A dust road, a fence rail, and Clark Gable demonstrating the science of the thumb to no effect whatsoever. Then she steps past him, lifts a hemline about as far as a hemline needed to go in 1934, and the car stops. In twenty-six years up in the box I have watched that moment land on every kind of house — matinee crowds, rainy Tuesdays, one memorable school group — and the laugh always arrives in the same place, half a second after the brakes.

She was born Emilie Chauchoin in Saint-Mandé, just east of Paris, on this day in 1903, and came to films by way of Broadway once the pictures learned to talk. The story that has always kept me fond of her is that she finished It Happened One Night convinced it was the worst thing she had ever done and said so to friends, and then the Academy handed her the award for it. A useful reminder for anyone who has ever struck a set at two in the morning certain the whole enterprise was a mistake. Nobody in the building knows what the audience will do until the audience does it.

The photograph below is from the other side of that same year: the gold headdress with its cobra and horned sun disc, the wide black and gold collar, the scarab, the arms folded as if she has been waiting a while. Two pictures, one twelvemonth. The costume department earned its keep.