Saturday Night Cinema: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic is in celebration of Marilyn Monroe’s birthday (June 1, 1926). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’ joyous, glam-gal musical comedy of 1953, is the film that catapulted Marilyn Monroe to major stardom and iconic status as sex symbol. “Anchored by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s sparkling magnetism, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a delightfully entertaining 1950s musical.” German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder declared it one of the ten best films ever made. Incredibly, Monroe was second-billed in this tour-de-force.

The New Yorker:

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The director Howard Hawks adds sly sexual insinuation to the blatantly sexual antics of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in this scintillating 1953 adaptation of the stage musical based on Anita Loos’s novel. Lorelei Lee (Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Russell) are showgirls sailing to Paris, where Lorelei, an unabashed gold digger, plans to wed the dorky heir Gus Esmond (Tommy Noonan, in a role meant for Cary Grant). But Esmond’s disapproving family plants the virile private detective Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid) on board to dig up dirt on Lorelei, and the sex-crazed Dorothy falls for him. Meanwhile, Lorelei flirts with a wealthy old goat (Charles Coburn), and legal complications ensue. Hawks’s whiplash-wicked comic set pieces display his classic themes of gender swaps and repressed desires, and Monroe’s inflections and expressions have a deliciously clever and sharply experienced irony. Jack Cole’s choreography offers some of the most incisively swinging musical numbers ever filmed, notably the strenuously geometric “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?,” featuring Russell and the entire male Olympic team.
— Richard Brody

You won’t find a more elegant take on ’50s va-va-voom vulgarity or a more joyous paean to the cheesecake self-empowerment of two little girls from Little Rock.