Director: Jean Negulesco (USA). Year of Release: 1953
We hear some music and the screen curtain opens to show an orchestra playing something light and Gerschwinny. There are about 50 musicians including a big string section and 3 drummers / percussionists. And they go on for EVER. Really, it’s apparently 8 minutes before they’re done. It’s like those variety programmes from the 1970s when before you watched the funny comedy you had to endure some mediocre musicians. And Cleo Laine. O tempora o Mores.
New York City, by which we mean the plushest area of Manhattan. Schatze is looking at an expensive apartment from which she is planning her next move. She will move into the penthouse with her friends Pola and Loco, and use their surroundings to inveigle a rich husband each. When Schatze learns that the current owner is going to be out of the country for the foreseeable future, evading the interest of the police, she puts down the deposit immediately.
This is a film which brings together acting royalty, and is entirely led by its 3 leading women. As Pola and Loco, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable play dumb blondes as if they’ve been playing them all their life (irony alert). Monroe plays a short sighted bimbo who misquotes Dorothy Parker about girls who wear glasses. But it’s Lauren Bacall as Schatze who steals the show. Both cynical and sardonic, she plays a role that at the time had traditionally only been given to men.
After a couple of false starts, the three women all find a man who is interested in them. Schatze takes up with the ageing oil baron J.D, who is really too old for her, but Schatze pleads that there is something attractive about older men: “Look at Roosevelt, look at Churchill, look at that old fella what’s his name in The African Queen” (ie Bacall’s then husband Humphrey Bogart). It’s not hilarious, but it’s a neat little joke to keep us going.
Loco goes off to Maine with married swindler Waldo, before meeting Eben who tells her that he has a lodge. Loco presumes that this means he’s part of the élitist Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, whereas all he means is that he’s a park ranger. When she finds out that his lodge is a wooden hut in a forest that he doesn’t even own, her mouth drops. She has Waldo drive her back to New York City.
Pola meanwhile is attracted by a sinister crook, who invites her to meet up with him in Atlantic City. She, giddy to the end, gets a flight to Kansas City, where she sits next to Freddie Denmark, who owns the New York flat where she is staying. Freddie tells her that she looks good even when she is wearing glasses, which is possibly the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to her. The problem is that he is still on the run from the police and unwilling to attract too much attention.
While Loco and Pola are gadding around the states, Schatze is selling furniture from flat that she is renting from Freddie to cover her expenses. She hooks with Tom Brookman, who she first met when he brought home Pola’s shopping, and reminds her of an ex who used to pump gas. Brookman woos her assiduously, but she’s had enough of dating poor people, so every time they have a date, she ends it by assuring him that they are to never meet again.
How to Marry a Millionaire is a film of its time, and should be judged accordingly. To say that women should find other ways of getting on in the world than marrying rich would be to ignore the social realities of Eisenhower’s USA. And it’s not as if the men shown in the film are particularly compelling. Arguably the only one who is remotely likeable retains his sympathetic character precisely because he hides the fact that he is, in truth, a rich bastard.
In retrospect, though, the film is now remembered for Monroe’s contribution – it was showing this evening as part of a Marilyn season. Let’s just say that although she and her co-stars sparkle, it’s not her best film. It’s almost as if she were a better actor when her lines were being provided by writers like Billy Wilder and Arthur Miller. The plot and dialogue here are, in contrast, painting by numbers. Individual scenes are entertaining enough, but nothing too surprizing ever happens.
One thing that probably won’t affect most viewers – we saw the film tonight in English with German subtitles, which were the most bizarre that I have ever encountered. It is not that they substituted cultural references like Texaco with others that a German audience might better understand, not that, for example, 14 was translated as 15. On several occasions, whoever was writing the subtitles just went rogue and wrote an entirely different plot. I have no idea why.
All in all, How to Marry a Millionaire may be more important for its symbolic value than what it actually delivers. The fact that we see Monroe, Grable and Bacall all on the same screen. The fact that it is part of a worryingly slow trend of Hollywood films which start to show things from a woman’s perspective. The fact that Monroe’s best was yet to come. These are all rough-hewn and not quite there, but watching the film is to witness a moment of emerging cinema.
And yes, you can criticize the limited plot, the assumption that female characters must be either calculating harridans or dumb bimbos, the fact that, if you think about it, very little actually happens in the film. And if you want to make such criticisms, feel free to do so. But if you fail to do this against the background of what had happened before, and what was just about to come, then you rather miss the point. This was not the pinnacle, but at the very least it was Base Camp.
CinePhil 