DVD/150: GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (Howard Hawks, 1953)

Nearly 70 years old and one of my favourite screen musicals still crackles with great one-liners, eye-popping colour and two iconic performers showing the power of female friendship.

Jane Russell had been a star longer than Marilyn and showed a flair for comedy with Bob Hope in THE PALEFACE films but here she shines as the wise-cracking, practical, protective Dorothy.

This was Marilyn's breakthrough year: after starring in the thriller NIAGARA. she brought her lumious presence to the glorious Lorelei, the archetypal dumb blonde who also is canny enough to know of her seductive power over the poor rich saps.

Showgirls Dorothy and Lorelei sail to Paris unaware that they are followed by a private detective hired by the disapproving father of Lorelei's befuddled fiancée to spy on her onboard behaviour.

Dorothy finds love while Lorelei's belief that "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" leads to trouble!

Shelf or charity shop? Currently strutting and shimmying along the shelf - which reminds me, Hawks admitted he wasn't interested in filming the musical numbers so we can credit them to choreographer Jack Cole and his assistant, the one and only Gwen Verdon. Marilyn and Jane Russell make a wonderfully subversive duo who confound the men around them, including Elliott Reid's dull detective, Charles Coburn's letcherous diamond mine owner and Tommy Noonan as Lorelei's bedfuddled fiancée - the exception is the gravel-voiced 8-year old George Winslow who steals all the scenes he is in.  Loosely based on both the Anita Loos bestseller and the Jule Styne-Leo Robin Broadway musical, Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson added "When Love Goes Wrong" and Jane Russell's solo "Ain't There Anyone Here For Love", possibly one of the campest musical numbers ever filmed.  Of course the stand-out musical number is Marilyn's "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" which of course inspired Madonna's "Material Girl" video.  A special mention must go to Travilla for his classic costumes. What the film illustrates is that what gets lost by the non-ending speculation on her life and death and the Warhol-ish iconography is that Marilyn was a genuinely loveable screen presence and a fine comedienne. 

DVD/150: FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG (Mark Rappaport, 1995)

Before the mendacious biopic SEBERG and excellent documentary JEAN SEBERG: ACTRESS ACTIVIST ICON, independant film-maker Mark Rappaport made Jean his second meditation on cinema: FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG.

Casting Mary Beth Hurt is a master-stroke: facially similar, Hurt is also from Marshalltown, Iowa and actually had teenage Jean as a baby-sitter when small.

Through Rappaport's sly use of montage, Jean reflects on how she was exploited by Otto Preminger's humiliating treatment on the sets of SAINT JOAN and BONJOUR TRISTESSE and the bizarre way her second husband Romain Gary cast her in two films as a nymphomaniacal victim.

Through this, Rappaport addresses how male directors cast their actress partners as prostitutes or nymphos and how Hollywood morality influenced female characters' sexualty.

The most successful sequence connects the lives and careers of Jean with fellow actress activists Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda - and why they "survived".

Shelf or charity shop?  Def Shelf.  Rappaport's theories might be a bit of a stretch at times - get this: Jean was married to Romain Gary who asserted that he was the illegitimate son of Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine whose close-up from a silent film was used by film director/theorist Lev Kuleshov to prove how the viewer projects the emotion onto a scene - he intercut Mosjoukine's blank expression between shots of a dead woman, a child playing and food and his original viewers claimed the actor's expression changed every time - so by inter-cutting Jean's blank expression from A BOUT DE SOUFFLE's final scene, he links Jean to Russian revolutionary film-making... yeah right.  However at the film's climax thankfully he drops the tricks and allows us to focus on Mary Beth Hurt's emotional recounting of the FBI's 1970 campaign to discredit her and her subsequent miscarriage.  Although the film allows for humour and sarcastic takes on Hollywood, ultimately Rappaport's film leaves you sad for Jean, as it should do.