I started writing this review last week, but put it aside for other things. Yesterday, my movie networks were lit up with the news that Jane Russell had died at 89. Suddenly, the circumstances of this review turned into a eulogy. Which is all kinds of wrong for a movie as full of life as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, directed by Howard Hawks). Russell appeared in a handful of iconic roles and was notorious for her plunging neckline in Howard Hughes's The Outlaw, but it's in Blondes that she staked her claim to immortality, even in the shadow of Marilyn Monroe.
Has there ever been a sexier musical than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Somehow, I doubt it. Better musicals? Maybe. But not sexier. It's a bitches brew of sexual politics, in which our two heroines, Dorothy and Lorelei, are on the make for suitable mates in the best tradition of the Gold Diggers musicals of the 1930s. They are both sexually self-possessed. They know what they like, and they go after it. This would be at home in a pre-Code movie, but in 1953? This is downright revolutionary: simultaneously sexist, retrograde, and of its time and feminist, sex-positive, and forward-looking. It's a movie that completely explodes the male gaze by turning the tables upon it.
Oh, and it's LOADS of fun.