The Unsung Joe: Victoria Vinton

Victoria Vinton wouldn't have had to wait long to see herself in Bullets or Ballots (1936), as she's up there on screen in the first shot of the film. She'd have recognised the scene immediately, as it involves a great crane shot which starts high above a movie theater, then swoops down as a car pulls up and a couple of gangsters get out and walk over to the ticket booth, where she sits.

Perhaps she took a boyfriend to see the film with her, eager to impress him by showing him proof that she really had met Humphrey Bogart, who plays one of the gangsters, or maybe she went with her mother, who might have been visiting from New Jersey and been looking forward to sitting with her daughter while they both watched her act face-to-face with real-life movie stars.

Perhaps Victoria whispered, "This is it! This is my scene!" as the camera swung down to the level of her ticket booth. "That's me! You can't see my face yet because of that grill, but that's me!"

"The gangsters are coming over to me to buy a ticket. You'll see me when the shot changes. Look!"

But this was the next shot:

Victoria is just outside the frame on the left. You hear her tell the gangsters what time the crime picture starts, but that's not quite the same thing.

Victoria had been in Hollywood for six years or so by this point, and, obviously, things were not going well.

When she'd first come to town in 1931, she'd made a living as a model, showing up in glamorous costumes at publicity events for store openings and fairs. Here she is at the age of 19, in one of her first jobs:

(1)

If the various bits of publicity in the newspapers over the years are anything to go by, absolutely everybody thought she was extraordinarily beautiful. For example, a celebrity portrait painter (and, apparently, compiler of peculiar lists) called Willy Pogany included her in his list of women who have "the most beautiful and the most nearly perfect shoulders"⁽²⁾ (she's the only non-famous name in a list that includes Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Ginger Rogers), and a photograph of her appeared in the press with the caption "Victoria Vinton is said by experts in pulchritude to be the prettiest chorus girl in Hollywood"⁽³⁾.

Perhaps those pulchritude experts influenced the decision to cast her in a lead role in the very first film that she appeared in. She must have been thrilled: her first film, and top billing already! I wonder how long it took her to realise that The Seventh Commandment (1932) was actually a rather seedy exploitation movie that would eventually be marketed by its producers as a "sex hygiene drama".

No copies of the film have survived, but here's what Joseph Breen, the admittedly puritanical film censor, said about it: "The whole play is the most thoroughly vile and disgusting motion picture which [our staff] have ever seen. It is thoroughly reprehensible in all its details. In addition, it is poorly produced and poorly photographed. The portion of the film given over to the Cesarean operation suggests a foreign picture ... The whole thing is very offensive and disgusting."⁽⁴⁾

Victoria's next roles were more subdued, and she spent the next few years appearing as chorus girls or various background blondes. Her highest profile part was in a short Busby Berkeley number in the middle of Fashions of 1934, in which she played a chorine who emerges from a mountain of feathers and stares fixedly at the audience like an early incarnation of the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead (1977):

Although she rarely got noteworthy roles, her publicist seems to have managed to keep her name in the papers throughout the 30s, usually by means of issuing a cheesecake shot of her in a swimsuit or something. However, in 1933, she featured in one genuine news item:

⁽⁵⁾

The story read: "Victoria Vinton, young motion picture actress, wept softly over a piece of soap in municipal court here Wednesday. 'I suppose that's all that's left of Duchess,' she said. 'Duchess was such a good pal.'

Thereafter, the soap exhibit and other testimony aiding, Jess Anderson and Morven Strange, screen cowboys, were held for trial on charges of stealing Miss Vinton's pet horse and selling it to a soap factory."⁽⁶⁾

Frustratingly, I can't find any record of the outcome of the trial, and the IMDB hasn't heard of the two actors, so we've no way of telling whether Victoria's remarkable ability to determine the precise horse from which a bar of soap was made was as accurate as she thought it was.

In the mid-30s, Victoria got a couple of lead roles in low-budget Westerns, but, on the whole, her career was made up of roles like the theater ticket seller in Bullets or Ballots. Perhaps she'd tarnished her reputation by appearing in The Seventh Commandment. Alternatively, maybe she was simply terrible at acting. Who knows? She had her own theory, naturally, which she explained to gossip columnist Paul Harrison, who was visiting the set of a film in which she had a bit part as one of the movie stars attending a premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The article bore this headline:

⁽⁷⁾

It explained that Victoria was offered nothing but bit parts because she looked so exactly like "a magazine illustrator's notion of a movie star" that casting directors appeared to be able to think of her only as a generic movie star type. "During seven years in Hollywood, she has had many such brief, anonymous roles. But never a chance to act!"

Of course, in those two brief sentences, Harrison gets the length of her career wrong and over-dramatises her situation by pretending that she had never had a speaking role, but the essence of the story is this: Victoria Vinton suspected that the reason she'd never become a movie star was that she was just too beautiful.

The article was published in 1940, the year in which Victoria appears to have given up trying to make it in Hollywood. She's credited with only one more small role, in 1944, and she died in 1980, in a nursing home for retired actors.

Sources -- IMDB.com, newspaperarchive.com, (1)Brainerd Daily Dispatch, Jan 19, 1931 (2)New Castle News, March 27, 1934 (3)Zanesville Signal, 1938 (4)Schaefer, Eric "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959", Duke University Press, 1999. (5)Standard-Examiner, January 29, 1933 (6)Albuquerque Journal, Jan 19, 1933 (7)Olean Times-Herald, Feb 20, 1940

Comments

Reading this Blog is an oddly moving experience. All these little flickering smudges of grey, all those forgotten people. Except that they're not. Thanks for bringing these strange people back to life so vividly. This is obviously a labour of love.

Posted by: Simon Fraser | July 05, 2008 at 04:19 PM