Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

It's summer! Take a vacation on a boat with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe for the musical cruise of your life. We're heading to France and their dubbing of musicals.

What's a musical? C'mon now! Even if the trend of movies where people break into song when they're in love or when they're happy or sad tend to come and go, some still meet with success nowadays like High School musical.

In France, American musicals are still dubbed in French but, probably because they speak better and better English, or maybe because the song sound better that way, they only dub the dialogs and keep the original recording for the songs. That wasn't always the case. Translators in the fifties often became lyricists and had a hard time combining lip synchronism, the musicality of the rimes and the meaning of the sentence.

 They would be frustrated to hear that their hard work was thrown away in many cases like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In fact, when released in France, Marilyn paraded in her pink dress while singing in French. Imagine her Parisian accent. Hard to believe? Yet in this film, Lorelei Lee is in France and is supposed to sing in a Parisian cabaret. She even starts her song by an operatic "non, non, non".

As a matter of fact, the first cabaret sequence in France was supposed to be a "Two Little Girls From Little Rock" reprise sung in French by the two stars. The scene was cut and if neither picture nor sound has turned up since, you can still a glimpse of it in the trailer.

Quite surprisingly for such an important musical, there is no legitimate soundtrack, only songs spread upon various collections of Marilyn recordings. Yet masters are still extant in the Fox vault since The Diamond Collection CD offered us clean recordings of songs like "Anyone Here For Love". Interesting anecdote: this song was supposed to end with  Jane Russell being cheered by the gymnasts, but during shooting, one of them accidentaly pushed her in the swimming pool and the ending was altered musically and visually with a wet Jane Russell so that the dive be kept in the final cut. It is the original version you can hear on the CD and, here again, see in the trailer.

French singer Claire Leclerc recorded her dubbing of Marilyn on November 16 and 17, 1953. Actress Mony Dalmès dubbed her speaking voice. But the voice of the American star is now popular throughout the world, heard many times on CD, so lately when the movie is aired on French TV in a dubbed version, the songs are kept in English, sometimes with subtitles. However these French songs are not lost, you can find them all on DVD. I'm giving you here an extract of the most famous one. In it, Diamond is no longer Marilyn's best friend, it just "seduces her better".

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That's all for today, folks!