How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

Although The Robe, released earlier in 1953, became the first CinemaScope picture released to the public, How to Marry a Millionaire had actually completed production before The Robe.

How to Marry a Millionaire is a 1953 American romantic comedy directed by Jean Negulesco and produced and written by Nunnally Johnson for Twentieth Century-Fox. The film stars Betty Grable as Loco Dempsey, Marilyn Monroe as Pola Debevoise, and Lauren Bacall as Schatze Page, three New York models who decide that ordinary romance is not enough and set out to marry wealthy men. The supporting cast includes William Powell, David Wayne, Rory Calhoun, Cameron Mitchell, Alex D’Arcy, Fred Clark, and George Dunn.

The screenplay was based primarily on Zoë Akins’s 1930 play The Greeks Had a Word for It, with additional material taken from Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert’s 1946 play Loco. Johnson combined the two sources into a story specifically designed to give the three female stars separate romantic situations while keeping them together as friends and partners in their ambitious scheme. The plot centers on Schatze, Pola, and Loco, who rent an expensive Manhattan penthouse with the intention of using it as headquarters for their search for rich husbands.

Schatze, the practical leader, has already been married to a gas-station attendant and is determined to improve her financial circumstances. Loco is more impulsive and romantic, while Pola is extremely nearsighted and refuses to wear her glasses because she believes men will not find her attractive if they see them. Their plan initially seems successful when they encounter a succession of wealthy prospects, but the women gradually discover that money and love do not necessarily point in the same direction.

Schatze becomes involved with the seemingly ordinary Tom Brookman, played by Cameron Mitchell, while also attracting the attention of the wealthy and considerably older J. D. Hanley, played by William Powell. Loco becomes involved with Eben Salem, played by Rory Calhoun, and Pola eventually discovers that the supposedly destitute

Freddie Denmark, played by David Wayne, has his own complicated financial situation. Much of the comedy comes from the women’s determination to judge men according to their bank accounts while repeatedly finding themselves attracted to men who do not fit their carefully designed plans. Pola’s refusal to wear her glasses becomes one of the film’s recurring jokes, while Loco’s romantic adventures

provide another source of complications. Schatze’s story ultimately becomes the emotional center of the movie. She believes Tom is unsuitable because he appears to be an ordinary working man, but she gradually falls in love with him. On her wedding day, she finally realizes that marrying J. D. would be dishonest because she loves Tom.

The ending supplies the film’s biggest joke: Tom turns out to be vastly richer than any of the women realize, claiming to be worth about $200 million. The three women had spent the entire film looking for millionaires, only to discover that one of them had already fallen in love with a man who was considerably wealthier than the men they had been pursuing.

