This Howard Hawks comedy is the pick of the new Marilyn Monroe Diamond Collection from 20th Century Fox. It should be an indispensable part of any and every DVD collection.
--Anthony
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Directors: Howard Hawks
Producers: Sol C. Siegel
Writers: Anita Loos (novel), Joseph Fields
Features: Movie trailer, Newsreel, Newly remastered English stereo sound
Characters:
Lorelei - Marilyn Monroe
Dorothy Shaw - Jane Russell
Sir Francis Beekman - Charles Coburn
Detective Malone - Elliott Reid
Genre: Comedy
Review:
This Howard Hawks comedy is the pick of the new Marilyn Monroe Diamond Collection from 20th Century Fox. It should be an indispensable part of any and every DVD collection.
It was filmed in 1953 just a few months before the introduction of Cinemascope. So there’s no widescreen, but the transfer to full-frame 4.3 ratio is sparkling – the colours are crisp, the print is in pristine condition, and the mono sound is rich and full for the period.
This film is art masquerading as entertainment – there is as much value in this 97-minute movie as there is in the entire lifes’ - work of Andy Warhol. More, probably. The story is simple – it’s a reasonably straight adaptation of Anita Loos’ classic novel of gold-digger Lorelei and her quest for a millionaire she can really, truly love. The quest takes her from American to France, through a sequence fat millionaires who are already married, jealous wives, stolen diamond tiaras, arrests, courtrooms, all the usual confusions that are needed to make great comedy.
Just one section alone – the cabaret number sung with sensational sensuality by Marilyn Monroe, ‘Diamonds are a Girls’ Best Friend’ – must qualify as one of the most perfectly planned sequences not just in all movie musicals, but in all cinema. Howard Hawks trusted his star, and his audience. There’s no flashy editing, no 200 shots a minute; just Marilyn doing as she does best, with husky voice and looks to kill.
Marilyn in this film plays her carefully developed Marilyn Monroe persona to perfection – the moue with the lips, the exaggerated ‘I’m a helpless little girl’ act, the all-knowing dumb blonde. It’s very high camp as Marilyn parodies her own image, but at the same time she manages to transcend that. Every shimmy of her body breaks through the parody, as she delivers one of the most scorching, downright sexy performances of anyone’s career.
And as her best buddy Dorothy, Jane Russell is the perfect foil. She stands at least eight feet tall, a dark Amazon to Marilyn’s blonde helpless beauty. She shares with Marilyn the song-writing riches of ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’ and ‘Bye Bye Baby’, and is given a knock-out solo, ‘Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love’, sung to the bicep-popping backdrop of the American Olympic team of 1952 en-route to Europe.
This movie is the 1950s incarnate. It’s in a style which is being imitated every day, but which is triumphantly best in the original. There can never be another ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ – nor would we ever need one.
There are no special features of significance, but this movie is so perfect it needs no supplements. Fox is regularly doing some of the best transfers to DVD in the market today and it’s great to see such mastering care being lavished on such releases. News is that the great musical ‘All that Jazz’ will be given the Fox treatment for early release in 2002 – now it’s time for Fox to revisit their catalogues and bring us the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals as well – ‘Oklahoma’, ‘Carousel’ and ‘South Pacific’ -- in the anamorphic transfers these masterpieces of American music-theatre deserve.
---Anthony Clarke