Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Review
8/10
Official trailer
Two showgirls sail to France. Lorelei is engaged to a rich man whose father disapproves and has hired a detective; Dorothy is looking for nothing in particular and finds the Olympic team in the gymnasium.
It’s a musical comedy and it’s also the most clear-eyed film about the economics of marriage that its decade produced, largely because Lorelei never once pretends otherwise.
Howard Hawks directed it. That’s easy to forget. The man who made Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep and His Girl Friday made this, and the fast overlapping dialogue is his.
Monroe runs rings around every man in the room here, and watching her do it is as much fun as I have with any musical of its decade. I keep my eyes on hers, waiting for the moment the act drops, and she makes me work to catch it. The plot around her is flimsy, and I don’t much care while she’s on screen.
The 8 is for a film considerably smarter than its surface and a lead performance playing three things at once. The plot is thin, the second half sags badly once the detective business takes over, and the courtroom resolution is silly. Two of the numbers are among the best filmed in the decade.
Lorelei Is Not Stupid
The entire performance depends on this and it’s the thing most often missed. Lorelei plays dumb because dumb is what the men she deals with want to buy, and she’s completely aware of the transaction. The line everybody should quote, instead of the diamonds one, is her explanation to Mr Esmond senior. She says a man being rich is like a girl being pretty: you wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, does it not help. He’s no answer, because there’s not one. The courtroom sequence proves the point structurally. She impersonates Dorothy, in a wig, doing an exaggerated version of her own persona, and the joke is that a performance of a performance is indistinguishable from the original to everybody watching.
Monroe is playing a woman playing a role, which is two performances stacked, and she makes the seam visible exactly when she wants you to see it and invisible when she doesn’t. The switch happens in the eyes and nowhere else. She was paid five hundred dollars a week for this while Jane Russell received one hundred thousand dollars, because Monroe was still under an old contract and Russell was the bigger star. It was Monroe’s film and she was the cheapest thing in it.
That pay gap makes me grind my teeth. The studio had the smartest performance in the picture on its books for five hundred a week and still couldn’t see what it was looking at.
She’d also just made Niagara and Don’t Bother to Knock, both of which are dramatic, and the studio spent the rest of her career refusing to notice.
A character who performs a persona for other characters gives you two levels to work with, and the reader’s pleasure is in spotting the seam. It’s one of the highest-return devices available and it requires only that you decide, scene by scene, who’s watching.
The construction step is to establish the real person early, briefly, in a moment nobody in the story observes. Lorelei’s asides to Dorothy do this: two women alone, speaking plainly about money, and the audience is given the baseline against which every later performance can be measured.
The test is to ask, at each appearance, who your character is performing for and what they want from that person. If the answer is nobody, you’re seeing the real one and the reader should be able to tell. If you can’t answer for a given scene, the character has no strategy there and will read as inconsistent instead of layered.
The Ship Removes the Chaperones
The crossing exists so that the two women are unsupervised for a week on a boat full of wealthy men and an Olympic team, with nobody’s family able to intervene. It’s also a closed economy. Everybody aboard is stuck with each other, the class arrangement is fixed by deck, the passengers provide the entertainment, and a private detective has been hired to watch. That supplies the entire plot mechanism.
The film is quite precise that the voyage is a marketplace and both women understand what’s on offer. Lorelei works it systematically. Dorothy is uninterested in money and the film treats that as a preference instead of a virtue. The Piggy subplot, with the elderly diamond mine owner and his wife’s tiara, is the plot’s engine and it’s the weakest material. It requires Lorelei to be careless in a way the character isn’t.
I’d have cut half the Piggy business. Every minute spent on that tiara is a minute Lorelei has to act dumber than she is, and the film forgets its own best joke to make room for it. What the ship does best is force proximity between people who would never otherwise share a room. The detective has to keep encountering his targets. The fiancé’s father’s spy is at the same dinner. There’s nowhere to go.
Hawks shoots the interiors as a series of connected spaces you learn the layout of. That matters because half the comedy is people arriving where they shouldn’t be.
Two Numbers That Justify It
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend is staged flat, in shocking pink against black, with almost no camera movement and a chorus of men used as furniture. It’s a thesis statement instead of a song.
Every line is about the depreciation of romance and the reliability of stones. A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds don’t lose value, men grow cold, and there’s no charity in a French chateau. The lyric is an actuarial argument.
