An uncredited scribe in the June 23, 1953, issue of Newsweek described Howard Hawks’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953) as an essay in “erotic anthropology”: “Hollywood’s censors require that bumps be bumped rearward … and that grinds be ground sidewise instead of in rotary form.” 

This writer was discussing the picture’s two stars, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, but what about a musical number written by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson, “Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love?” 

In it, Russell enumerates a clever string of double entendres, to wit: “I’m not in condition to wrestle/I’ve never trained in a gym/Show me a man who can nestle/And I’ll pin a meddle on him.” All the while she shimmies her generous curves “sidewise” through a gymnasium populated by a bevy of fit young men wearing flesh-colored bathing trunks.

The joke here — or, rather, one of the jokes — is that a cadre of hunky young guys can’t be distracted from their calisthenics by the admiring entreaties of a gorgeous woman. That Russell was among the reigning sex symbols of the time added its own obvious irony, but so too did the choreography of Jack Cole. Hawks had never directed a musical and gave Cole the leeway to do as he saw fit with his charges, not least spinning Russell’s feminine charms within a homoerotic subtext.

Cole’s subtext has long since become overt, and it’s worth asking how much Hawks’s picture shifted emphasis from the 1925 book of the same name by Anita Loos, not to mention the subsequent Broadway adaptation that Loos wrote in conjunction with Joseph Fields. Just how old-hat were the trappings for the story of two showgirls eager to meet the men of their dreams in 1953? Old enough, maybe, to convince the higher-ups at 20th Century Fox to add oomph with some s-e-x.

New Yorkers can get acquainted with Dorothy Shaw and Lorelei Lee at the Paris Theater, which is hosting “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” as part of an ongoing series of films titled “The Wonders of Technicolor.” Mounted in conjunction with an exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures at Los Angeles, “Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations in Cinema,” the Paris’s program is also something of a follow-up to a recent Museum of Modern Art program, “Eye Candy: The Coming of Color.” If the latter tended toward misty tonalities, this one favors the super-saturated.

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is a splendid confection, being the rare film that has, over the years, gained in dazzlement. As has been pointed out by many an admirer, the story of “two little girls from Little Rock” — one a gold-digger and the other having a heart of gold — is less backward than the mores of the time would seem to have allowed. Lorelei (Monroe) and Dorothy (Russell) know full well that they live in a man’s world and see fit to tweak and flout its rules. Our heroines are wise to life’s capriciousness — a fact that Monroe and Russell play up with an irresistible mixture of extravagance and grit.

Lorelei Lee was the role that made Monroe a star and she’s at her most assured here, elaborating on a ditsy sex appeal with a canniness that would have made Machiavelli call it a day. Monroe’s take on “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” has achieved a cultural reach that was undreamed of by either its performer or choreographer. As such, Russell is, I think, unfairly overshadowed: Her performance is on game and resolute in its  timing. 

Both actresses thrill as Hawks provides the momentum, screenwriter Charles Lederer the drollery, and costume designer William Travilla the resplendence. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” will be a find for the benighted and an affirmation of delight for those who revisit it.