Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)

Two Howard Hawks movies in less than seven days. The good lord must be smiling down upon me. This is, as far as I know, Hawks' only musical, and it's his most female-centric film. Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are the focus, the men are mostly wimps, ogling oldsters, and ineffectual bumblers. Most traditional films would pit the women against each other in competition for men, but in Hawks' world, Monroe and Russell are allies whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Monroe plays a gold-digging airhead; Russell is smarter and more contemptuous of money. That's only a launching pad for a series of gags and musical numbers that satirize our business-obsessed culture and the ways men objectify women, while revealing subtler, deeper shades in Russell and Monroe's characters that modify our opinions of them. Neither Monroe nor Russell are great dancers, and their singing voices are merely pleasant, but these weaknesses only add to the greatness of the musical numbers, giving them an awkward charm and an unpolished naturalness.