Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

NEW 35mm RESTORATION! ► Screening in a glorious new 35mm restoration, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has hard-boiled Howard Hawks directing Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in a garish, giddy, spectacularly colourful musical comedy. The battle-of-the-sexes romp casts the actresses as two buxom buddies golddigging while on a transatlantic ocean voyage. Monroe is breathy blonde Lorelei Lee, looking for loot; Russell is sharp-tongued, raven-haired Dorothy, looking for love. The film makes great ironic play with the Monroe/Russell sexpot stereotypes, features Monroe memorably crooning “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and allows Russell to steal the show with a knockout sardonic turn that showcases her considerable comic talents. Based on Anita Loos’s saucy Broadway musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is glorious good fun — and a great female buddy movie to boot. Choreographer Jack Cole, not Hawks, reportedly directed the film’s music numbers — essentially 40% of the film. Even so, Blondes has “Hawks’s signature all over it: Russell’s wisecracking, take-no-shit dame, the frantic yet unflappably smooth pacing; and how Lorelei and Dorothy’s affectionate friendship takes center stage, the ultimate Hawksian touch” (David Fear, Time Out New York). “[From] the mammary-mad ’50s . . . a musical that is as close to satire as Hawks’s films ever get on the nature (and perversions) of sexual relations in America” (Molly Haskell). Colour, 35mm. 91 mins.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
More Marvellous Monroe!
How to Marry a Millionaire
Let's Make Love
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -