How to Marry a Millionaire 1953

[6.6/10] Love is both the easiest and the hardest thing to convey on screen. It’s easy because audiences want to believe in it. It’s nice to see two people come together and have the rush of romance and mutual understanding that comes with it. It’s difficult because it’s one of the most personal and intricate experiences imaginable, so communicating it convincingly, with a relationship that can live up to that lofty standard, takes good writing, good chemistry, and more than a little luck.

But to make it really work, the viewer has to see the two people falling in love with one another. People joke about meetcutes and other standard romcom tropes, but there’s a reason movies return to that formula. It forces the couple-to-be to spend time with one another and, if the creatives are fortunate, to weave a believable tale of two people slowly but surely falling for one another.

How to Marry a Millionaire is founded on the idea of love, more specifically, of three women setting their sights on one sort of a man and unexpectedly ending up with another, through the magic of twue wuv. Betty Grable’s Loco absconds with a moneyed (but married) man, only to end up with a humble park ranger. Marilyn Monroe’s Pola sidles up to a shady (but wealthy) character, only to stumble upon someone who likes her even with the necessary accessory she tries to hide. And despite her grand plans, Lauren Bacall’s Schatze gives up the too-kind millionaire she’d tried to ensnare in favor of the man she thought was a “pump jockey.”

There's a basic formula, done to varying degrees of success, with all three of them. Each gets what they think they want in the romance department and, after accidental exposure to someone they hadn’t anticipated meeting, finds that love triumphs over money. There’s a sweet, if trite, moral to that. The problem, though, is that How to Marry a Millionaire never takes the time to actually show the audience these women falling in love with their suitors. It just happens by fiat, by montage, or worse yet, against all good indicators.

Take Grable’s Loco. She’s off to Maine to canoodle with her attached (but loaded) escort, when she comes down with the measles. There’s an indication that the forest ranger who’s attending to them, Eben, is a good guy, since he seems to want to get her treated, while the married man is more worried about being found out. But he and Loco never actually have a conversation. The next time we see Loco and Eben together, they’re skiing and smooching, and the film all but declares that they’ve fallen in love, without the necessary connective tissue to make it work. As with all of these stories, the movie seems to want to rush through to the ending without doing the work to get there.

It doesn’t help that Loco’s pretty annoying. She’s one of the film’s two “dingbats,” whose only defining feature is that she mixes up one thing for another (e.g. elks lodge for winter lodge, owning land for looking after land, etc.), and gripes about everything. Her married mister is unlikable, not only cheating on his wife, but disinheriting his daughter for dating a “gigolo”, and complaining about women every chance he gets. And while Eben seems nice (he’s played by a Rory Calhoun, a thrill for any Simpsons fan), he’s also a one-dimensional drip. There’s just nothing to latch onto here.

The same goes for Monroe’s Pola. She’s likewise a single-gimmick character -- a woman who’s “blind as a bat” without her glasses, but hides them for wooing purposes. Most of what she does in the film is wander around and knock into things, or mistake one person for another, or stumble into other broad “Oh no, I can’t see!” jokes. I’ll confess, her suspicious customer of a well-off beau feels like a reference that went over my head nearly seventy years later. But the gag mostly seems to be that she’s oblivious to his questionable machinations because she too is a dolt who’s only focused on his pocketbook.

Despite that, Pola’s ultimate romantic pairing is the one that feels the most earned, if only because we get to see her spend time with him. In a contrived scenario, Freddie is the former occupant of the girls’ apartment, forced to flee due to a taxable misunderstanding and misfortune, who ends up on the same plane as Pola.

It’s not much, but we actually get to see some playful and friendly banter between the two of them on the trip. We see them bond over each wearing glasses and getting over the stigma of it, and he even encourages her and compliments her when she’s wearing the thing that she thinks will prevent her from landing a man. It’s not the world’s greatest love story, and it’s still a big rush from that cute enough conversation to them being married a few scenes later, but it’s more pre-wedded interaction and person-to-person connection than we get from anyone else.

That just leaves Bacall’s Schatze, who is the anchor of the film, supports the only real story, and provides the film’s best performance. Schatze is a divorcee with a grudge, who’s found that marrying for love to a “cute” pump-jockey only left her heartbroken and penniless. So she resolves to play (and look) the part of the high society dame in order to attract a man whose flush, no matter how she feels about him, having adopted a much more mercenary, yet understandable, view of romance given her experiences.

She ends up with a widower thirty years her senior, a Mr. Hanley, who’s lucratively invested in cattle and craving the human companionship that Schatze is all too eager to provide in exchange for the lifestyle she dreams of. The catch is that Hanley isn't a hypocritical lech or a shady character like the two men the “bubbleheads” pursue. In fact, he’s the most decent, patient, almost saintly character in the film.

He initially puts off Schatze despite claiming “love at first sight” because she doesn’t want a young woman with her whole life ahead of her to have to take care of him when he’s truly old. And then later in the film when she jilts him at the altar, he not only takes it remarkably well (his line that it’s "just one of the few advantages of age -- disappointments become a normal part of life" is quietly heartbreaking), but even encourages her to go to the guy she actually loves.

That’s the major credit to Schatze in terms of good character here. Bacall gives her a great on-screen presence and the dialogue offers her a rapier wit and sharp mind to match. She all but carries the film and does a stellar job of it. But what makes her likable here is the way that, for all materialistic machinations, when push comes to shove she can’t marry Hanley, not because her heart lies elsewhere, but because she recognizes that he deserves to be with someone who loves him too. It’s downright magnanimous of her, even if it’s a pretty late-breaking pang of conscience.

But there’s a save! It turns out there is someone she loves, and Hanley eggs her on to go to him. It’s Tom, the guy who doesn’t wear a necktie and she thus assumes to be another “pump jockey,” but who’s been pursuing her the whole film. They kept going on dates in Hanley’s absence despite her protestations that she never wanted to see him again because he’s not rich, but the lady doth protest too much, and in the end, she marries him. As a bonus, it turns out he’s loaded, and Schatze ends up with both love and money.

There’s just one catch. At best, the movie implies that the two of them care for another, with Schatze choosing to spend time with Tom despite her claims not to want to, and the suggestions that there’s a hint of Hepburn/Tracy chemistry between the two of them. But the film montages all over this, and we never see any of that chemistry actually on display.

At worst, the few times we do see them interact involve him refusing to accept her repeatedly saying “no” to him or respect her wishes in that regard. In one scene, he even takes advantage of her job as a model to force her to parade around for him, give him the chance to leer at her, and then send her and her co-workers away without buying anything. It’s all pretty gross, and no bulging bankroll and comic fainting at the end of the picture can justify it.

That’s the tricky thing about attempts at cinematic love. They rest on the tenderness and believability of relationships that, in the real world, take months, years, and decades to develop. The magic of movies is that, with the right performances, the right pairings, and the right tricks, a good film can make a couple of hours feel like they can stand in for all that time and earned connection. But if the characters are shallow, their suitors are barely-sketched (or, worse yet, leering cads), and most of all, if we don’t really get to spend time watching the relationship develop, the whole thing rings as false as a relationship founded on nothing but money.