Review of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) by Edith N — 19 Dec 2012

An Unpleasant Mission.

I was explaining to Graham yesterday about the Bechdel Test. This is a test to apply to movies. Simply put, you look at three factors. First, the movie must have at least two named female characters. (I'm willing to give more leeway to this than some people are; I'm aware that there are plenty of movies where major characters still never actually get names, but that doesn't take away from their importance to the story. Heck, I've even encountered people who think "Mrs. So-and-so" doesn't count as a name.) Second, two named female characters must have a conversation with each other. Third, it must be about something other than a man. This doesn't prove the movie is good, or even friendly toward feminism, but it is still an incredibly simple test that quite a lot of movies don't pass. This movie does, but only just barely. There is one brief conversation between two of the women about the third, but for the most part, they talk about men for ninety-five minutes.

Schatze Page (Lauren Bacall) has come up with what she is convinced is an iron-clad plan to find and marry a rich man. She leases an extremely impressive furnished apartment for a year. She believes it's easier to get millionaires if you live in the kind of place millionaires are anyway. She takes on roommates Pola Debevoise (Marilyn Monroe) and "Loco" Dempsey (Betty Grable). They're selling off the furniture to pay the rent, and they continue to go about their ordinary lives as models at a clothing store. Schatze hooks up with J. D. Hanley (William Powell), older but wealthy. Pola meets J. Stewart Merrill (Alexander D'Arcy), who comes across as wealthy about about whom we don't know much. Loco meets Waldo Brewster (Fred Clark), wealthy but both older and married. Also pursuing Schatze is Tom Brookman (Cameron Mitchell), whom we know to be wealthy but whom she believes to be a gas station attendant.

It's really pretty awful, if you think about it. There never seems to be any implication that Loco is actually going to do anything with Waldo; she hopes that spending time with him will be a stepping-stone to other wealthy men. But that's really all these women care about. All they want, all they think is necessary, is to marry wealthy men. And because they're pretty, we're left to believe that it isn't unreasonable of them. Can you imagine if they made a gender-reversed version of this story? It would only get made if the women were total laughingstocks. J. D. is probably the most dignified character in the whole of the movie; he knows that Schatze is in it for the money, but he loves her and is willing to marry her even if he doesn't entirely believe that she loves him. The girls here are shown as being remarkably practical, though things don't necessarily work out the way they might have hoped, and the men are shown to be getting what they're looking for, because the girls are pretty, and that's what counts.

Most of the humour in this movie is about how foolish people can be during relationships. That can be a source of great humour, if it's done right. However, I think the problem here is that values have changed. It isn't just that Pola would have contacts now. She would, of course, but there's more to the differences than just that. Pola is vain and kind of dumb, and Loco isn't too bright, but Schatze is a smart woman. She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it. A woman like her today could be expected to make her own living doing pretty much whatever she wanted, and the idea that all she wants to do is be someone's trophy wife doesn't ring true. It just seems like a waste of her capabilities. A woman like Schatze shouldn't be wasting her brain trying to marry a rich man; she should be getting rich on her own. She's smarter than pretty much everyone else in the movie, and while she seems to come off the best, she could have come off a better person.

It's interesting to consider what other kinds of movies these characters could have fit into. J. D. is a pretty standard William Powell character; even in 1953, you could see him wooing a character played by Myrna Loy. Waldo Brewster is just Dwight Babcock of [i]Auntie Mame[/i] with a girl on the side. Marilyn Monroe played Pola more than once, and pretty much literally the same with Betty Grable and Loco. Lauren Bacall also played the same character, but unlike the others, she didn't play her character in comedies. Schatze casually references her love of "that guy from [i]The African Queen[/i]," which is of course her own husband, Humphrey Bogart. But she played Schatze against Bogart, and the games they played were for keeps. Schatze's biggest oddity is that she is a noir [i]femme fatale[/i] transplanted into a whimsical romantic comedy. If she were in a better whimsical romantic comedy, this would even be a movie worth watching more than once every few years, if that.