There could hardly be a more perfect setting for a Marilyn Monroe movie season than the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. The screenings accompany the Marilyn: Life as a Legendexhibit, which runs from October 23 through to January 2.
Nice to see two of Monroe’s lesser-known films on schedule: Don’t Bother to Knock (a 1952 thriller containing one of Monroe’s most impressive dramatic performances) and River of No Return, a visually arresting Cinemascope western from 1954, with some great musical numbers from Marilyn (though a bit light on realism!)
TheWall Street Journal reports this week that economic downturns lead to increases in divorce and infidelity. But as Paul Krugman points out in the New York Times, this is not a new phenomenon – as Lorelei Lee warned us nearly sixty years ago…
“He’s your guy
When stocks are high,
But beware when they start to descend.
On September 28 at Utica Public Library, NY, a screening of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at 6.30 pm will be followed by a series of free draws, with lots of MM goodies to be won!
“Marilyn Monroe (1926-62) is the most famous Hollywood blonde, and she stars in several of the Blonde Bombshells movies playing the Castro Theatre from Aug. 27-Sept. 5.”
The ‘Blonde Bombshells’ season also includes films starring one of Marilyn’s favourite actresses, Jean Harlow, as well as Carole Lombard, Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner and Jayne Mansfield.
“Playing up the usual style gap between Monroe’s acting and everyone else’s, and playing down her often-cited vulnerability, Hawks oversees a remarkable comic performance, with terrific line readings like beat poetry (‘Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me’) and bits of business that hint at a bizarre inner life (confronted for the first time with a diamond tiara, Lorelei can barely restrain her hands from pouncing inappropriately; after the tiara’s departure, she happily improvises a scenario of future possession, using a napkin ring encircled by a necklace as a stand-in).”
“Just months after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes opened, Monroe graced the first cover of Playboy, connecting one boom-time America to another, the Ziegfeld Girl to the Bunny.
In Hawks’s Gentlemen, the flat-chested flappers illustrating Loos’s book are swept aside by not-so-little Monroe and Russell, striding out with ‘Just two little girls from Little Rock,’ their opening bump-and-wiggle …
Russell is supposedly romanced by oval-faced zero-charisma snoop Elliott Reid, but there’s more warmth in her fondly bemused looks at Monroe, whose friendship is a front-row ticket to the best show in town. The girls, untouched by competition, present a united front, even transferring identities—Russell does a dye-job masquerade as Lorelei—until they practically exchange vows with each other in the most ironic wedding in Hollywood history.”
