bethesda, Maryland and was buried in Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery near her last husband, Donald Dawson, who had served in the United States Air Force Reserve as a Major General.

 Partial filmography

• Balalaika (1939)
• International Lady (1941)
• The Great Awakening (1941)
• Invisible Agent (1942)
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
• Holiday in Mexico (1946)
• Northwest Outpost (1947)
• Love Happy (1949)
• Jet Over the Atlantic (1959)

References

1. ^ However her date of birth has also been cited as July 5, 1912 and her date of death as August 10 or 12, 1974. This article uses the dates on her gravestone, on the assumption that they are the most accurate.
2. ^ Northwest Outpost at the IMDB database, accessed June 23, 2010
3. ^ Pageant May 1953, V8 n11

 External links

• Ilona Massey at the Internet Movie Database
• Ilona Massey at the Internet Broadway Database
• Ilona Massey at Find a Grave

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Evidently someone thought Ilona Massey in LOVE HAPPY needed censoring,

 

because they superimposed a shadow over her bosom.

 

 

 

Iolna Massey with Harpo Marx

 

 

 

 

 

Rooftop scene

 

 

 

 

With Groucho, in scene unseen in the US that was seen in the foreign version.

 

 

 

 

Somebody thought the comic strip version needed censorship, too.

 

 

Milt Caniff's girl characters.

                                                                     Madame Lynx by Caniff.     

 

 

 

 

 Today, LOVE HAPPY is better known for being a Marilyn Monroe movie.

 

 

 

Because she was in it, LOVE HAPPY was run here more often than the other movies the Marx Brothers made.

 

 

Marilyn had only a brief scene in the movie where she comes into Detective Groucho's office and complains about a man who has been following her. But you see a lot of publicity photos of her from this movie.

 

 

 

 

 Including some with her on the roof, although she wasn't actually in that part of the movie.

 

 

 

 Milt Caniff later had another character that was supposed to have been inspired by Marilyn Monroe, "Miss Mizzou".

 

Here she is shown as a blonde, but she's a redhead in the lineup of Caniff girl characters above.




Steve Canyon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Canyon

Dumont Television Network:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuMont_Television_Network

LOVE HAPPY:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Happy

http://www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/love.htm



Madam Lynx:
http://www.tcj.com/milton-caniff-steve-canyon-and-the-fair-sex/

Ilona Massey:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0557314/

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Joan Crawford And The Pirates

"The Dragon Lady" of  Milt Caniff's "Terry And The Pirates" is actually based on Joan Crawford.

When "Terry And The Pirates" began, Milt Caniff's art looked much the same as it had in "Dumb Dora". The new girl character ( Normandy Drake ) was similar to Dumb Dora in appearence.

TERRY AND THE PIRATES strip for 5-18-35.

But as he continued working on the strip the style changed somewhat and began to take on the look it is remembered for today.

"The Dragon Lady" was introduced as an oriental villianess who was the head of a gang of Chinese pirates.

Reblogged from http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=629

There were other stooges, but this could well be a reference to the familiar Three. It's the right period.

During the second World War, the Dragon Lady helped fight the Japanese in China and became an ally of the United States.

The Dragon Lady continued to be a part of the strip after the war. Eventually the strip passed into other hands after Milt Caniff started another strip, "Steve Canyon".


One of the inspirations of the Dragon Lady was a real-life Chinese woman pirate named Lo Hon-Cho.

But Milt Caniff said that he modeled his comic strip character on Joan Crawford, seen here in a picture with him and a picture he drew of the Dragon Lady.

Here are a couple of drawings Caniff gave to Joan Crawford.

Joan Crawford site:
http://www.legendaryjoancrawford.com/index.html

Joan Crawford and Terry And The Pirates:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/c.htm

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001076/bio


Terry And The Pirates:
http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2008/02/heroic-evolution.html


Terry And The Pirates Go To War:
http://kellyriggsmysteries.com/2012/08/milton-caniff-and-terry-go-to-war/





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Dumb Dora's wasn't so dumb. Matter of fact, she was one of the most successful comic strip girls of her day.

