Unrated, 1 hr. 36 min. Directed by: Jean Negulesco. Release Date: January 1, 1953. DVD Release Date: May 29, 2001.
I should first mention that this is unrated not because of content, but because of age. I'm not sure when movies started getting ratings, but there were a large number of films from the 50s that don't have them (yet). By modern standards, this MIGHT be PG, nothing heavier than that.
This was an odd movie. Well, it wasn't an odd movie for Marilyn Monroe, who seems to play a gold digger in every third movie she did over the course of her career. It was odd in that it sort of failed to deliver on its promises. It's billeted as a romantic comedy, but I didn't find it particularly romantic or funny. You could see where both Monroe and Grable were trying (occasionally frantically) to make the movie funny, but it just came off as sort of lame. The only time I laughed was when Marilyn Monroe and William Powell shared a scene together and he divided his attention fairly equally between her eyes and her chest. I'm not sure if that was directed or not, but once I caught it I laughed.
Of the three of these ladies, I've only seen Monroe on screen before, and I know she can do better than this. Marilyn Monroe is to the dumb blonde siren what Katherine Heigl is to the uptight woman who is destined to fall in love with the guy she hates, by which I mean, it's her signature role. In How to Marry a Millionaire, she has the same part, but only manages to pull off the dumb blonde part. Unfortunately, it wasn't a funny dumb blonde, which can actually work for people, such as Reese Witherspoon. Monroe was a painfully dumb blonde, where you hear the lines and wince rather than laugh.
Betty Grable was worse. Considering how famous an actress she is, I'm going to call her tedious part bad directing and not bad acting. There are 25 minutes or so of the film dedicated solely to Ms. Grable's character and her machinations and I was considering slitting my wrists before those minutes were over. Only Lauren Bacall gave a good performance among the women, but again, she wasn't funny and didn't appear to be trying for funny. So again, I’m not really sure if I just missed the cultural cues that would have made this funny back in the day or if it was just a blasé act that would have been considered funny when this was originally released.
If I could have watched this and not known it was supposed to be a rom-com, I would have probably liked it better. If I'd never seen Marilyn Monroe anywhere else, I might have liked this better. As it is, I probably won't watch this again.
