How to Marry a Millionaire **** (1953, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, William Powell) – Classic Movie Review 2612

Marilyn Monroe (as Pola Debevoise), Betty Grable (as Loco Dempsey) and Lauren Bacall (as Schatze Page) star as the shallow but sweet gold-diggers of 1953 in director Jean Negulesco’s entertaining smash comedy.

The trio of New York models band together to trap and marry rich, eligible millionaire husbands by hiring an exclusive New York apartment. Bacall gives up rich William Powell for poor Cameron Mitchell, only to find he’s rich after all. Grable likes forest ranger Rory Calhoun and Monroe goes for the apartment’s owner, David Wayne. The tarts turn out to have hearts of gold, of course, and find true love in the process of gold digging.

There had been a lot of movie gold-digging in the Hollywood movies of the Thirties, but this is a new lucrative Fifties dig at an evidently rich seam. This carefree, cynical comedy is bright and jolly in all departments. Grable and Bacall are excellent, brisk, capable and professional, and, even if she would insist on 15 or more takes every time to get it right, the final result shows Monroe’s comedy technique was coming on delightfully.

In an eight-minute prologue to display stereo sound, composer Alfred Newman conducts his ‘Street Scene’, which is quite something.

Based on the play The Greeks Had a Word for It by Zoë Akins and Stephen Powys, this is a remake of the 1932 movie The Greeks Had a Word for Them, in which Grable had a walk-on as a showgirl, and Three Blind Mice (1938).

Bacall said: ‘Betty Grable was a funny, outgoing woman, totally professional and easy. Marilyn was frightened, insecure – trusted only her coach and was always late.’

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2612

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