Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, from 1953, opens with a scene that would not be out of place, but for musical tastes and the amount of skin shown, today: two women on stage in revealing clothes performing a song about their hard-luck origins and how what they really want in life is love. Or not love exactly, but a man. Or not just a man, but a rich man.
The song opens with a description of their difficulties in life and romance: We're just two little girls from Little Rock, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks … Then someone broke my heart in Little Rock, so I up and left the pieces there … I came to New York and I found out that men are the same way everywhere!
From this, they pivot into giving a simple piece of advice : Find a gentleman who's shy or bold, or short or tall, or young or old ... As long as the guy's a millionaire!
It's a song that rests on the same foundation as a lot of pop culture from the last seventy years: sex and money. These women know what sells, they know what they want, and they know how to get it. It is, at first glance, not a terribly flattering portrayal of femininity. And on top of this, the scene also participates in a long tradition of reducing women on the screen to little more than objects of male sexual admiration. The movie presents these women as having no real value beyond their looks, and it urges the viewer – almost forces the viewer – to be complicit in this objectification.
Or does it?
Because the first time the film cuts away from its female stars – Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell – the shot it cuts to is of a goofy-looking man, sitting at a table almost literally drooling over them. He is far less attractive, charismatic and interesting than they (like most of the men in the film); he's also clearly under their power. He is, perhaps...us.
Which is to say that the trick director Howard Hawks plays in the film is not to objectify women, but to coerce us into joining him in thinking about the way movies portray women and desire. He takes some of the most prevalent and longstanding assumptions, tropes, and derogations revolving around gender and turns them from invisible, assumed elements of his story into the topic of the story itself.
There are layers upon layers in the film, commentary upon commentary, all wrapped up in a joyous musical comedy. And it's in part this self-reflective quality – the way it helps us viscerally understand how movies affect us – that makes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a masterpiece.
The story unfolds along twin lines of desire. Monroe plays the wonderfully-named Lorelei Lee, who's a seemingly not-that-bright but actually canny woman who longs to marry a rich man; this is perhaps best exemplified in her iconic song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." Russell plays Dorothy Shaw, clear-eyed and sharp-tongued, who adores men but has no interest in rich ones because of the way their money comes to define them; she wants to fall in love with someone because of their other qualities.
At the start of the film, these two showgirls embark on a cruise liner bound for France. Lorelei is being courted by Gus Esmond – the goofy fellow from the opening sequence, played by Tommy Noonan – who's wealthy enough for her but being prevented from marrying her by his father, who's certain she's a gold digger. To get around this obstacle, Lorelei's plan is to get Tommy to meet her in France where, away from his father's clutches, she'll be able to make the matrimony happen.
On the ship, the comedic twists begin. Dorothy is delighted to find that the men's Olympic team is aboard, which means she's surrounded by a great deal of luscious male flesh. She also finds herself becoming attracted to fellow passenger Ernie Malone (Elliot Reid) who, unbeknownst to the women, is a private detective hired by Tommy's father to keep tabs on Lorelei.
Further complications arise when Lorelei meets Francis "Piggy" Beekman (Charles Coburn), a ridiculous, homely, and aged chap who owns a diamond mine in Africa. "Pardon my saying so," Lorelei purrs when she finds out about this source of wealth, which makes her imagine his head as a giant gemstone, "but having heard so much about you and all, I expected you'd be much older." Piggy falls head over teakettle for her gorgeous flattery, and Lorelei manages to convince him to give her his wife's diamond tiara.
When Piggy's wife discovers the tiara is missing she’s of course outraged and accuses Lorelei of stealing it. But spineless old Piggy refuses to admit that it was a gift and, to make things worse, Ernie gets pictures of Piggy demonstrating to Lorelei how a python kills a goat by enveloping it in a crushing embrace. He sends the pictures to Tommy's father, who forces Tommy to break off the relationship.
So in the final act of the film, Lorelei and Dorothy disembark in France broke and under a cloud of criminal suspicion. It's only through some final intricate machinations (including a wonderful scene where Dorothy pretends to be Lorelei, allowing Russell to break out her Monroe impersonation) that they manage to get what they want in the end: Lorelei marries Tommy and his money and Dorothy marries Ernie and his integrity in a closing scene that recalls the opening musical number.
Throughout, Hawks plays his game of reflecting on the way sexual desire – and in particular traditionally male desire – works in movies. And because he's an intelligent director, and one that assumes an intelligent audience, he frequently does this not by putting the critique in the mouths of the characters (as is the tendency in contemporary films) but simply by putting it on the screen and trusting that we will see what he sees.
Often, his approach is the one he uses in that first shot of Tommy: he shows us alluring women, and surrounds them with men who gawk at them – the way we've been trained to do by movies (and I don't think this "we" is necessarily restricted to men, by the way) – implicitly asking us to see ourselves in these on-screen viewers. So, for example, there are virtually endless shots in the film of men – often many at the same time – surrounding our heroines and subjecting them to the exact gaze that we the viewer are subjecting them to.
