Undying appeal of the "Pretty Woman". Thirty years in the making.

The "whore with a golden heart" is as much of a Hollywood invention as a "gentleman gangster". Orson Welles who could not avoid knowing "the boys" as an entertainer in the 1930s New York had reported that compared with even smartest of them, a truck driver was an intellectual. I suppose that during after-Depression years, truck drivers were quite intelligent.

A real hooker meeting Richard Gere's character would probably concoct up a cockananny plot with her red neck boyfriend to part the amorous banker with his money. At least, a literary source for the Blau Angel, Professor Unrat, proposed exactly this outcome. Why then, with all its ridiculous improbabilities, the Pretty Woman remains a popular movie thirty years after the premiere? Obviously, because it is a Cinderella story sufficiently spiced for the modern audiences but insufficiently burdened with practical details to raise its parental warning label.