Beauty Archivist: The Action Bombshell Archetype as Typified by Raquel Welch
Words: Grace Ellington
Make it stand out
In 1965 during the filming of One Million Years BC, a B Movie monster flick no one had particularly high hopes for, Raquel Welch posed for some publicity stills. She was a relative unknown with just three lines but many many shots of her running in the skimpy doe skin outfit described by the studio as ‘Man’s First Bikini’. Yet by the time filming had wrapped, the image had gone the 60s version of viral, and she was greeted at the airport by crowds of new fans and paparazzi. Welch’s image would eclipse the film itself and change her life, transforming her into a new sex symbol for the changing times.
Welch’s chestnut brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin and her athletic, broad shouldered figure cut a striking departure from the pillowy soft passive physicality of America’s previous sexual obsession Marilyn Monroe
A new generation was emerging, one for whom the 1950s ideal of the damsel in distress felt less relevant. Yes, Welch’s image was sexualised and her costume revealing, but she was also muscular and capable looking, she is shown outdoors and in motion. A proto version of the sexy action heroine which would later be embodied by Angelina Jolie. In some ways her look straddled two eras, less threatening then the new swinging 60s ideal typified by models such as Penelope Tree and Twiggy with their counter cultural associations: Her hourglass figure and statuesque femininity was still recognisably linked to the 50s blonde bombshell yet she was undoubtedly different and modern.
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At the time of filming Raquel Welch was a divorced single mother, only 26 but still hardly considered an ingenue, she had been a ballet dancer as a teen and a fit and catalogue model in her 20s but struggled to find success due to her ‘unfashionable’ body type. She was considered head strong, serious and difficult to work with. In a Rolling Stone interview Welch recounts a story from the set when she approached director Don Chaffey to tell him she had been thinking about her part and he told her plainly not to, just to run from one rock to another.
Although Welch’s version of sexiness hardly looks challenging today I think placing it within the context of the times and comparing her image to previous stars such as Monroe you can see there is something empowered about this portrayal. The concept of a toned and worked out body as an aspirational image for women wasn’t common in the 1960s. Messaging around body ideals focussed on either slenderness or voluptuousness and neither look was closely associated with the idea of fitness or activity. Toned abs and thighs feel oppressively ubiquitous today but when Raquel Welch’s poster became a cultural sensation it really was expanding the type of imagery seen of the women anointed as desirable. Raquel struggled with her new status saying “A sex goddess isn’t a real living thing” and “I’m not a phenomenon who exists out of time, an anachronism of sociological significance. I’m a person.”
The 1960s was a decade of rapid change and Welch’s image which seemed progressive at first distribution became almost instantly retrograde. By 1968 just two years after the release of One Million Years BC Mia Farrow cut her hair for Rosemary’s baby and a new wave of European and counter cultural stars made her bombshell persona look like a hangover from the 50s. Raquel’s image had become linked with patriotism and the Vietnam war via the near totemic status the fur bikini press shots received amongst GI’s. In the way that happens when a single image becomes divorced from the real person in it she had come to symbolise an idea of femininity she herself did not relate to. The transcendence of this one image created a box that she struggled to escape from for the rest of her career. In a 1974 Rolling Stone Interview Raquel talks about her desire to one day direct and to be taken seriously as an actress, telling journalist Timothy Ferris I would work for practically nothing to do a film by Truffaut or Schlesinger, George Roy Hill, Billy Friedkin. . . . You see, it’s not a question of fame, money, success; it’s a question of living and doing something. I want to do well.” He responds by describing her for the reader as “sleek as a racing car and not much more supple.”
“The 1960s was a decade of rapid change and Welch’s image which seemed progressive at first distribution became almost instantly retrograde.”
Raquel Welch occupies an awkward place in our cultural history, she is pre second wave feminism, and supposedly wanted little to do with it at the time, and post the studio system and its heavy handed safeguarding of stars. Her breakout occupied a brief few years before a total shake up of the culture. She moved rapidly and seamlessly between representing the new and feeling like a throwback to an audience who had moved on to a landscape that was embracing New Hollywood and the French New Wave with releases like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde. Despite being a pin up icon her body was never truly fashionable, too athletic for the early 60s and too bombshell for the late 60s and 70s and yet this anachronistic quality meant that despite making several good movies, and being the only good thing about a few bad ones, almost all press focussed on a fascination with her body. Yet whilst she was outside of the times in her own career she is the original in a lineage that includes, of course Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, Charlize Theron, Sigourney Weaver and basically any actress that its easy to imagine firing a gun.