Howard Hawks (1953)
Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) are showgirls and best friends, with different ideas of Mr Right. Dorothy wants a lovable hunk; Lorelei is a gold-digger. She’s engaged to the adoring Gus Esmond Jr (Tommy Noonan), no oil painting but likely heir to plenty. Gus’s vastly rich father (Taylor Holmes) is deeply suspicious of Lorelei and won’t let his son travel with her to France, where they plan to wed. Lorelei decides to head there regardless, accompanied by Dorothy. Esmond Sr hires private detective Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid) to spy on his prospective daughter-in-law during the Atlantic crossing. Malone instantly takes a shine to Dorothy; at first, she’s preoccupied with other ship passengers – the all-male US Olympic team – but then finds herself falling for Malone. Also on board are elderly lech Sir Francis ‘Piggy’ Beekman (Charles Coburn) and his watchful wife (Norma Varden). Lorelei is happy to flirt with Piggy after learning he owns a diamond mine in Africa. She invites him to her cabin, where he tells her of his African travels and demonstrates – by hugging Lorelei – how a python can squeeze a goat to death. Malone takes photos of the embrace but Dorothy catches him in the act. She and Lorelei get the private eye blind drunk and, while he’s unconscious, recover the incriminating film from his trousers pocket, print the negatives and hide them. Well aware that Lady Beekman would take a dim view of the cabin snaps, Lorelei blackmails Piggy into giving her his wife’s tiara. Everyone knows the stand-out number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but I hadn’t realised diamonds were quite so crucial to the story.
Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay for Howard Hawks’s now legendary musical comedy. The source material, Anita Loos’s 1925 comic novel of the same name, had become a Broadway show in 1949, with book by Loos and Joseph Fields, songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin, and Carol Channing playing Lorelei. The Loos novel is evidently much more substantial than its stage and screen descendants but the film is bracingly unsentimental; after plenty more plot twists, when the ship docks and the girls reach Paris, it delivers an apparently conventional happy ending without going soft. The finale is a dual wedding – Lorelei and Gus, Dorothy and Malone – but Hawks’s camera focuses, as it must, on the two brides. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an exuberant declaration, decades ahead of the phrase being coined, of girl power. According to the first line of their first number (reprised as they prepare to take their wedding vows), Lorelei and Dorothy are ‘just two little girls from Little Rock’. As if. These heroines, and the size of the rocks Lorelei is after, aren’t remotely little. Were the film not so unassailably light-hearted, you might say that Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell weaponise their beauty. Both spectacularly photogenic, they’re as witty as they’re glamorous. The same goes for the gorgeously funny, hourglass figure-hugging costumes that Travilla designed for them. Next to the two high-wattage stars, the actors playing their beaus are unexciting, to put it mildly – that’s as true of the technically handsome Elliott Reid as it is of dorky Tommy Noonan. This is more than not a problem: it’s an essential part of the set-up. If the young men in the story competed with the young women, they’d get in the way.
Over the course of the film, Monroe and Russell wear many clothes but the favoured colours are reds, oranges, fuchsias. Their culmination is Monroe’s hot-pink gown for her rendition of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a Paris club (where the male chorus line includes George Chakiris – uncredited, as he usually was at this stage of his career). This vibrant palette is showcased in the glorious Technicolor of Hawks’s picture – exhilarating to experience on the big screen of BFI’s NFT1. You just don’t see such ravishing colour in films today, except perhaps in the work of Pedro Almodóvar, a stylist and humorist who might also approve of the highlight of the male costuming in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: the swimwear of the Olympian dancers with whom Jane Russell performs ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?’ Russell’s outfit for this number is black, matching the trim on the men’s trunks that emphasises the flesh tones of the rest of their garment. ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love?’, by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson, was written for the film, which is hardly rich in memorable songs. It’s lucky that ‘Diamonds’ and ‘Little Rock’ are good enough – and used enough – to conceal the deficit, and that there’s much more besides to keep you entertained.
13 January 2022
