In other movies, you have two men who go out looking for pretty girls to have fun with. We pulled a switch by taking two girls who went out looking for men to amuse them: a perfectly modern story. It delighted me. It was funny. The two girls, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, were so good together that any time I had trouble figuring out business, I simply had them walk back and forth, and the audiences adored it. I had a staircase built so that they could go up and down, and since they are all well built… This type of movie lets you sleep at night without a care in the world; five or six weeks were all we needed to shoot the musical numbers, the dances and the rest.
Howard Hawks, from Entretien avec Howard Hawks, by Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, “Cahiers du Cinéma”, n. 56, February 1956

The second and last musical comedy by Hawks after A Song Is Born. Some of the film’s stylistic elements are part of the aesthetic of the American style animation film. To note especially is the marked caricaturization in the plot’s adventures, the gestures, tones, desires and behavior of the characters. As far as rhythm is concerned, it is calm and sober like in most films by Hawks, whatever genre they may be. Hawks is not the only American director with comedies influenced by animation. (…) In comedy – and the musical comedy here to Hawks is a comedy enlivened by constant intervals in which characters comment on their desires and obsessions with more than a little detachment – Hawks saw the opportunity to satirize some of the most mechanical and widespread tics and defects of society. They are lined up like in a drawer. Dorothy’s subdued nymphomania and Lorelei’s rationalized greed do not create conflict between the two friends because as the true maniacs that they are they are exclusively interested in one specific thing and absolutely ignore everything else. Like butterflies in a painting, Hawks transfixes on the screen the monstrosity of each one with luminous clarity and simplicity. The curt Hawksian tone is just as alien to expressing contempt as it is to expressing compassion and connivance towards the characters. This curtness, which to Hawks is the search for the right distance for stigmatizing a mania, an obsession or a vice without being indignant or dirtying its prey, has never been more classic, serene and expressive than in this film. And he never demanded more art and talent from his actors.
Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films, Laffont, Paris 1992.