Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is showing at the Paris Theatre on West 58th St. in Manhattan tomorrow, July 12, at midday, and again on Tuesday, July 15 at 7 pm, as part of a summer film series, ‘The Wonders of Technicolor,’ in association with the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, where the exhibition, ‘Colour in Motion,’ closes on Sunday, July 13.
“An uncredited scribe in the June 23, 1953, issue of Newsweek described Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) as an essay in ‘erotic anthropology’: ‘Hollywood’s censors require that bumps be bumped rearward … and that grinds be ground sidewise instead of in rotary form.’
This writer was discussing the picture’s two stars, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe … it’s worth asking how much Howard Hawks’s picture shifted emphasis from the 1925 book of the same name by Anita Loos, not to mention the subsequent Broadway adaptation that Loos wrote in conjunction with Joseph Fields. Just how old-hat were the trappings for the story of two showgirls eager to meet the men of their dreams in 1953? Old enough, maybe, to convince the higher-ups at 20th Century Fox to add oomph with some s-e-x.
New Yorkers can get acquainted with Dorothy Shaw and Lorelei Lee at the Paris Theatre … the Paris’s program is also something of a follow-up to a recent Museum of Modern Art program, Eye Candy: The Coming of Colour. If the latter tended toward misty tonalities, this one favours the super-saturated.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a splendid confection, being the rare film that has, over the years, gained in dazzlement. As has been pointed out by many an admirer, the story of ‘two little girls from Little Rock’ — one a gold-digger and the other having a heart of gold — is less backward than the mores of the time would seem to have allowed. Lorelei (Monroe) and Dorothy (Russell) know full well that they live in a man’s world and see fit to tweak and flout its rules. Our heroines are wise to life’s capriciousness — a fact that Monroe and Russell play up with an irresistible mixture of extravagance and grit.
Lorelei Lee was the role that made Monroe a star and she’s at her most assured here, elaborating on a ditsy sex appeal with a canniness that would have made Machiavelli call it a day. Monroe’s take on ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ has achieved a cultural reach that was undreamed of by either its performer or choreographer (Jack Cole.) As such, Russell is, I think, unfairly overshadowed: Her performance is on game and resolute in its timing.
Both actresses thrill as Hawks provides the momentum, screenwriter Charles Lederer the drollery, and costume designer William Travilla the resplendence. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes will be a find for the benighted and an affirmation of delight for those who revisit it.”
– Mario Naves, New York Sun
The Marilyn Report 