Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Review
8/10
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 is a musical comedy and it is 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, which is 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.
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 is the thing most often missed. Lorelei plays dumb because dumb is what the men she deals with want to buy, and she is 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 would not marry a girl just because she is pretty, but my goodness, does it not help. He has no answer, because there is 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 does not. The switch happens in the eyes and nowhere else.
It is worth knowing 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.
She had 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 is one of the highest-return devices available and it requires only that you decide, scene by scene, who is 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 subsequent 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 are seeing the real one and the reader should be able to tell. If you cannot 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 is also a closed economy. Everybody aboard is stuck with each other, the class arrangement is fixed by deck, the entertainment is provided by the passengers, and a private detective has been hired to watch, which supplies the entire plot mechanism.
The film is quite precise that the voyage is a marketplace and both women understand what is on offer. Lorelei works it systematically. Dorothy is genuinely 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 is the weakest material. It requires Lorelei to be careless in a way the character is not.
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 is nowhere to go.
Hawks shoots the interiors as a series of connected spaces you learn the layout of, which matters because half the comedy is people arriving where they should not 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 is 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 do not lose value, men grow cold, and there is 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, which is 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.
Both numbers are doing argument instead of decoration, which is 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 is 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 is 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 is unusual for 1953. Two women who like each other, do not compete, and are not 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 is helping.
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 demonstrates that the absence of friction between two characters does not 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 is no scene where either tries to reform the other, which is where most fictional friendships spend their time.
The test is to check whether your allied characters are ever in disagreement about each other’s values. If they are, you have 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 will 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 were not asked, which is 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 are 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 does not bring is any interest in the musical form. The numbers are staged by Jack Cole and shot with minimal intervention, which is 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, which 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 have never examined.
The test is to take a scene you are 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, for the two numbers and for Monroe playing a woman playing a role, which is a considerably more technical performance than her reputation allows. The plot is thin and the second half sags. Watch the Esmond senior scene twice, because it is the film telling you exactly what it is about.
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