Dumb Dora

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A dumb Dora is 1920s American slang for a foolish woman.^[1][2]
The epithet arose from the vaudeville act of George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen,^[3] It was eventually turned into a classic comic strip produced by King Features Syndicate.^[3] Although this strip was discontinued in 1935, a popular 1960s and 1970s CBS game show, Match Game, occasionally alluded to the strip by asking those watching in the studio to shout in unison, "How dumb is she?" (borrowing from a routine from The Tonight Show).^[3] Flappers of the 1920s were also sometimes likened to dumb Doras.^[4]

Chick Young's DUMB DORA ( March 7, 1929 )

References

1. ^ Slang of the 1920s
2. ^ Alpha Dictionary
3. ^ ^{a b c} Don Markstein's Toonpedia
4. ^ 1920s Slang

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There, in a nutshell, is the history of Dumb Dora. Actually the comic strip was originated by Chic Young, whose later "Blondie" is much the same as his version of Dumb Dora. The syndicate then turned the strip over to Paul Fung and later to Bill Dwyer, who produced the strip with the aid of Milt Caniff.

Milt Caniff discussed this period of his life in an interview by Will Eisner that was originally published in WILL EISNER'S SPIRIT MAGAZINE issues number 34 and 35:

Reblogged from http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2011_09_04_archive.html

Caniff: …[in 1932] when I reached New York I called Bil Dwyer who had also worked on the Columbus Dispatch.

Eisner: Oh—he did Dumb Dora, that was it.

Caniff: Well, it's pertinent here. I called him just socially and told him I was in town to say hello. I didn't know where he lived, on Christopher Street. I didn't even know where Christopher Street was. So he said, "My God, I'm glad you called! I've got a problem here. Come on down!" This was like the first night I was in town and he had been submitting things to King Features and selling gags, by the way, to the magazines, Colliers and the New Yorker. Anyway, he had submitted a gag-type strip to King Features and he got a call back saying that Paul Fung was being pulled off Dumb Dora and Dwyer had the assignment. Here he was suddenly with six strips and a Sunday page to do and he'd never done anything except single panels.

Eisner: Oh boy!

Caniff: And he was in trouble. Frank Engli was helping him.

Eisner: Frank Engli...He was a sports cartoonist, right?

Caniff: No, he did lettering. He later on did a strip called Looking Back, about stone age characters—

Eisner: Oh, I see.

Caniff: —very well done cartooning. But his lettering was especially good. So I went down to see them and they were laboring away at the first release. Bil was a good gag writer, but he'd never had this kind of assignment before. So he said to me, "Will you sit in on this thing and especially draw the girls?" So I laid out the first batch of stuff and again, it was not hard for me to do because I had those eleven o'clock deadlines every morning. And so then I inked the girls and he inked the other characters; very simple drawing.

Eisner: Who wrote the stuff?

Caniff: Dwyer. He was a very good gag man. Chic Young had originated the character and then Paul finally took over from Chic when Chic started Blondie. Paul was drawing it before Dwyer. I never did find out, by the way, why he withdrew.

Eisner: Dumb Dora was a very successful strip in its day.

Caniff: Maybe Fung had a fight with King Features. I don't know and I never did ask. So we made the deadline, which was the thing that was bothering Dwyer, but in the mean time I had to go to work the next morning at eight o'clock....

Play money printed with the Sunday comic strip.

Paper doll printed with the Sunday comic strip.

Paper doll of Dumb Dora herself.

Cover Of A Big Little Book

And here for your perusing pleasure is none other than Gracie Allen herself.

She wasn't so dumb, either.

One other thing: there's also a "Dumb Dora" reference in the 1935 Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly comedy HOT MONEY.

Dumb Dora:
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2011_09_04_archive.html

http://www.toonopedia.com/dumbdora.htm

http://www.comicstripfan.com/newspaper/d/dumbdora.htm

http://mostlypaperdolls.blogspot.com/2010/06/dumb-dora-cut-outs.html

http://www.biglittlebooks.com/lynn.html



Dumb Dora "Type":
http://lanternhollowpress.com/2011/06/05/characters-and-caricatures-part-i-dumb-dora/


HOT MONEY ( Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly movie with a Dumb Dora reference in it ):
http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article.html?isPreview=&id=334203%7C334107&name=Hot-Money



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