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How to (Marry a Woman Who Wants to) Marry a Millionaire

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2012.664057

1543-5326

Amanda Konkle,

Cinema and Media Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe, How to Marry a Millionaire, directed by Jean Negulesco (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1953). Hereafter referred to as Millionaire, excepting circumstances requiring the full title. 2. For a good overview of CinemaScope and other technological developments, see Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 107–126. 3. Richard Buskin, Blonde Heat: The Sizzling Screen Career of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Billboard Books, 2001), 155. 4. Released in September 1953, The Robe stars Richard Burton, Michael Rennie, and Victor Mature, and is an epic tale about the men who crucified Christ. 5. Lisa Cohen, “The Horizontal Walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 276. 6. “The New Pictures,” Time November 22, 1953, 115–116. 7. Peter Filene, Him/her/self: Gender Identities in Modern America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 1998), 193. 8. Richard Maltby, “‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’: Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996): 443. 9. Maltby notes that he cannot claim with any empirical certainty the existence of these spectators or their readings of the film and thus imagines them as two fictional characters likely to have these readings of the film. Likewise, I cannot claim with any empirical certainty that viewers read Millionaire in the way I outline here, but, based on the historical and cultural documents presented as extra-filmic texts to ground my reading of the film, I can make a strong case for the existence of these readers and the readings I purport. 10. “The New Pictures: How to Marry a Millionaire,” Time November 22, 1953, 116. 11. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988, 2008), 6. 12. Clifford Adams, Preparing for Marriage: A Guide to Marital and Sexual Adjustment (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1951), 150. 13. Evelyn Duvall and Reuben Hill, When You Marry, revised edition (New York: Associated Press, 1953), 214. 14. Walt Disney's Cinderella, DVD, directed by Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson (1950; Walt Disney Productions, 2005). 15. Bosley Crowther, “Of Size and Scope: The Wide Screen Viewed in the Light of ‘How to Marry a Millionaire,’” New York Times 15 November 1953, X1. 16. . Gold-Diggers of 1933 begins with the number “We’re in the Money,” complete with coins as strategically-placed costuming, and features the number “Petting in the Park,” a lighthearted ditty about shy sexual exploration. 17. See Gold-Diggers of 1933, Gold-Diggers of 1935, Gold-Diggers of 1937, Gold-Diggers in Paris. Women in other romances of the 1930s, typically screwball comedies, were wealthy women who did not need a man's money. 18. The Palm Beach Story, directed by Preston Sturges (1942: Paramount); Moon over Miami, directed by Walter Lang (1941: Twentieth Century Fox); and The Lady Eve, directed by Preston Sturges (1941: Paramount). 19. Ernest Burgess and Paul Wallin, Engagement and Marriage (Chicago: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1953), 28. 20. Paul H. Landis, “The Changing Family,” Current History 19.109 (1950): 151, emphasis in original. 21. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1942). 22. Douglas Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, Austin: U of Texas P, 2005, 186. 23. Pamela Colby O’Brien, “The Happiest Films on Earth: A Textual and Contextual Analysis of Walt Disney's Cinderella and The Little Mermaid,” Women's Studies in Communication 19.2 (Summer 1996), 165. 24. 7. Wylie, Generation, 46, 194. 25. Ibid., 194. 26. Ibid., 207. 27. Ibid., 47. 28. Ibid., 194, 197. 29. “Advertising: There's nothing immoral …,” Time November 16, 1953, 97. 30. “Advertising,” 97. 31. Ibid., 97. 32. Catherine Johnson, “Marriage and Money: How to Marry a Millionaire,” Film Reader 5 (1982): 69–70. 33. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), xv. 34. Filene, Him/her/self, 187. 35. Judson T. Landis and Mary Landis. Building a Successful Marriage (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1948), 36. 36. Ernest Burgess and Paul Wallin. Engagement and Marriage (Chicago: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1953), 218. 37. Adams, Preparing for Marriage, 186. 38. Landis and Landis, Building, 75. 39. Burgess and Wallin, Engagement and Marriage, 586–7. 40. Ibid., 94. 41. Landis and Landis, Building, 44. 42. Sylvanus Duvall, 101 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Marry (New York: Association Press, 1954), 21. 43. Burgess and Wallin, Engagement, 7. 44. Ibid., 8. 45. Landis and Landis, Building, 31. 46. W. Lloyd Warner, Social Class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the Measurement of Social Status (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1949), 3. 47. Robert Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 13. See also Leerom Medevoi, “Identitarian Thought and the Cold War World,” in Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–52. 48. Warner, Social Class, 21. 49. S. Duvall, 101 Questions, 76. 50. Filene, Him/her/self, 184. 51. Ibid., 35. 52. Building a Successful Marriage, When You Marry, and Preparing for Marriage, respectively. 53. Ibid., 83, emphasis in original. 54. Duvall and Hill, When You Marry, 219–224. 55. Elisabeth Panttaja, “Going Up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella,’” Western Folklore 52.1 (1993), 98. 56. “Southwest African Persian Lamb Coat by Tailored Woman,” advertisement, Harper's Bazaar, October 1954. 57. “You’re So Well Put Together in Cashmere Twosomes by Heatherton,” advertisement, Harper's Bazaar, October 1954. 58. Johnson, “Marriage and Money,” 73. 59. Cohen, “The Horizontal Walk,” 277. 60. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987), 5. 61. Cohan, Masked Men, 59. 62. See, for example, An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1953). 63. For discussion of “feminized” and “masculinized” spectators, see Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” See also Mary Ann Doane, who emphasizes the bisexual oscillation of masculinized and feminized spectator positions for both men and women, which I assume here, in The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 8. 64. Cohan, Masked Men, 10. 65. See Jane Mersky Leder, Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 105–108, for a discussion of World War II nose-art. 66. Cohan, Masked Men, 45. 67. Robert Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly 42.4, December 1990, 596. 68. Cohen, “Horizontal Walk,” 267. 69. Ibid., 280. 70. Nadel, Containment Culture, 131–2. 71. Cohen, “Horizontal Walk,” 273. 72. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 144. 73. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 25–27. 74. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 25–27. 75. Bosley Crowther, “The Wide Screen Viewed in the Light of ‘How to Marry a Millionaire,’” The New York Times, November 15, 1953, X1. 76. Richard Mallett, “At the Pictures: How to Marry a Millionaire, Le Fruit Défendu,” Punch, January 27, 1954, 162. 77. Quoted in Buskin, Blonde Heat, 154. 78. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 40. 79. Cohen, “Horizontal Walk,” 280. 80. Quoted in Richard Buskin, Blonde Heat, 155. 81. Marilyn Monroe's mates, onscreen and off, were often “ordinary” men. In 1959's Some Like it Hot, in a parody of this trend, she says, “men who wear glasses are so gentle, weak, and helpless,” and thus preferable. During a period when masculinity was in crisis, Monroe sent a reassuring message that she preferred feminized men. See also Albert Mobilio's “Scratching Tom Ewell's Itch,” in All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 53–59, for a discussion of this phenomenon in The Seven Year Itch (1955). 82. Cohen, “Horizontal Walk,” 279. 83. William Young and Nancy Young, The 1950s: Popular Culture Through History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 64. 84. Wigley, Mark, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 341. 85. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, 223. 86. Pola will go “underground” with Denmark, and Loco will join Eben in his little mountain shack.