NZIFF review: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

While watching Marilyn Monroe dance in the opening number of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, sheathed in red sequins against a violet background, the colour drench of the screen shocking my cynicism into submission, I realised I'd never really watched Marilyn Monroe move. She has always remained a beautiful, tragic statue in my mind. And I realised this was sacrilege — kind of like telling myself I knew Bob Dylan while having never heard Like a Rolling Stone. Because goodness those hips were hypnotic. It slowly dawned on me that that\s where her attraction lay — not only in that purring voice and those fluttering doe-eyes, but in her total command of the power of her body.

As Lorelei Lee, the supposedly money-grubbing 'mantrap' in Howard Hawks’ film, Marilyn shows that she has serious comedy chops, especially next to her sassy co-star Jane Russell who plays the wise-cracking Dorothy Shaw, the salt to Monroe’s sugar. These two stars, icons in their own right (in fact, at the time of shooting, it was Russell who was top of the bill — Monroe earning less than a tenth of Russell’s fee for the film) sure are a formidable double-act. Many a moment had the Civic audience - a real demographic mixed bag - roaring with laughter. It really is face-value funny.

Of course a second layer of hilarity occurs in the sixty year gap between then and now. There is the wonderfully camp musical sequence when Russell performs with the half-naked members of the US Olympics team who also happen to be aboard their Paris-bound ship. Topless men in tiny nude pairs of togs perform calesthenics and other acts of group athleticism of with a seriousness that is just so foreign it’s hilarious. But maybe this is modern arrogance. Maybe our grandmas were laughing at this scene in 1953 too. Either that or thrilled at the defiant objectification of men.

So there I was, bracing myself for 1950s gender relations, and discovered that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has stronger threads of feminism than most films of the time. I was completely charmed by those stunners: two female friends acting according to their own — and not men's — desires, and hooked by the sneaking suspicion that underneath ditzy Lorelei Lee lay a person who was utterly conscious of every single move she made.