Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, dir. Howard Hawks) (scene online here)
Today, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is most fondly remembered for a single musical number which is pretty much the iconic Marilyn Monroe scene: her vampy, bubbly performance of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. It’s one of Monroe’s most memorable scenes, as she coos and dances while delivering the lyrics that would come to personify, if not her true self, then at least the most true representation of her public persona. She’s a cheerful, unabashed gold-digger here, surrounded by men who adore and lust after her, rejecting all their declarations of love as fickle, fleeting, and more often than not two-faced.
It’s easy to mock or dismiss Monroe’s showgirl Lorelei Lee, who admits with a smile on her face that she’s in love with money and wouldn’t dream of marrying a man who wasn’t rich. But underneath her brash forthrightness, barely concealed, are her fears, especially the fear of getting old, of losing her charms and her ability to make men fall in love. The “Diamonds” number, as upbeat as it is, is actually about a woman’s insecurity in a world where she is judged for her physical beauty while a man is judged by his monetary success: Lorelei realizes that while women’s assets are momentary at best, money and power doesn’t dissipate with age. She believes that wealth is the only security against a woman’s sad fate, of being cast aside for younger and prettier girls down the road. “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?” she murmurs, so charmingly that it’s hard to argue the point. “You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?”
Sure, and it also helps when she’s clever and self-aware and delightfully fun, all adjectives that apply perfectly to Monroe, perhaps more here than anywhere else. What comes through in this film is a sly, winking quality in Monroe’s performance, a sense that she knows very well — as her character knows — the effect she can have on men, and that she’s perfectly willing to conform, at least outwardly, to stereotypes if it’ll get her what she wants. This seems to apply at least as well to the real Marilyn as it does to the bubbly, bouncy blonde Lorelei, and one suspects there’s some truth to the rumor that Monroe herself suggested Lorelei’s coy admission that “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” If a film as light and airy as this one can be said to have a theme, it’s that women, living in a world with rules set by men, must erect elaborate facades over their true selves in order to exist comfortably.-excerpted from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Only the Cinema
