From the moment the camera was invented, the desire to photograph erotica of any and all sorts came into being. Pornography in cinema goes back to the turn of the century and while much of the film is lost (but documented orally, so to speak) certain specimens survive that cannot be called anything less than fascinating. Some of these films explicitly show the sexual act. Others tease the audience in more subtle ways. The latter is the case with ‘Why Girls Walk Home’, a 1929 silent short film which features four young flappers who frolic in their underwear on the beach. (There’s a plot of sorts but let’s not bother with it). Even though their underwear is, in the words of one of the YouTube commenters, “still too much clothing to get them into the Grammy’s”, the film remains provocative period ‘cheesecake’. The girls are giggly, fetching, clearly having some fun making the little movie…or at least forcing themselves quite convincingly to look as if they are. Their identities are unknown, as is the maker of the movie or indeed its actual purpose. Movies like this one were likely passed around privately, shown in Shriner’s halls, sales conventions, private all-male ‘smokers’, etc. I’ve long wondered how the actual production and post-production of these primitive ‘dirty pictures’ was accomplished. They were illegal–so who shot them, edited them, processed them, made multiple prints etc. ? And, perhaps most importantly, what’s the story behind hiring the performers? One might be forgiven for assuming that early pornography was cast using exclusively prostitutes, but what about this soft-core (to say the least) entry? Were they actresses needing the money? Working girls willing to cavort for a day’s work? Or perhaps they were runaways, young women who busted out of their small, repressive mid-western towns, got off the bus in Hollywood to become the next Jean Harlow, but who had a cold splash of water thrown in their face when confronted with the grim realities of the picture business. This last possibility is perhaps the most poignant; they desired to be in the movies enough to escape from their homes and journey to the west. But the beaches of Santa Monica or Malibu (which is where It think this was filmed) did not become the site of their ocean-side mansions, as it did for Marion Davies or Norma Talmadge. It became the location for “Why Girls Walk Home”, a movie in which these young women fulfilled their dreams of being in front of a camera. They may have even been encouraged by the film’s maker by being told that this was the way all the big female stars began their careers. And, if so, the manipulative ploy worked. Alas, they were never heard from again, existing only as ghostly ‘good-time-girls’ (a period synonym for girls with ‘loose morals’)  dancing from the distant past one sunny day in Southern California in 1929…