Cast

  • Grable, Betty (December 18, 1916 – July 2, 1973) – Loco Dempsey, one of three Manhattan models who rents a luxurious apartment with Schatze and Pola so they can search for wealthy husbands. Loco is the fun-loving, impulsive member of the trio and becomes romantically involved with Eben Salem. Previous movies and TV roles included Down Argentine Way, Tin Pan Alley, Moon Over Miami, Sweet Rosie O’Grady, Pin Up Girl, Mother Wore Tights, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, Wabash Avenue, Call Me Mister, and My Blue Heaven.
  • Monroe, Marilyn (June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) – Pola Debevoise, a beautiful model whose severe nearsightedness creates many of the film’s funniest situations because she refuses to wear her glasses around men. Pola eventually falls in love with Freddie Denmark, despite initially believing that he is not wealthy. Previous movies and TV roles included Dangerous Years, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, Ladies of the Chorus, All About Eve, As Young as You Feel, Monkey Business, Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, and The Seven Year Itch.
  • Bacall, Lauren (September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014) – Schatze Page, the sophisticated and determined leader of the three models. She is determined to marry a millionaire and initially pursues the wealthy J. D. Hanley, but eventually realizes that she is in love with Tom Brookman. Previous movies and TV roles included To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo, Young Man with a Horn, Bright Leaf, Written on the Wind, Designing Woman, North West Frontier, The Rockford Files, and The Sopranos.
  • Wayne, David (January 30, 1914 – February 9, 1995) – Freddie Denmark, the owner of the Manhattan apartment rented by the three women. Although he appears to be financially unsuccessful, he develops a genuine romance with Pola, and his actual circumstances ultimately make him a much better prospect than she realizes. Previous movies and TV roles included Portrait of Jennie, Adam’s Rib, As Young as You Feel, With a Song in My Heart, The Greatest Show on Earth, We’re Not Married!, The Tender Trap, The Three Faces of Eve, The Andromeda Strain, Ellery Queen, and The Twilight Zone.
  • Calhoun, Rory (August 8, 1922 – April 28, 1999) – Eben Salem, a handsome outdoorsman whom Loco encounters during the women’s search for wealthy husbands. Loco initially assumes that he is a wealthy landowner, but learns that he is actually a forest ranger; she ultimately chooses him because she loves him rather than because of his money. Previous movies and TV roles included The Red House, That Hagen Girl, Adventure Island, Miraculous Journey, Sand, With a Song in My Heart, Way of a Gaucho, The Silver Whip, Powder River, The Texan, Motel Hell, and Capone.
  • Mitchell, Cameron (November 4, 1918 – July 6, 1994) – Tom Brookman, the seemingly ordinary man who falls in love with Schatze. She initially rejects him because she believes he is poor, but the film’s ending reveals that Tom is actually an extremely wealthy man, providing the movie with its final romantic joke. Previous movies and TV roles included The Black Swan, The Black Rose, Death of a Salesman, My Six Convicts, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Silver Whip, Garden of Evil, Love Me or Leave Me, The High Chaparral, The Swiss Family Robinson, and The Fall Guy.
  • D’Arcy, Alexander (August 10, 1908 – April 20, 1996) – J. Stewart Merrill, one of the wealthy and sophisticated men encountered by the three women during their campaign to find millionaire husbands. D’Arcy was credited onscreen as Alex D’Arcy. Previous movies and TV roles included The Awful Truth, The Prisoner of Zenda, Topper Takes a Trip, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Razor’s Edge, The Emperor Waltz, The Exile, and The Black Rose.
  • Clark, Fred (March 19, 1914 – December 5, 1968) – Waldo Brewster, a married businessman who becomes interested in Loco and creates one of the film’s more uncomfortable comic romantic situations. His attraction to Loco complicates her attempts to determine which wealthy men are actually suitable marriage prospects. Previous movies and TV roles included The Good Humor Man, The Woman in the Window, Christmas in Connecticut, The Unsuspected, Sunset Boulevard, The Mating Season, The Joker Is Wild, Pillow Talk, The Beverly Hillbillies, Batman, and The Monkees.
  • Powell, William (July 29, 1892 – March 5, 1984) – J. D. Hanley, the wealthy Texas businessman whom Schatze regards as the ideal millionaire husband. Powell brings the polished sophistication and dry comic delivery that had made him one of Hollywood’s leading stars, while the character’s wealth makes him the obvious target of Schatze’s marriage plans. Previous movies and TV roles included The Great Ziegfeld, My Man Godfrey, The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, Libeled Lady, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, Life with Father, The Senator Was Indiscreet, The Hoodlum Saint, and Mister Roberts.

The movie is particularly important in film history because of its connection with CinemaScope1. Although The Robe, released earlier in 1953, became the first CinemaScope picture released to the public, How to Marry a Millionaire had actually completed production before The Robe. It was therefore one of the earliest major demonstrations of the new widescreen process. The film was photographed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, with Joseph MacDonald serving as director of photography. Its famous opening sequence is an extended presentation of Alfred Newman’s Street Scene,

performed by the Twentieth Century-Fox Symphony Orchestra under Newman’s direction. The unusually long opening was deliberately designed to demonstrate CinemaScope’s widescreen image and stereophonic sound,

making the movie something of a technological showcase as well as a romantic comedy. Principal photography took place from March 9 through approximately mid-April 1953, with the main production occurring at Twentieth Century-Fox facilities in California. However, the production also used location photography. Background sequences were filmed in New York City and Sun Valley, Idaho, allowing the picture to give its Manhattan story a greater sense of authenticity.

New York is particularly important to the movie because the city itself functions almost like another character: department stores, expensive apartment living, fashionable restaurants, bridges, and other recognizable elements of metropolitan life reinforce the women’s obsession with wealth and status. The George Washington Bridge also figures prominently in one of the film’s comic episodes. One of the film’s most interesting production stories involves its unusual development.

George Cukor reportedly suggested that Lauren Bacall encourage Twentieth Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck to acquire the rights to The Greeks Had a Word for It. Nunnally Johnson then expanded the material by incorporating characters and situations from Loco, particularly to strengthen Betty Grable’s part. The result was an unusually star-oriented comedy in which Grable, Bacall, and Monroe were all given substantial and distinctive personalities rather than simply functioning as variations on the same character.

