Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

 I'm always looking for movies that my young daughter, my older son, my fastidious wife and I can all enjoy; we all enjoyed Gentelmen Prefer Blondes, though for somewhat different reasons: my wife Susan enjoyed some of the wit and the performances of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, my son Gideon particularly liked the humor of Charles Lederer's script, my daughter Victoria loved the art direction of Lyle Wheeler and the costumes by Travilla, and I liked the film particularly for the choreography of Jack Cole and the direction of Howard Hawks, whose work has fascinated me ever since I read the book about Hawks by Robin Wood that came out in 1968, the same year I first saw Citizen Kane.

Of course Wood did not much care for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes because it did not conform to Wood's view at the time that art (and he considered Hawks's films art) should show a moral interest in life as well as being well-structured, a view strongly influenced by British critic F.R. Leavis, whose courses Wood took at Cambridge.  As far as I know Wood did not write about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes after he moved to Canada, came out as gay, and became interested in Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism, but I feel fairly certain his view of the film shifted, especially since the film contains strong homoerotic elements: Jane Russell sings "Anyone Here for Love" (by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) while male Olympians cavort around her in skimpy bathing suits and ignore her; at the end of the film as Russell and Marilyn Monroe emerge in wedding dresses together they look as if they would prefer to marry each other than the schlubs (Elliot Reid and Tommy Noonan) they've chosen for sex (Russell) and money (Monroe). 

A kind word here about Marilyn Monroe.  In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and some of the other films in which she appeared she reminds one of Stepin Fetchit, i.e., she effectively pretends to be something of a empty-headed sex kitten in order to exploit the considerable gullibility of men, in the same way Stepin Fetchit faked his laziness to get his way with white men.  Hawks's films, of course, are full of formidable women (Lauren Bacall, Angie Dickinson, Katherine Hepburn, Paula Prentiss, etc.) undermining the partriarchy.