NYE Double Bill with Marilyn at Hyde Park Picture House
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Ready to ring in the New Year with Hollywood royalty? Hyde Park Picture House has just the ticket – a double bill of fabulous musicals starring the one and only Marilyn Monroe. Promising glitzy, camp fun, the cinema presents the star’s final musical film, Let’s Make Love, followed by our personal fave Marilyn movie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
1963’s provocatively-titled Let’s Make Love stars Yves Montand as Jean-Marc Clément, one of the world’s wealthiest men. While Clément has money in the bank, he struggles to find genuine romance. That is, until unwitting producers cast him as himself in a satirical play – a role he decides to take on in order to get closer to a gorgeous actress, played by Monroe. Directed by Hollywood master George Cukor, the film also features Milton Berle, Gene Kelly, and Bing Crosby as versions of themselves hired to teach Clément the secrets of show business.
Cukor’s film is followed by Howard Hawks’ 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Opening with an assault of primary colour, as the red-sequined Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell dance in front of brilliant blue curtains, this tale of two gold-digging girls from Little Rock remains surprisingly outrageous, perverse and even subversive today. From a sequence in which Russell seduces the entire U.S. Olympic team at once, to the sparkle in Monroe’s eyes that matches the diamond tiara she so lusts after, the film balances sensory pleasures with a light touch that’s perfect for New Year’s Eve.