The billing history is also interesting. Betty Grable had been one of Fox’s biggest stars for years and had received top billing in her pictures since the early 1940s. How to Marry a Millionaire was her last contract film for Twentieth Century-Fox, although she later appeared for the studio as a freelance performer. Marilyn Monroe, meanwhile, was rapidly becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars. Although some modern accounts incorrectly describe Monroe

as receiving top billing over Grable in the film’s actual onscreen credits, Monroe did receive first billing in the advertising and trailer, reflecting Fox’s growing awareness of her box-office value. The film became a major commercial success, earning approximately $8 million worldwide according to modern estimates, and it helped establish Monroe as one of the defining stars of 1950s Hollywood. Her performance as Pola is especially memorable

because she combines physical comedy, vulnerability, glamour, and the character’s deliberately ridiculous refusal to wear glasses. The famous joke about men not making passes at girls who wear glasses became one of the movie’s most enduring bits of dialogue and is closely associated with Monroe’s screen image, even though the character’s vanity is deliberately exaggerated for comic effect.

Another bit of trivia is that How to Marry a Millionaire was not the first screen adaptation of Akins’s play. The Greeks Had a Word for Them, released in 1932, had already been made from the same source, starring Joan Blondell, Ina Claire, and Madge Evans. Betty Grable reportedly had a bit part as a showgirl in that earlier production. The 1953 film later became the basis for a syndicated television series, How to Marry a Millionaire, which ran during 1957–1958

and starred Barbara Eden, Lori Nelson, and Merry Anders. The movie therefore had a longer afterlife than its original theatrical run, although the 1953 version remains the best-known incarnation of the story. Ultimately, How to Marry a Millionaire works because it balances three different kinds of comedy: the satire of women deliberately hunting for wealthy husbands, the romantic comedy of people discovering that money does not guarantee happiness, and the visual comedy made

possible by the enormous CinemaScope frame. Grable supplies the experienced comic presence, Bacall gives Schatze sophistication and determination, and Monroe brings an appealing combination of innocence and sex appeal to Pola. The film’s combination of three major female stars, New York glamour, Technicolor spectacle, romantic complications, and the novelty of CinemaScope made it one of the most successful and recognizable romantic comedies of the 1950s.

Footnotes
  1. CinemaScope was a revolutionary widescreen motion-picture process introduced by 20th Century-Fox in 1953 as Hollywood’s answer to the growing popularity of television and the need to give audiences a reason to return to movie theaters. The system was based on an anamorphic lens developed from the work of French inventor Henri Chrétien, whose Hypergonar lens could compress an extremely wide image onto conventional 35mm film; a specially designed projection lens then expanded the picture horizontally on the theater screen, producing a dramatically wider image than the traditional Academy ratio. Fox acquired the rights to Chrétien’s technology and developed it into CinemaScope, initially producing images as wide as approximately 2.66:1 before technical requirements involving the optical soundtrack reduced the presentation to ratios around 2.55:1 and eventually 2.35:1. Unlike Cinerama, which required multiple cameras and a complicated multi-projector setup, CinemaScope could use a single camera and relatively conventional theater equipment equipped with the appropriate anamorphic projection lens, making widescreen presentation much easier for theaters to adopt. Fox chose two major productions to introduce the process: The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire. Although How to Marry a Millionaire was actually the first feature completed using CinemaScope, Fox released The Robe first on September 16, 1953, because the studio believed its enormous biblical spectacle would provide a more impressive introduction to the new technology. How to Marry a Millionaire, filmed earlier and released later that year, demonstrated that CinemaScope could work just as effectively for a sophisticated romantic comedy with relatively small groups of actors and interior scenes. The process also required filmmakers to rethink composition because the extremely wide frame encouraged wider group shots and made conventional close-ups more difficult; early CinemaScope lenses could produce distortion toward the edges of the frame and gave rise to technical challenges that cinematographers gradually learned to control. Fox promoted the process as a spectacular new theatrical experience, and How to Marry a Millionaire even included an elaborate musical prologue and epilogue featuring Alfred Newman conducting the Fox orchestra, specifically helping showcase the widescreen picture and stereophonic sound. CinemaScope quickly spread throughout Hollywood and became one of the most influential developments in postwar filmmaking, helping establish widescreen photography as the industry standard and influencing later anamorphic systems, particularly Panavision. Its importance went far beyond simply making movies wider: it changed the way directors composed shots, how theaters presented films, and how studios marketed the theatrical experience, permanently altering the visual language of mainstream cinema. ↩︎
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Author: Doyle

I was born in Atlanta, moved to Alpharetta at 4, lived there for 53 years and moved to Decatur in 2016. I've worked at such places as Richway, North Fulton Medical Center, Management Science America (Computer Tech/Project Manager) and Stacy's Compounding Pharmacy (Pharmacy Tech).

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