Red-Headed Woman, by Katharine Brush (1931) (opens in new tab)

“So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Jean Harlow’s opening line in Red-Headed Woman (1932) was a double self-jest: a retort to the title of screenwriter Anita Loos’s best-seller, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a jab at the platinum blonde hair that had already become Harlow’s trademark. But it was also a signal that this film was going to take its story in a different direction than the Katharine Brush novel that inspired it.