Do the eyes of people like Joan Blondell only appear to look big because of their facial structure, or are their eyeballs actually larger than other people's? If her eyeballs were larger than normal, did that give her enhanced vision? Her pupils and retina would have been larger, and there would have been more light receptors. I wish she was here so I could ask her if she had really good night vision.
shareI don't remember how i first saw JB, but seems like she was a little older and very curvy, like a fat Monroe. Same thing happened to Ruth Roman. And Joan seemed to have a flair for comedy, like a cross between Rosalind Russell and Eve Arden.
shareIt's the shape of the eyelids and the facial structure. People with those really big eyes tend to have higher brow bones and "deep set eyes" with a lot of eyelid showing because of that higher brow bone. Lower brow bone and all other things equal, and you have what appear to be small eyes.
The eyes are also set wide apart. Eyes close together never appear to be very large for some reason.
Well, if it's only facial structure creating the illusion, and not actually larger eyeballs, then I don't suppose her visual acuity would be any better than a person with eyes that appeared to be normal-size. However, if, as you said, her eyes were wider apart than the average person's, then her stereoscopic vision and depth perception would have been enhanced.
shareThe woman I know with great big eyes uses glasses. Visual acuity is more a matter of length of eyeball than circumference, anyway -- where the image focuses, whether in front, behind or on the retina. If it focuses in front or behind, the image would be blurry. It's the accommodative/convergence ratio that makes for depth perception. My ACA ratio is shot, which I didn't know all my life until I was an adult, standing in the front yard of my parents home and my mother was talking about a tree that was in front of another tree up on the hill beside the house. She meant to the front and to one side. Since I couldn't see a tree partially obscuring another tree, I asked her what she was talking about. It was then I got to hear that my perception of the world was off. To me, all the trees were on a straight line. The autonomic nervous system has something to do with the function of the vision, as well. My ANS was falling apart, but the last thing to go completely was the function of the vision. Even after a lot of vision therapy, I can look at things and not understand them. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
And you now know almost as much as most GP's and Internists do about the way eyes work. Well, more than most, actually, since they're interested in diseases of the eyes -- if they're interested at all. They're not interested in how the vision functions. That's optometry's department.