Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at 70: Marilyn Monroe remains a dazzling star

Last year’s Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde broke up its parade of visceral suffering heaped upon the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson with an acknowledgement of one injustice not of the physically invasive persuasion.

Related: Some like it overheated: how Marilyn Monroe is betrayed by Blonde

We learn that while working on Howard Hawks’ superlative Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which turns 70 years old this weekend), she received a paltry rate of $500 a week, while her comparatively better-known co-45star Jane Russell raked in a sum-total fee in the amount of $200,000. On this point, director Andrew Dominik clearly conveys his thesis that the industry used and abused a woman ill-equipped to advocate for herself, and for once, he does it without joining in on that which he purports to critique by lavishing punishments upon star Ana de Armas. He pathologizes Monroe’s original narrative of tragic glamour in the direction of a savage, failed empathy, curdling into pity, making her out to be a victim of her own bimbofied image at the hands of the predatory men circling her, from the daddy that never loved her to abuser John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Revisiting Hawks’ fizzy musical romance, that portrait of morbid subjugation comes to feel quite remote, all but refuted by Monroe’s comic incandescence in a paean to women as crafty, capable creatures. In the screen adaptation of the stage production mounted four years prior, she and Russell play a pair of fast friends and showgirls, introduced all dolled up for the top-hatted swells hooting and hollering from the audience. As they head backstage to symbolically remove their headdresses and costume jewelry, however, they summarize their personal philosophies that instantly dispel the impression of guileless ingenues. They each subscribe to their preferred form of objectification as a belief system: Lorelei (Monroe) wants a well-heeled bachelor to guarantee a comfortable standard of living, whereas Dorothy (Russell) hungers only for a slab of grade-A beef with the implied sexual prowess to match. Even as Monroe smiled through the most brazen behind-the-scenes rip-off of her young career, she got the last laugh by giving the opposite sex a run for their money in every available sense.

The general critical consensus in 1953 ruled that in spite of a substandard showing from Hawks (who never showed up on set for the song-and-dance numbers he “didn’t have any desire to” shoot), the undeniable charms and chemistry of the leading ladies salvaged a slight effort. From the vantage of the present, nothing seems minor about the satire on the anything-but-cold war between the sexes, an exemplar of ravishing Technicolor cinematography, extravagant mid-century haute-couture costumes, and impeccable production numbers. A winningly racy sensibility lights up each scene, past the odd double entendre to a more pervasive horniness suggesting that Monroe projects an intoxicating field on all those in her immediate vicinity. A spoiled little boy-heir notices her stuck in a porthole, having mis-measured the width of her hips against the diameter of the window, too much woman to squeeze through. “I’ll help you for two reasons,” he says. “The first reason is I’m too young to be sent to jail. The second reason is you got a lot of animal magnetism.”

The kid’s randy remark encapsulates the male conception of Monroe as instinctual and un-honed to the point of accidental inspiration, a condescending appraisal not borne out by her precise performance. Even before she took to the Actors’ Studio to level up as a capital-T Thespian, she possessed a facility for timing too spot-on to be anything but skill; there’s a daffy perfection in the matter-of-fact way she asks for directions to “Europe, France” and rebuts Dorothy’s contention that she wouldn’t say “North America, Mexico” with the contention that “If that’s where I wanted to go, I would.” The woozy sexy-baby routine hinges on Monroe’s tendency to emote with her mouth – she can telegraph happiness, unsureness, confusion or confidence all with a drawing-back of the lips – more than her eyes, perhaps a contributing factor to her detractors’ charges of telegenic absentmindedness. But like the role of Lorelei, her cannier-than-it-may-appear actorly decision-making reiterates the eternal truism that just as the erudite can be boob-headed in the practical sense, the unschooled are nonetheless capable of great cleverness and insight.

The merry chauvinism of the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes proffers a bait-and-switch, luring unwitting moviegoers into a seeming lark with a deep, abiding appreciation of women, their friendships and rarest of all, their appetites. It would be another 20 years before theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze”, but Hawks recognized the concept avant la lettre and reversed it to allow Lorelei and Dorothy to do the ogling. Like something out of a Looney Tune, Lorelei locks on to a well-to-do owner of a diamond mine, and her POV shot transforms his head into a gigantic jewel. On the cruise ship that sets the scene for the flimsy plot, Dorothy makes the acquaintance of the entire men’s Olympic team and goes gaga in the immortal number Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love? as she’s swept up in a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of taut thighs and back-muscles. The closest thing to Magic Mike that American culture would have for the remainder of the century, the scene proudly foregrounds female pleasure for its own sake, in effect sanctioning women to act like men.

At first, this liberated attitude takes the tone of a jolly misandry as Dorothy and Lorelei concur that “the louses go[ing] back to their spouses” only want one thing, so why shouldn’t they get a little something in return? For her alleged empty-headedness, Lorelei evinces an unusually developed grasp of the structural iniquities that keep her in the bondage of economic dependency and makes canny moves to resolve the disadvantages hardwired into capitalism. The recent embrace of the God-given right to get paid has lent the film a renewed relevance in a world of increasingly destigmatized sex work and a mainstreamed OnlyFans, where an adeptness in “scamming”, “finessing”, or “securing the bag” commands an unprecedented level of respect as a valid set of talents. We can now see that Lorelei is merely redistributing wealth, aware of and secure in the exchange rate between the dollar and the higher-value currency of her company.

As an all-the-trimmings Tinseltown spectacle must, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes winds down with a happy ending as Dorothy couples up with the silver-tongued detective tailing her and her galpal, though this resolution doesn’t play as a compromise on her fierce independence. The feather-light cynicism about the ingrained opposition between genders dissipates in the face of Hawks’ sentimental yet true assertion that the pesky nuisance called love still manages to squeeze in regardless. The grand paradox of heterosexual womanhood resolves itself all the time; despite having every reason to distrust men, going against a conscious knowledge of the intimate and systemic ways in which they can be aggravating and disappointing, a woman nevertheless meets someone halfway decent and takes a shine to him. The unruly heart supersedes even the most jaded politics, its walls crumbling before the promise that a new mate could be one of the good ones. If there’s a hint of utopian optimism to Hawks’ hope for a relationship beyond the transactional, it lies in his call on men to rise – ahem – to the occasion.