But in the Fifties Playmates like Vickers soon discovered that their sexy charisma made them more likely to be cast in movies as the vamp than as the Strattonesque virgin.

Eager to appeal to American audiences looking for the saucy grown-up thrills not available on the latest home appliance craze -- the TV set -- Fifties filmmakers began to emphasize sex, violence and other titillating topics.

With this new emphasis on sin and spectacle, Hollywood inaugurated a new kind of female star. The bombshell was an outrageously curvaceous, archetypally Fifties invention in keeping with the vogue for big, bigger, biggest: Cadillacs with great white dorsal fins, CinemaScope movies and babes with the Pacific Coast Highway curves necessary to compete in this new supersize America.

Eve and the Handyman (1960)

Playmates like Miss June 1955 Eve Meyer fit the bombshell blueprint perfectly. Meyer lent her ample 39-25-35 curves to projects like the sexploitation film Eve and the Handyman, directed by the Playboy photographer-turned-filmmaker who would become her husband, "nudie cutie" king Russ Meyer.

Playmates like Meyer and Vickers made their biggest mark in the growing B-movie market, which was stocking the new drive-ins that had popped up like a case of heat rash in the postwar landscape. Those sexy B-movie scream queens battled giant ants and homicidal arachnids or played bad girls in tight sweaters who left destruction in their pretty wake.

The Violent Years (1956)

Luscious blonde Jean Moorehead, Miss October 1955, was a definitive bad girl: She starred as one of the "untamed thrill-girls of the highway" in the 1956 exploitation film The Violent Years. Scripted by exploitation director and angora-lovin' cross-dresser Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space), The Violent Years was vintage Fifties teen-bait -- a juvenile delinquency potboiler with Moorehead as pampered princess Paula Parkins, a girl from the right side of the tracks who rounds up a group of like-minded femme ne'er-do-wells to start her own girl gang -- heavy petting, hold-ups, prison time, illegitimate children and girl criminality soon follow.

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