Having both an unhealthy obsession with classic pin-up style, which is coming back, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lives on forever, I've decided to combine my two lusts and create yet another series, this one based around pin-ups of the lovely ladies that starred in the b-movies MST3K skewered so hilariously. I will be taking on every single one of the relevant episodes, in order, because I have problems. Enjoy!
The series begins here.
Anne Nagel
Tom: "Nice caboose on that girl. What am I saying? She's my daughter! I am mad."
Anne Nagel had an especially tragic story, even for Hollywood Babylon: raised by a devoutly religious family and primed to joined the sisterhood, a chance encounter with photography led her astray, as they would have said then, and into a career in the movies. (She was helped by her new stepdad, who was a Technicolor expert working at the "Poverty Row" b-movie studios.)
Soon, she was Universal's go-to girl for low-budget films, and the most popular of the lot, popping in and out of over 40 films in ten years (!) and working hard to win over audiences with her Judy Garland-like charm and sweetness. (Tom Servo picks up on the similarities in the MSTed Mad Monster.) Eventually she worked her way up from uncredited chorine and hat-check girl to, well, secretaries and scenery, this being the '40s. You may have seen her as the secretary in the Green Hornet serials, or with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in Black Friday. She also appeared as a schoolteacher in W.C. Fields' classic My Little Chickadee and as Madame Gorgeous in his Never Give A Sucker An Even Break.
Unfortunately, her personal life was encroaching on her professional one. Her first husband, actor Ross Alexander, was a mess, marrying Anne just nine months after the suicide of his first wife, stage actress Aleta Freel. Furthermore, he was a self-hating gay man with an unrequited passion for none other than Bette Davis, and he eventually killed himself with the same exact pistol Freel had used. As might be expected, Anne never recovered completely from this episode, and began drinking heavily. It was a major factor in the demise of her second marriage, to an officer in the Army Air Corps.
Universal considered her on-set behavior erratic, for whatever reason, and gave her the axe, whereupon she had to return to Poverty Row and crank out crappy z-movies like, well, like The Mad Monster. In it, she plays a mad scientist's beautiful daughter, befriending handyman/assistant Petro, played by Glenn Strange, the bankrupt man's Lon Chaney Jr. Seems Dad wants to turn Petro into a werewolf to prove his blah blah blah and get revenge on his yadda yadda yadda. Dog jokes ensue. Anne's career degraded over the next decade as her drinking worsened; she died of liver cancer, penniless and with no surviving family members, at the age of 53.
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