Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” – with this number, Marilyn Monroe transforms desire and luxury into a seductive interplay of colour and movement. Her character, Lorelei Lee, clearly prioritises material possessions over emotions. Although already engaged to a millionaire, she craves more. Together with her friend Dorothy, who is also searching for her Mr Right, the ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’ set off for Paris on a cruise ship, where they turn the heads of the opposite sex both on and below deck. Hawks portrays their friendship as a bond of solidarity: like two of his Western heroes, they stand side by side, as supposedly naive partners who nevertheless effortlessly turn the power dynamics between men and women on their head and reveal that relationships are also economic contracts.
(Florian Widegger)