GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy (Jane Russell) are just “Two Little Girls from Little Rock”—lounge singers on a transatlantic cruise, working their way to Paris while enjoying the company of any eligible men they might meet along the way. Russell’s flat sarcasm and Monroe’s social-climber put-on make them a delightful team (and Monroe’s performance underlines her brilliant control as a comic performer). The famous musical numbers dazzle with rich colors and wink-wink lyrics, but underneath there’s also a touching tale of friendship tested and director Howard Hawks’s clever take on gender politics.

"Was there ever a movie in which Miss Marilyn Monroe looked more relaxed, or closer to having a good time?" - David Thomson

"While Hawks’s only pure musical might conceivably be the most popular of his movies today, critics on the whole tend to be confounded by it. Treated only marginally in books devoted to the director, it has received attention more recently from feminist writers, who often disagree about essential characteristics. For Maureen Turin, it is sexist, racist, and colonialist; for Lucie Arbuthnot and Gall Seneca, it is jubilantly feminist and, at least by implication, proto-lesbian. Molly Haskell, no less persuasively, finds it “as close to satire as Hawks’s films ever get on the nature (and perversion) of sexual relations in America, particularly in the mammary-mad 50s. Like the blind men grasping different parts of the elephant, each of these writers is on to something — which helps to explain why the movie manages to accommodate some of the viewpoints and fantasies of heterosexuals and homosexuals of all genders." - Jonathan Rosenbaum