[go: up one dir, main page]
Showing posts with label Anita Loos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anita Loos. Show all posts

Friday, November 25, 2022

Book Review 049 / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos


 


Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos1925
The 100 best novels written in English / The full list
Book Review
The 100 best novels / No 49 / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)

10 July 2018

What a marvellous novella this turned out to be. Smart, engaging and uproariously funny – another great summer read for me.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the debut novel of the American screenwriter and author Anita Loos. (You can read a little more about her career here.) The book was an instant success on its release in 1925 – the individual sections had previously been published in Harper’s Bazaar, so the market was ripe for its appearance as a complete text.

Read more »
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Anita Loos / Sharp, shameless humour of the 'world's most brilliant woman'

Anita Loos

Anita Loos – sharp, shameless humour of the 'world's most brilliant woman' The writer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was an extraordinary, barbed genius of the silent era, Hollywood and Broadway

Pamela Hutchinson
Monday 16 January 2016

Piquant wit … the screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos. 





Anita Loos, the screenwriter and author, claimed – in typically waggish style – to be furious at the women’s lib movement. “They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men,” she said. “That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.” Loos was a veteran of silent-era Hollywood, when women worked at all levels of the film industry – directing, editing, producing and designing. Scriptwriting, Loos’s forte, was the most feminine department: a “manless Eden” of female screenplay writers, scenario authors, story editors, intertitle artists and “script girls”. Loos may not have been the most successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s silent years (that honour falls to Frances Marion), but she was one of its greatest wits, most popular characters and one of its key storytellers.
Read more »
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Marilyn Monroe / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell make a fantastic double act in Howard Hawks's sparkling 1953 comedy, writes Peter Bradshaw

 Peter Bradshaw
Thu 25 February 2010

 "D
on't you know a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You may not marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?" Marilyn Monroe's unimprovably droll line ­epitomises the pizzazz of Howard Hawks's tremendous musical ­comedy. Monroe and Jane Russell play ­Lorelei and Dorothy, hot showgirls and cool ­customers. Lorelei has a fiercely ­idealistic commitment to marrying rich so that the pure concept of love is not sullied by money worries; Dorothy pragmatically wishes only to follow her heart. Those two faces are incredible in ­juxtaposition: Russell is worldly, amused, intensely in touch: Monroe is sublimely unfocused and ­beatific. A joy.


 THE GUARDIAN


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Monday, August 25, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 49 / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)



The 100 best novels written in English No 49    Gentlemen Prefer Blondes  by Anita Loos (1925)

A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age

Robert McCrum
Monday 25 August 2014
A
nita Loos, a screenwriting Hollywood wunderkind, says she began to draft Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a jazz age classic, on the American railroad, as she crossed from New York to LA in the early 1920s. Travelling on the celebrated Santa Fe Chief with the movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his brainless leading lady, the young Loos became exasperated that a woman so stupid could "so far outdistance me in feminine allure". Could this girl's secret, Loos wondered, possibly be rooted in her hair? "She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette."

Lorelei Lee (aka Mabel Minnow from Little Rock, Arkansas) was born in that nano-second of female rivalry. Whipping out her yellow pad, Loos began drafting The Illuminating (originally Intimate) Diary of a Professional Lady, teasing fact and fantasy into an intoxicating depiction of "the lowest possible mentality" in prohibition America, a gold-digging blonde who is not – surprise, surprise – quite as dumb as she looks. No wonder that the part burst into life when Marilyn Monroe starred in the 1953 film version.
Later, Loos joked that the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was "almost as gloomy" as a Dostoevsky novel. Indeed, without Lorelei's faux-naif interior monologue, her tale is replete with hints of rape, actual murder, seduction, gangsterism, and courtesanship, spun into airy nothing. When her diary begins, Lorelei is "under the protection" of the millionaire Gus Eisman, a Chicago button manufacturer, but in danger of falling in love with an impecunious British writer who wants to divorce his wife and marry the woman he believes to be his true love.

When Eisman gets wind of this, he sends his mistress on a European tour with her hard-boiled friend Dorothy. Quickly bored with London, despite a dance with the Prince of Wales, they head for Paris ("devine") and its romantic attractions, especially "the Eyeful Tower". Yet the longer Lorelei's sentimental education continues, the more she recognises the truth: continental men are no match for Americans. "I really think," she writes, "that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good but a diamond-and-safire [sic] bracelet lasts for ever."
Marilyn Monroe

This novella (it is barely 150 pages in my battered Penguin edition) falls into the category of "guilty pleasure", but I think it earns its place on this list, if only for the roll call of its distinguished contemporary fans, its lasting influence, and intensely quotable lines. Long before Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, Loos hit on a young woman's diary as the perfect medium for satirical romance. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, serialised in Harper's Bazaar, became cult reading. Edith Wharton, probably tongue in cheek, hailed it as "the great American novel". Loos, an unreliable witness, claimed that James Joyce, who was losing his sight, saved his reading for Lorelei Lee. Who knows? It's a little book with a broad smile, and a deceptively big heart.

A note on the text
In her prime, in the 1920s, Anita Loos was "the Soubrette of Satire"and also boasted that her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing followed immediately after Shakespeare's.
The roaring success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes owes an important debt to the celebrated critic and columnist, HL Mencken, a friend of Loos's. "Menck", as she called him, had just left the editorship of The Smart Set for The American Mercury, and correctly saw that "making fun of sex" was the kind of risque novelty that would work better in a popular middlebrow publication like Harper's Bazaar. So Loos took her Lorelei material to the Harper's editor, Henry Sell, who encouraged Loos to extract maximum advantage from Lorelei's European trip. In just a few months, Gentleman Prefer Blondes became a magazine sensation. Newsstand sales of Harper's doubled, tripled and quadrupled.


Then the publishers Boni and Liveright came calling, and made a contract for a slim hardback, illustrated by Ralph Barton. Blondes sold out at once as a runaway bestseller, becoming the second highest-selling book of 1926, and helping to define the jazz age for ever. A second edition of 60,000 copies was exhausted almost as quickly. Some 45 editions later (in the end, 80-plus), the book had passed into classic status. It would be translated into 14 languages, including Chinese. Eventually, Lorelei's most memorable obiter dicta found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The idea that "diamonds are a girl's best friend" passed into popular culture, and is now repeated without irony too often to be diverting. Loos herself lived long enough (she died in 1981) to describe her book as a "period piece" for the grandchildren of its first fans. "May they be diverted by the adventures of Lorelei Lee", she wrote, "and take courage from the words of her favourite philosopher: 'Smile, smile, smile.'"

Anita Loos

Three more from Anita Loos
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928); A Girl like I (1966); Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974).


THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)


 Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell star in this musical comedy which lacks the wit of the original novel


Philip French
Sunday 28 February 2010
T
his 1953 musical comedy, among the last of its kind to be made before the coming of the widescreen, features a golddigging Monroe and a man-eating Russell as busty girls en route by sea from the States to Paris, France. There are a couple of well-staged numbers but less wit and style than are to be found in Anita Loos's demotic classic on which it's based. Released the year Playboy was launched, it features much characteristic 50s coarseness and leering. Gentleman Prefer Blondes is among the weaker works of a great filmmaker, whose two finest comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) were made before the war and whose greatest film (Rio Bravo) was yet to come.


 THE GUARDIAN
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)