How to Marry a Millionaire

If Lauren Bacall was known for any film that did not co-star Humphrey Bogart, it was How to Marry a Millionaire, a mediocre peace of fluff from 1953 that also starred Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as three golddiggers.

Directed without much charm by Jean Negulesco, the film is in vibrant Cinemascope, but the story is wan and at times offensive. The three stars are models who rent a classy apartment in the hopes they will rub elbows with rich men. It's all Bacall's idea--she's just out of a divorce with a poor guy. She has a weakness for "gas pump jockeys" and wants to marry up. Monroe is a ditz who can't see a thing without her glasses, which she won't wear because she thinks they'll turn men off. Grable's character really doesn't have a defining characteristic at all.

Bacall meets a wealthy widower (William Powell), but is really attracted to Cameron Mitchell, who is richer than Powell but Bacall doesn't know it. Monroe gets hooked up with a fake oil sheik, but ends up with David Wayne (who is the apartment's owner). In the most tasteless portion, Grable accompanies a piggish businessman (Fred Clark) to his lodge in Maine (she thinks it's an Elk Lodge). She ends up falling for a simple forest ranger (Rory Calhoun). Though there is no hanky-panky between Grable and Clark, it has a kind of leering quality that isn't funny at all.

I did like some of the inside jokes. Grable, who in real life was married to Harry James, listens to his band on the radio. Bacall, telling Powell she loves older men, mentions that what's-his-name who was in The African Queen. "Love him!" she exults.

Though Bacall is terrific, one can't help feel that after the great noir films she did with Bogart, that she's kind of slumming here.