[ May 1, 2024 ]
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.
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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 BrodyYou 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.
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5 Comments
5 years ago
They really don’t make them like that anymore. The films too.
5 years ago
Reply to
santashandler
They used to spend allot of money on films. Today they don’t. We rarely go to the movies today. The language, plot is usually poor. It almost seems the Hollyweird has no imagination left. Older shows are making a come back like Roseanne till she offended her hypersensitive liberal friends who hate Trump supporters. We have never watched Roseanne so I don’t know what her shows were like.
5 years ago
Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but I ain’t no gentleman, and I prefer Liberty Ladies.
5 years ago
Watch near the end for Hoagy Carmichael’s bluesy ‘When Love Goes Wrong’ – great song.
5 years ago
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. I went to school with both of them about 1969-70. My wife of 41 years told me, she figured out what I meant by “going to school”. So….any red blooded American boy of 12 to 14 years old “went to school” with those ladies. I will let you figure it out for yourself.
