Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

As New York showgirls Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw travel to Europe, they are shadowed aboard ship by private detective Ernie Malone, hired by the disapproving millionaire father of Lorelei’s fiancé. Lorelei’s material girl behaviour makes it easy for Malone to find proof of her alleged “infidelity”. Meanwhile, Dorothy falls in love with the detective … Much like the private eye’s preferred potable (“just equal parts of scotch, vodka, brandy, and gin”), the film mixes the seemingly incompatible for Marilyn Monroe’s stunning performance of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” in this case the colours hot pink, red, violet, and orange. The result was the birth of “camp”. What its trailer called “the most glamorous musical of our age” celebrated Technicolor as one component of a dazzling work of art or, as Cole Porter put it in a verse cut from the final version of Silk Stockings (1957) because it was deemed “unacceptably vulgar”, “If Zanuck’s latest picture were the good old-fashioned kind, / There’d be no one in front to look at Marilyn’s behind / If you want to hear applauding hands resound / You’ve gotta have glorious Technicolor / Breathtaking Cinemascope and / stereophonic sound”.