Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits, the two women part a sheer, black-sequined curtain, decked out in matching sequined, crimson gowns with plunging necklines and crowned with red-and-white feathered caps that frame their faces in tightly constructed swoops.
The song they perform to open Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’ 1953 film, is “Two Little Girls from Little Rock,” accompanied by simple and stylish choreography that they execute with fluid confidence, and it’s an effervescent ode to social advancement by bagging a millionaire man. Not only does this flashy opening number exemplify the precise balance between narrative efficiency and dense layering of aesthetic pleasures found in the best of classical Hollywood films, it also indicates the gender and sexual dynamics near unique to this film in its era. In the patriarchal culture of mid-century Hollywood, there was never anything unusual about the camera’s idealization of desirable women, but Lorelei and Dorothy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are distinguished by how they play up their desirability for personal gain — and entirely avoid Hays Code-inflicted moralizing consequences, wearing their man-trapping successes with ebullient, glamorous triumph.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was adapted by screenwriter Charles Lederer from a hit 1949 Broadway musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin, and a book by Robin and Anita Loos, which itself was adapted from Loos’ 1925 novel of the same name. The film is a loose adaptation of the musical, and a few of Styne and Robin’s songs were maintained — most notably, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” — while Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson were recruited to write additional numbers. The paper-thin, screwball-adjacent plot follows Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw, successful showgirls and best friends, taking an ocean liner to Paris, where Lorelei plans to marry her dopey millionaire fiancée Gus Edmond Jr. (Tommy Noonan). Dorothy is ostensibly Lorelei’s chaperone, but she plans to have a good time on her vacation — whereas Lorelei’s philosophy is to use men for money, Dorothy is more interested in pursuing sex and romance with good-looking men.
Dorothy falls for the blandly handsome passenger Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid), but soon discovers that he’s onboard as a private detective, hired by Gus’ father to spy on Lorelei — and Ernie’s been keeping a close eye on Lorelei’s flirtation with the septuagenarian Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman (Charles Coburn), the owner of a diamond mine in South Africa. Despite Lorelei and Dorothy’s crafty efforts to foil him, Ernie still manages to incriminate Lorelei to Edmond Sr., and they run into deeper trouble when Piggy’s wife, Lady Beekman, accuses Lorelei of stealing her prized diamond tiara (Lorelei had manipulated Piggy into bestowing the tiara on her as a gift, which he of course would not admit to his wife). The film’s final stretch finds Lorelei and Dorothy in Paris, scheming to protect Lorelei from criminal charges and for Lorelei to win Gus back — all while performing their famed double-act in a local nightclub.
Hawks was assigned this film by Fox, and in some key ways, it was both a typical and an atypical project for him. He had made his stamp on the screwball comedy with his signature rapid-fire dialogue direction in classics like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes follows the narrative and tonal codes of the genre (albeit with a somewhat more relaxed pace than Hawks’ earlier comedies). Russell also fits in well with Hawks’ preferred mode of idealized femininity: straight-shooting and sexually charismatic, she plays Dorothy Shaw as a witty brunette bombshell who can one-up any man.
Yet Hawks rarely directed musicals, nor did he direct any other film with two female leads. Hawks alluded to the distinctiveness of both his stars being women in a 1956 Cahiers du Cinema interview: “In other movies, you have two men who go out looking for pretty girls to have fun with. We pulled a switch by taking two girls who went out looking for men to amuse them: a perfectly modern story.” It was a “switch” for both Hawks and mainstream movies as a whole, and while many contemporary viewers have rightly interpreted the female-driven narrative from a feminist lens, Hawks and the critics of the era seemed mostly fixated on the novelty of Monroe and Russell as sex objects, even as they inarguably drove the narrative.
In this sense, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is both an exact enactment of the male gaze as Laura Mulvey originally defined it — the film is set up so both the male characters and the implied straight male audience are meant to leer at women — and a clever subversion. As much as the film fixates on Monroe and Russell’s bodies, Lorelei and Dorothy are written to be completely aware of this dynamic, and they use men’s sexual attraction to them to their advantage at every turn. Their expertly calibrated performances — full of personality, comic timing, and musical skill — in comparison to the forgettable supporting men bolster their absolute power over the film. Lorelei and Dorothy hold all the cards, and the male characters — and, by extension, the men who bought tickets just to gawk — are easily made fools of.
Hawks, notably, did not direct any of the musical numbers, ceding all authority to choreographer Jack Cole. Cole, a pioneering force in screen dance, brought a completely different perspective to Blondes from Hawks. Cole had cultivated a distinct choreographic style that borrowed from African-American and Indian forms, and in doing so was instrumental in developing and popularizing American jazz dance (per Cole scholar Debra Levine). Cole also had a keen eye for sophisticated spectacle, and a sense of the erotic that was perhaps more visually refined than Hawks’.
Cole staged “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” with a lush visual panache and sensual, subtle choreography tailored to Monroe’s abilities. Her dynamic performance in concert with the surrounding aesthetic extravagance — Monroe’s pink satin gown and glittering diamond jewelry, a chorus of tuxedo-clad male admirers, a spinning chandelier decked out with stock-still women in revealing black ensembles — made the song iconic and oft-imitated. While “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?,” Russell’s solo number written for the film by Carmichael and Adamson, is more straightforward in its presentation, it distinguishes itself through its blatant homoeroticism (Cole himself was gay). The number sees Russell, in a form-fitting jumpsuit, strolling through the gym where the men’s Olympic team onboard the ocean liner train, bemoaning the fact that the team is there for athletic pursuit and not “love.” The team is costumed in tight, flesh-toned swimsuits, and they perform calisthenic choreography — plenty of elegantly executed squats and stretches — while continuously ignoring Russell. The number functions as a joke on the basic concept of the film: the most attractive and accomplished men on the ship are the only ones not interested in Dorothy or Lorelei, because they’d rather be working out nearly naked with their fellow men.
Cole’s impact on the film, with these two numbers in particular, was immense. Not only does Cole complement Hawks’ breezy, efficient direction of the film’s comic scenes with extravagant production numbers, but he also provides a counterpoint in sexual and aesthetic point of view. With “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” balancing over-the-top camp and a subtler sensuality, and “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” bringing homoeroticism to the forefront, Cole’s numbers are practically a mirror image of Hawks’ scenes in what they elevate as desirable.
The pleasures of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes run deep frame by frame. Harry J. Wild’s effulgent Technicolor cinematography, Travilla’s array of glamorous gowns as worn by Monroe and Russell, and production designer Lyle Wheeler’s extravagant design for the ocean liner — each room is decked out with Hollywood Regency flair — collectively create a visual experience akin to a particularly rich dessert. “The girls were unreal, the story was unreal, the sets, the whole premise of the thing was unreal. We were working with complete fantasy,” Hawks would later astutely say, articulating the glorious Hollywood escapism that suffuses the film.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ appeal over seven decades later lies in the simultaneous truth that it is both one of the great studio films to present a delightful dream completely untethered from reality, and that its sexual and gender politics are deceptively complex and contradictory. The film’s closing scene, where Lorelei and Dorothy saunter down the aisle, side by side, to marry the men whose devotion they’ve secured, exemplifies both of these layers: ending a comedy of romantic folly with a happy marriage is as traditional of a plot resolution as any, yet the two women’s obvious interest in one another over their pliant husbands-to-be — who are pushed to the edges of the frame — subverts this simple narrative pleasure into something more surprising in its casual reversal of conventional gendered and sexual ideals. It proves a fitting end to a film that is both satisfyingly classical and slyly transgressive.
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