Jane Russell passed away Monday at age 89. She was perhaps best known as a discovery of Howard Hughes, who hired her to show off her ample breasts in his film
The Outlaw (1943). (He apparently designed a special bra for her.) But despite that inauspicious beginning, Russell is known to have been smart and savvy, and spun an entire career from it. She also starred in
The Paleface (1948) and
Road to Bali (1952), with Bob Hope,
His Kind of Woman (1951), with Robert Mitchum; and the legendary
Macao (1952), which was partly directed by both Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray. She published her autobiography in 1985 and was active in right-wing politics, but she also helped with a foundation that helped find families for orphans. Her movie career is slight at best, but she made at least one clear masterpiece, as Marilyn Monroe's polar opposite in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Following is my review, from 2001.
****
My personal favorite of Marilyn Monroe's films is Howard Hawks'
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), which is also Monroe's first starring role along with the voluptuous Jane Russell. They play a pair of fortune hunters on board an ocean liner; Monroe hunting for a rich husband, Russell longing for a well-built hunk. Of course, they break into song from time to time. (It is a musical, after all.) Hawks uses the rich colors to make a kind of cartoon out of the proceedings, emphasizing unreality and the diametric opposites of Monroe's blonde and Russell's brunette. The best line comes when the girls climb on board the ship: First man: "Suppose the ship hits an iceberg and sinks. Which one of them do you save from drowning?" Second man: "Those girls couldn't drown."
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