Clip joint: Lipstick
This week clip joint focuses on the power of the pout, bringing you five of film's most kissable lipstick scenes
Lipstick and cinema grew up together. Commercially available lipsticks hit the American market in the 1890s, just as Koster and Bial's Music Hall began exhibiting the first moving pictures. Before then lipstick was considered the preserve of the stage actress and the prostitute, a preconception that cinema's luxuriantly lippy-d stars helped to erode.
In the black and white world lipstick provided definition. It helped make great performances ("You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? ...) iconic and later, powered the signature pouts of actors such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Rouged lips came to dominate the silver screen, selling beauty, sex and glamour – the promise of Hollywood applied through the application of a tinted, waxy pigment. Here are five clips that explore the power of that painted pout:
1) The old "look, no hands!" method of application. Demonstrated by Claire (Molly Ringwald) in 1985's The Breakfast Club.
2) Sienna Miller's go-getting Tammy hastily smudges her lipstick in a bid for less blatant sexiness in this scene from Layer Cake.
3) "REDRUM! REDRUM!" Stanley Kubrick's The Shining has a young child (Danny Lloyd) wielding a kitchen knife, a red lipstick and a bowl cut: a deadly combination.
4) Teetering off the surreal end of the B-movie spectrum, Night of the Demons includes a NSFW scene in which a demonically possessed, lipstick-smeared teenage girl ingests the tube through her breast.
5) (3:20) In Black Narcissus (1947), Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) revolts against the Sister Superior (Deborah Kerr) and nunhood itself by wearing a taboo red dress and applying lippy.
