Desired and pretending to not like it

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2014)

Lubitsch, at around the time this film is set, would do something like this with a frothy Viennese aroma. There would be no mob subplot and no one gunned down, and just endlessly suggestive twirling with the embroidered limits of social appearances. Soon the French young upstarts at Cahiers would do it with youthful style and lots of cinematic annotation around acting and images.
Here we're stuck with a revue, effortlessly smooth but the jokes are broad and corny, the improvised skits are forced without breath. The appeal is more or less the same all these years later. Monroe captured with a naive purity that has become the image of who we like to think she was, and kept just a little off center so that we yearn for each next voluptuous appearance. Men in drag, musicians that flee with a girls jazz band to Florida to escape the mob, so that we can pretend to inhabit for a while what it means to be desired.
Classic in this case means older and the material is not much better than an Appatow film.