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Ona Munson's tricks of the trade
TWO BROTHEL MADAMS (OR AS CLOSE as Hollywood dared get to them), one a lurid gash of pornographic pink throbbing against William Cameron Menzies' mourning-black backdrop of charred Atlanta, the other an alabaster insect queen from the depraved Far East, her hair shellacked into preposterous licorice waves: these are the defining extremes of Ona Munson's on-screen career. Her mismatched pair of thoroughly soiled doves - Belle Wading in the 1939 Technicolor Gone with the Wind and Mother Gin Sling in the blackand-white inferno of Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture (41) - are indelible classic variations on the scarlet woman. The rusty-locked Belle (longtime "friend" of Clark Gable's Rhett Butler) brims over with selfless goldheartedness, while Mother Gin Sling, abandoned by her callous whitehusband-from-the-West Walter Huston when still a girl and sold into sexual servitude, radiates malevolence with every smile she lets curdle into a sneer. Medusa in antennae braids and hairpins of ancient jade. As moody, mysterious, complex, and doomed ultra-hookers, Munson was altogether extraordinary - but where...