Jack Cole choreographed it and the staging was later borrowed wholesale by Madonna for Material Girl. It’s the correct reading of what the number is about. Anyone Here for Love, with Jane Russell in a gymnasium surrounded by the Olympic team in flesh-toned trunks, is the funnier one and the better joke. A room full of men entirely uninterested in the only woman present, all of them doing exercises, none of them looking at her.
Russell is the one being ignored and she plays it with complete good humor, and the number ends with her falling in the pool. Nobody helps.
That number is my favorite thing in the film. Russell taking a header into the pool while the team keeps doing its exercises makes me laugh out loud, and as comedy I’d put it ahead of Diamonds.
Both numbers are doing argument instead of decoration. That’s why they outlived the film around them and why most people can describe them without having seen the picture.
Russell and Monroe Together
The film is often discussed as Monroe’s and it’s a two-hander, and the friendship between the two women is the only relationship in it with any warmth. Russell is the straight man and she’s excellent at it. Dorothy is intelligent, sardonic, protective of Lorelei, and completely unbothered by her friend’s mercenary approach, which she regards as a personality trait instead of a flaw.
That’s unusual for 1953. Two women who like each other, don’t compete, and aren’t in conflict over a man at any point. The film’s structure requires them to be allies throughout and they never have a falling-out scene, which almost any modern version would insist on. Russell has said she looked after Monroe on set, who was anxious and frequently late, and the accounts of the production consistently describe her as the reason it functioned. The courtroom impersonation only works because Russell can do a passable Monroe, and the joke is generous instead of mocking. She’s helping.
The friendship is what stays with me when the film ends. I find it touching in a picture this cynical about money, and I think Russell deserves far more credit for it than she usually gets.
The double wedding at the end is played as the two of them getting married to each other’s satisfaction, with the men incidental, and the final shot is the two women looking at each other.
A friendship with no conflict in it is harder to write than a rivalry and considerably rarer, and this film shows that the absence of friction between two characters doesn’t have to mean an absence of interest.
What makes it work is that they want different things and neither disapproves. Lorelei wants money, Dorothy wants attraction, and each regards the other’s preference as simply how that person is arranged. There’s no scene where either tries to reform the other. That’s where most fictional friendships spend their time.
Check whether your allied characters are ever in disagreement about each other’s values. If they are, you’ve written a rivalry with a friendly surface. If they can hold opposite positions and remain uninterested in converting each other, you have a friendship, and it’ll be more restful and more distinctive than the conflict you were going to manufacture.
What Hawks Brings to It
Howard Hawks directing a Marilyn Monroe musical sounds like a mismatch and the fingerprints are all over it. The dialogue overlaps. Lorelei and Dorothy talk across each other constantly, finishing each other’s sentences and answering questions that weren’t asked. That’s exactly what Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant do in His Girl Friday. The women are competent. Hawks heroines always are, from Bacall in The Big Sleep to Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, and they’re always the ones who understand the situation before the men do. Lorelei and Dorothy are in that line.
And the men are largely furniture. Hawks was never especially interested in male romantic leads and it shows: Gus Esmond is a nonentity, the detective is a device, and the Olympic team is scenery. Nobody in the film is in any doubt that the two women are the subject. What he doesn’t bring is any interest in the musical form. Jack Cole staged the numbers, and they’re shot with minimal intervention. That’s why they look like performances instead of integrated sequences, and in this case that flatness is an asset. It was a considerable hit and Hawks never made another musical. That suggests he knew what he had and had no interest in repeating it.
A distinctive voice will assert itself through genre, and studying somebody working outside their usual form is the fastest way to see what their voice consists of. Strip the Westerns and the noir off Hawks and what remains is overlapping dialogue, competent women and men who are furniture.
The practical use is diagnostic. If you want to know what your own recurring habits are, write something in a form you never work in and look at what survives the transfer. Those are your fingerprints, and knowing them lets you decide which to keep deliberately and which are just defaults you’ve never examined.
One test: take a scene you’re pleased with and rewrite it in an unfamiliar genre with the same characters. Whatever you find yourself doing in both versions is your voice. Whatever you dropped was convention, and you may not have realized you were following it.
Should you watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?
Yes. The 8 comes from Monroe playing a woman playing a role, a far more technical performance than her reputation allows, and from two numbers I’d happily watch on their own. It stops short of a 9 because the plot is thin, the second half sags once the detective business takes over, and the courtroom resolution is silly. Watch the Esmond senior scene twice, because it’s the film telling you exactly what it’s about.
