A double bill of Marilyn’s greatest comedies is coming to Cineteca di Bologna on Tuesday, July 21 – with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes showing in the Cinema Modernissimo at 6:00 pm, followed by a free outdoor screening of Some Like It Hot in the Piazza Maggiore at 9:45, as part of the city’s famed Cinema Under the Stars series.
- GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES: “A blonde like no other and a dynamite brunette roam the corridors, bridges, and dreamlike stairways of a yacht. Luxury and lasciviousness, hidden cruelty, and exquisite entertainment. Howard Hawks’s second and final musical comedy after Ball of Fire. ‘Dorothy’s quiet nymphomania and Lorelei’s reasoned greed generate no conflict between the two friends […] Hawks pins the monstrosity of each of them onto the screen like butterflies in a painting, luminous with clarity and simplicity. Hawks’s tone, in its dryness, is equally alien to contempt, compassion, or connivance toward the characters’ (Jacques Lourcelles). Diamonds for breakfast, and marriage as the final catwalk.”
- SOME LIKE IT HOT: “The most celebrated American comedy of all time, a saraband of genders and sexes, the apotheosis of gags, double entendres, and disguise. And yet, Some Like It Hot is also the apotheosis of romance, and it is thanks to Marilyn Monroe. In life, she was drifting, and in art, Billy Wilder’s genius brought her to the absolute pinnacle. Sugar Kane is the only true romantic heroine in Marilyn’s destiny: genetically predisposed to melancholy, all fragility and trembling, an expansive body that Charles Lang and Orry-Kelly strip of light, a girl who wants to be loved and then wants to end it all with love in two songs that still send shivers down your spine. Only for her does the queer saraband stop, in the suspended time of golden measure, of supernatural harmony, of the sensual simultaneity of events.”
UPDATE:
The Marilyn Report 