By Jan Wahl–
It takes guts to wear a fabulous hat. Or, they may just be a cool way not to have to style your hair. I’ve always loved them. The serious affair with hats began with two movies. In Now, Voyager, Bette Davis goes from mousy to marvelous in a large picture hat as she is disembarking a ship. Ingrid Bergman says goodbye to Bogart in Casablanca, a hat perfectly hiding some tears. I began a search for great hats on film, and they were, and are, everywhere!
It doesn’t get better than the happy hat opening to the wonderful musical Easter Parade. Fred Astaire is going down the most stylish street in Manhattan, ready to buy Easter gifts for Ann Miller, his dancing squeeze. The first stop is a hat fashion show, with gorgeous and colorful spring hats. He chooses a white feathered number, but they are all divine.
It’s a hat movie all the way through, along with incredible Irving Berlin tunes. Watching it around Easter may just encourage you to join in singing and rocking a flowered Easter bonnet.
Hats can be used to define characters and situations. One of the most obvious is from steamy 9 1/2 Weeks. To the raucous tune of Joe Cocker’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” Kim Basinger does a strip. In Mel Brooks’ underrated Spaceballs, Helmet is the name of a dumbass bad guy, his hat as large as his ridiculous ego. Charlie Chaplin’s bowler as The Tramp gives him the class he is longing for, while his colleague Buster Keaton had a porkpie hat as a trademark.
Once in a while, the hat leaves people talking about it after the movie. Oddjob’s bowler in Goldfinger is a weapon that completely freaked me out when I first saw the 1964 James Bond classic. To demonize a hat didn’t seem right, but it does stay with us and is an excellent way to dismember an offensive statue.
Glamour and hats are made for each other. Cecil Beaton’s designs for the Ascot sequence in My Fair Lady take hats to black and white beauty. It always helps to add Audrey Hepburn to the mix, and her iconic hat as she eats a bagel in front of the window at Breakfast at Tiffany’s lets us know Holly Golightly is on the make.
Cloches are some of my favorites, especially in roaring twenties movies like Chicago, Some Like It Hot, and Singin in the Rain. Hat veils were used from Marlene Dietrich to Myrna Loy, adding mystery and allure. Period films like Downton Abbey, Marie Antoinette, and Bridgerton had lavish designs that took us back to a time when hats were complicated (Queen Marie even had a birdcage with living birds in one) but stunning.
Fedoras are for men and women. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark started a new fad, but go back to Bogart, Alan Ladd, and just about every Hollywood heavy for the start of this great fad. The Blues Brothers used fedoras as part of their coolness, while no private detective or gangster on film would ever be caught dead without one.
Cowboy hats are just about the sexiest, in my humble opinion, and not just because of the taste and beauty in Brokeback Mountain. They lend a swagger and style to any guy. Women look good in them, too. It’s a shape that can work and enhance any face and provide shade from that desert sun.
Fascinators are easy to wear, basically headbands with hopefully wild attachments like birds, flowers, sequins, feathers. The royals have made them popular and they can be far more comfortable than the Ascot hats, if less fascinating.
Hats off to hats themselves!
Jan Wahl is a Hollywood historian, film critic on various broadcast outlets, and has her own YouTube channel series, “Jan Wahl Showbiz.” She has two Emmys and many awards for her longtime work on behalf of film buffs and the LGBTQ community. Contact her at www.janwahl.com
Published on March 11, 2021
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