Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Based on the 1949 stage musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes sees a pair of showgirls, Marilyn Monroe’s ditsy, gold-digging Lorelei Lee and her best friend, Jane Russell’s acerbic Dorothy Shaw head off on a cruise ship to France for a continental marriage between Lorelei and Tommy Noonan’s Gus Esmond, who in the parlance of our times, is a total simp. However, Gus’ father objects to this marriage, for he is not booty blind, and hires a private eye, Elliott Reid’s Ernie Malone to observe and provide proof that Lorelei is more concerned with the size of a man’s wallet than their heart.
True to form, Lorelei is soon batting her lashes at Charles Coburn’s Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman, a diamond mine owner, and his wife’s diamond tiara, meaning the only possible wrinkle in Malone’s investigation will come from the fact that he’s falling in love with Dorothy. She can use this fact, and the power of showtunes, to dig Lorelei out of a tiara theft charge in Paris, and overcome Esmond Snr’s objections to Lorelei and Esmond Jnr’s relationship.
That’s a perhaps overly condensed plot recap, but as is common in this sort of thing the narrative is a fairly minimal framework from which to hang the musical numbers and sections of comic banter. Which is also the reason I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on this film, as in general I don’t like musicals and this style of comedy, and in this particular instance, I didn’t like the musical numbers or the comic elements, so this is very much a film diverging from my tastes on enough levels as to render my opinion of it valueless.
I am not going to deny the iconicnessicity of the work, in particular of course that there Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend number of which you may have a passing familiarity. The production values are on entirely point and the performances are exactly nailing what they appear to be intended to do. I have absolutely no reason to suspect that an audience more inclined to like this sort of thing would not very much like this, as its stellar reputation would suggest. However, my wheelhouse is very much on the other side of town, and simply cannot sanction this buffoonery.