How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

Second viewing; first viewing with original audio; previously viewed between 1983 and 1986.

Based on the plays The Greeks Had a Word for It, by Zoë Akins, first staged in 1930, and Loco, by Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert, first staged in 1946, and in turn based on their short story published in Cosmopolitan in 1945.

*mild spoilers below*
Three working-class women rent a high-class apartment as part of a strategy aimed at catching rich husbands. One of them is a divorcee whom experience has hardened; she is courted by a handsome millionaire whom she repeatedly shuns because she thinks he is poor; she has her eyes instead on an older man, also very rich; the second girl is perhaps even greedier than the first but considerably less intelligent, besides being extremely shortsighted; she meets a man who acts like a millionaire but is diagnosed as a phony by girl number one; the third girl has a sentimental side which she still cannot curb satisfactorily; she has a date with a married man with whom, through a misunderstanding, she goes to spend a weekend on a secluded mountain cottage; a handsome forest ranger has his eyes on her. Concurrently to all that, their rented apartment's owner wants to sneak in and retrieve some documents from the vault for the Internal Revenue Service.

Agreeable comedy. The task of joining two different plays into a single movie may prove a little awkward, but in this case it was done in a passably seamless way. On the other hand, there is a slight feel of anachronism from having a 1930 play adapted for the 1950s. The world had changed since that earlier date; the style of plays also. Women who took part in a World War, either in the factories or abroad taking care of the wounded, were certainly less receptive of the kind of attitude displayed in the movie. Much of the wit here is definitely dated; there is a scene which is particularly flawed, in which the divorcee character remarks "Two more pounds and she could be arrested for bigamy". The intended meaning is not hard to fathom from the words alone. As it appears in the movie, however, it does not work and may puzzle some modern viewers. Perhaps the scene was poorly conceived for clarity; the main problem, though, for audiences used to the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone is that the physique of the male actor who plays the character to whom the witticism is referred will not stand out as oversized.

Rating: 61 (unchanged)