愿嫁金龟婿

Going to the mat for gold-diggers, Jean Negulesco’s HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE seems like a prospectus of guiles and finesses for pretty gals to get hitched with the loaded, and the three penthouse-dwelling-but-furniture-hocking girls here, Loco (Grable), Pola (Monroe) and Schatze (Bacall), are strictly hewing to that aim, and Nunnally Johnson’s playful script proffers three prospects seriatim, a grouchy married businessman Brewster (Clark), a dubious Arabian tycoon Merrill (D’Arcy) and a kosher wealthy widower J.D. Hanley (Powell), different strokes for different folks. But as we might well expect, those are the wrong ones for them, a girl must marry out of love and love only, that lucre can only be the icing on the cake.

Shot in the then-new outrageously wide and sumptuous CinemaScope format, the slender film is prefixed with an on-screen orchestra performing the show tune “Street Scene” and is conducted by Alfred Newman, to ensure viewers that the movie’s sensory attack is all-round, at the very least, the central trinity has a knockout wardrobe at their disposal and they all look fantastically glamorous to a T.

For all the story’s predictable, storybook fabrication and the phony back projection grandeur, a sisterly rapport never dims among them while each girl gets busy with her own affair to cinch that grail. Bacall is as per usual with an assertive and matter-of-fact zeal which means business, Schatze has no fallback position after a failed marriage with a poor fellow; whereas a chicly speccy Monroe flogs Pola’s blind-as-a-bat ditziness to death, a role only she can play with a Teflon shied for backlash; then Grable, in her antepenultimate film, is the most adroit player here, bouncy, witty, but is also able to inhabit a love fool with some much needed brio.

On the other sex, men are merely trifle adornments, only a courteous Powell dutifully makes some pleasurable splash as a middle-aged gentleman completely deprived of any salacious disposition (he is no Humphrey Bogart, about whom Bacall delivers a punchy in-joke), the type a young girl prefers to be his daughter rather than his wife, and that is the gist, the heart wants what it wants, HOW TO MARRY…. is so innocuously fluffy, naysayers just as well give it a break, and in lieu, relish its opulence with a goofy, non-judgmental smile.

referential entries: Howard Hawks’ GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953, 6.3/10); Negulesco’s THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN (1954, 6.2/10).