But Hawks has other gags up his sleeve as well. One of the best involves a little boy named Henry Spofford III (George Winslow). Because of his patrician name, Lorelei naturally assumes that he must be a wealthy bachelor of her own age, and arranges to have him seated at her dinner table. (He is, in this regard, a kind of comedic foil for Piggy, who’s an old man: in both cases, their age serves to frustrate Lorelei's desire, and the frustration of everyone’s desire is another of the running themes of the film.) In this dinner scene and after, Henry is often given lines that are funny because we don’t expect them to be uttered by someone of his age, which again allows Hawks to skewer male hankering – or perhaps strip away its veneer – by making it explicit.
When he helps Lorelei to sneak out of a room through a porthole, for example, Henry explains that: "I'll help you for two reasons. The first reason is I'm too young to be sent to jail. The second reason is you've got a lot of animal magnetism."
It's a brilliant moment, and one in which Hawks manages to humorously literalize the impulses triggered by the objectification of women on the screen. In voicing what the screen sometimes trains us to think – that someone like Monroe exists only in her attractiveness, or that men should be on the edge of doing things to women that would land them (men) in jail – the lines forces us (or should force us, if we're paying attention) to reflect on the effects that the presentation of women in movies have on us.
A second, and perhaps more challenging, way Hawks contemplates these issues is by taking seriously women's desire. He does this not only through dialogue or character but also through the images he shows us.
This is most clear in the astounding scene in which Russell sings "Ain't There Anyone Here For Love?" backed by the aforementioned Olympic team doing calisthenics in flesh-colored bathing suits. The lyrics of the song carry direct sexual overtones.
I like big muscles, and red corpuscles [but] He don't have to be Hercules – don't anyone know about birds and bees? Ain't there anyone here for love, sweet love?
Which is not to say that the song is bawdy. In the context of the film, Dorothy is just doing what the men – the ones in the film, and the ones in the audience – do. She's saying that she likes what she sees, and wants some of that. It's just that we (and here I mean the contemporary viewer, not just the audience in 1953) are so unused to seeing the male body portrayed as an object of desire on the screen that the scene can feel startling, or even transgressive.
Rather than try to put this into language any further, here are a few images from the number, which is for my money one of the most fascinating visual ruminations on the male body in all of midcentury American cinema.
Woven into all this desiring is a final strand, represented by Lorelei's fascination with wealth. From the opening song, we know that our heroines grew up as poor kids in Little Rock. And both back home in America and once again in France, where they again find themselves penniless, the way they make their living is by singing and dancing. Performing, getting audiences to watch them, is their means of making their way through the world; put more strongly, performing is their way of asserting, or insisting on, control over their own lives.
As Lorelei puts it in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," A kiss may be grand, but it won't pay the rental on your humble flat, or help you at the auto-mat.
What men have far easier access to, in the world of this film, is money. They can own diamond mines and be private detectives; women are restricted to being showgirls and wives. Given this, Lorelei's determination to get hers is not so much mercenary or grasping as a kind of sexual realpolitik. The lyrics of the song make this relentlessly clear.
There may come a time when a lass needs a lawyer, she sings, alluding to the fact that when divorce comes calling, men have their suit-and-tie jobs to fall back on while women, unless they've played the game well, may have nothing at all. There may come a time when a hard boiled employer thinks you're awful nice, she sings, pulling us into workplace dynamics, and He's your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend – it's then that those louses go back to their spouses, pointing a finger at male duplicity.
And the answer to all this? Diamonds are a girl's best friend.
Were this the only presentation of women in the film, it might feel horribly misogynistic, a vision of women as blind to anything but monetary defense against a species – men – they see as entirely predatory. But this is where Hawks' brilliance in weaving ruminations on the sources and varieties of desire into every scene in the movie pays off. We're presented with a film in which some people want bodies, some want money, some want quick wit, and some want love, all to varying degrees and in different combinations. And they all have their own reasons, from material circumstance to media saturation to natural inclination.
This also buttresses the greatest twist of all: in the end, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a film that presents itself as an active force in all this desiring. It understands cinema not as an inert art that we consume, but as an activity capable of helping us reflect on our own constituent elements and responsible for helping to shape the way we see the world.
Enjoy this piece? Want to support my work, both critical and creative? Please consider subscribing. For the low cost of five bucks a month, you'll receive a new essay in your inbox every Friday. And you can also help by sharing, liking, and commenting, using the buttons below.
If you’d like to read more of my writing, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book format here. Read the first chapter for free here. My book on the 1969 cult classic film Mr. Freedom will also be available soon for on Amazon and elsewhere.