Monroe Strikes Gold

"Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

Watching this today, there's still no doubt it cemented Marilyn Monroe as a star. Her (and Marni Nixon) singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" is such a culmination its influence has been felt from the knowing derivatives of Madonna's "Material Girl" to the oblivious likes of posthumous consumer commercials and, by way of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," book to film, " the "Sex and the City" schlock (I'll spare you a rant contrasting the song to Carrie's shallow listing of brand wedding gowns in the 2008 movie) and in the movie itself, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," the only direction it had left to go afterwards was into self-parody. Jane Russell, a decade past from her cleavage-bearing part for another Howard H. in "The Outlaw" (1943), does an admirable job in this in some respects, and there's a sweet feminine bonding in the way her character defends her friend, but even she's reduced to being a Monroe impersonator in a climactic courtroom farce--joining the ranks of Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, Mamie Van Doren, and, later, Anna Nicole Smith, Kim Kardashian, Madonna and numerous other pop-singing and modeling copycats.

Patently inaccurate polls of the day may suggest otherwise, but it seems almost certain that Monroe was the biggest box-office draw beside CinemaScope of 1953, starring in three of the highest-grossing films of the year in "Niagara" and especially this and the similar "How to Marry a Millionaire," a marriage trilogy. On the heels of the admission of posing for a nude photo shoot a few years prior, it was also the year of the first edition of "Playboy" magazine, which exploited those calendar poses. Looking for a precedent to her meteoric rise to fame if ever there was one, as feminine sex symbol the closest I can come up with would be Clara Bow, "The It Girl." Although that was a specific flapper type, an image Monroe herself would imitate in one photo shoot, and indeed Bow would pass the mantle to her, it's the most approximate I can think of for a largely non-threatening sexpot persona on screen, not being vampish like and despite the physical similarities to Jean Harlow. I don't know; I'll get to think that over more when I dig deeper into Bow's filmography, since like Monroe with the upcoming "Blonde" (2022), Bow will also be soon embodied in "Babylon" (2022). As far as such far-reaching and imitated celebrity, though, maybe only Charlie Chaplin (also to make an appearance in "Babylon") and his Tramp. Such monetary sway helps explain how like Chaplin, Monroe could and would end up demanding and receiving much control of her image and films--and I appreciate that the rights to her image is a plotline in the movie--when the studio system was still near its peak power, and how she came to be identified with 1950s iconography in the way Chaplin is with the silent era.

One can see how that image was still being fiddled with immediately before this, such as trying on the femme fatale in "Niagara," or even the perhaps less complicated or challenged "dumb blonde" comedienne of the likes of "Monkey Business" (1952, also directed by Howard Hawks). Her gold digger here works, though, and while in an ostentatiously heterosexual way, it's not easily dismissed as simply sexist. There's an entire philosophy there that her Lorelei Lee readily imparts, and she's right, it does help. The central joke being that she's a dumb blonde so stupid she thinks she's the smart one, except it turns out she is the smart one, and to solve the marriage problem it'll take two performatively dumb blondes, two songs about diamonds. It'd be obtuse, too, to go on about the male gaze here with a number like "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love" with Russell ogling the muscles of a men's swimming team that's dressed in skimpy skin-colored shorts. I'm not going to get too much into a diatribe on the to-be-looked-at female eroticized empowerment of winking while exaggerating the swaying and bouncing curvature, but it's there. Monroe knew what she was doing, added some sensitivity and vulnerability to the part, a more assertive Russell had her back, and Hawks was a good enough--great, really, of course--director to help accentuate it. It's well paced, the musical numbers fit, the color looks good, and it's funny.

It's a shame this can't fully be compared now to the lost 1928 non-musical adaptation of Anita Loos's original novel of the same name. Who knows what Ruth Taylor, hand-picked by Loos, and Alice White originally did with Monroe and Russell's respective parts, although it seems likely there was a slapstick element given a supporting cast of suitors filled out by Keystone veterans the likes of Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, and Chester Conklin. Just to see what Loos's cinematic idea of this would be interesting, as she was a pioneering scenarist of the silent era, including defining a brand of an energetic and boyish masculinity by giving voice to the representation of star Douglas Fairbanks.

This extant version of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," though, feels like a culmination of those '20s notions of gender and sex symbols as reinterpreted for a new foundation in the 1950s creation of Monroe's star that continues to strongly influence such concepts and imagery and that would also continue to form the basis for the actress' development and undermining of the type in her all too short career and life. Plenty of charm left in this film.