Gentlemen's Revenge on Blondes

Superficially a piggybacking pastiche of Fox's prior box-office hit starring Marilyn Monroe and the female camaraderie of gold diggers, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953), "How to Marry a Millionaire" is actually its reactionary patriarchal antithesis, also from Fox and starring Monroe and the female camaraderie of gold diggers. Here, she teams ups with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable. Instead of the synergy Monroe and Jane Russell demonstrated in the prior film, though, this trio frequently inadvertently undermines each other's and their own nominally shared aims to bag rich husbands, and Bacall clearly plays the domineering matriarch of the bunch. The moral here seemingly being that, sure, they're greedy mantrappers, but we forgive them because they're incompetent at it. Whereas "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" posited the dumb blonde type to subvert it, this one submits three dumb blondes to confirm them all as bimbos. In the end, they're outwitted by the men, led by an aging William Powell in a wasted part. It's all very mean spirited. One woman's only bit in the entire picture is to introduce herself as "Ding Dong." It's quite the misogynistic change of pace from its surprisingly feminist predecessor. That, and a product of the dream factory run by actual millionaires to console its audience over their relative poverty. Money doesn't matter, and we'd know, because we have all the money.

Which is bad enough, but the picture also begins with several minutes of footage of an orchestra playing an overture to a film with a runtime of about an hour and a half for no apparent reason other than, I guess, it was the first film made with the CinemaScope widescreen process, although it was released after "The Robe" (1953). Either that or it was a feeble attempt to compete with "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" being a musical. Later, there'll be a plot-halting bit of a fashion show for the objectifying male gaze with outfits that might be considered today to be cultural appropriation, and again for no apparent good reason.

And the jokes are terrible. Shut up about the Republican convention in Maine. Was that supposed to mean something funny in 1953? Measles? Are we just blindly grabbing into the plot twists bag here? Most of the humor is rooted in the blondes misunderstanding stuff. Monroe playing blind has potential, I suppose, although it doesn't amount to anything here beyond "she was blind to love" triteness, and more blonde misunderstandings--dumber than a doorknob she can't even find sort of thing. The only reason Grable is in the movie, aside from filling out the expanded aspect ratio, is because glasses made Monroe look to, er, "distinguished" to play the dumbest blonde possible--hence Grable's even more idiotic one.

One funny self-referential bit, however, has Bacall pleading how she prefers older men, including citing "the old fellow, what's his name in 'The African Queen' (1951)," an allusion to her real-life husband and frequent co-star Humphrey Bogart. That's about all I got; the rest is pretty bad. The color goes well with fashionable outfits, and CinemaScope helps show off the consumer products, including Monroe in gown standing before several mirrors and the disappearing and reappearing furniture. Stay poor, and buy stuff. In her book, Amanda Konkle also says the widescreen format reflects the horizontal marriages to members of one's own class and the shape of dollar bills, which is neat in theory, I suppose, although the once-vaunted color and widescreen are now mostly pedestrian.

Work Cited
Konkle, Amanda. Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe. Rutgers University Press, 2019.