Marilyn Monroe movies

Summer of Marilyn: The Seven Year Itch

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

So here I am, behind yet again on my Marilyn movie-watching.

That’s okay, though. Summer is meant to be easy going and relaxed so I will take my time on these and if summer busyness gets in the way, I’ll just have to push my posts off.

If you are new here, I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies this summer and I have called the The Summer of Marilyn.

This week I watched The Seven Year Itch, which was nothing like I expected it to be.

I thought this movie was a drama until I started it and realized it was definitely not a movie to be taken seriously. This is the movie with the famous scene of Marilyn’s dress being blown upward by her standing over the subway grate.

This is a movie made in 1955 that jokingly explores the idea that middle-aged men who have been married seven years feel like they need to break out of the mundane and sow some more wild oats. I, personally, did not find it that funny that the movie makers thought it was funny to make fun of men in New York City sending their wives and children to the country for the summer so they can go meet other women and have parties, therefore feeling free and easy again.

We start the movie with Richard Sherman, a man working in book design, who sends his wife and son off to the country for the summer. Richard is determined he won’t be like other men who drink, smoke, and chase after women while their wives are gone.

Not long after he decides this, though, he heads home to a house that’s been made into apartments and starts complaining as he unlocks the door about how his wife wants to live in a house and not an apartment. Their apartment is nice, he decides, especially with nice neighbors upstairs and – he turns around and someone needs help being buzzed in through the main door.

That someone is Marilyn Monroe who is looking, of course, drop-dead gorgeous.

Richard has to renew his resolve not to forget himself and go crazy while his wife and son are gone with Marilyn acting all clueless and walking around upstairs either naked or half naked. When she almost drops a tomato pot on his head his resolve cracks and he invites her down for a drink.

It’s then he realizes she’s gorgeous but not too bright and that is totally fine with him.

He’s already been daydreaming a lot and Marilyn kicks his daydreams into high gear.

He enjoys daydreaming about how Marilyn will fall for him but, truly, Marilyn is just absolutely clueless to his advances and his more interested in getting into his apartment to take advantage of his air conditioning, which she does not have in her apartment.

Marilyn, incidentally, does not have a name in this movie. Her name is just The Girl.

This is another Billy Wilder film with Marilyn – like Some Like It Hot.

The movie is based on a play written by George Axelrod.

In addition to Marilyn it stars Tom Ewell who played Richard Sherman in the play as well.

Many lines from the play had to be cut because they were deemed indecent by the Hayes office, which determined what was and wasn’t allowed in movies at that time.

There has long been rumors that during the filming of the famous scene with Marilyn, there was too much noise to use the final footage and it had to be shot again on a sound stage. While it is true that the scene was shot twice, footage was used from both shoots, according to an article on Wikipedia. Marilyn really did stand over a grate outside the Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theater, then located at 586 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. She also did get a lot of attention from the press and onlookers when this happened because Wilder invited them to drum up attention for the film.

This left Marilyn’s then-husband Joe DiMaggio pretty ticked off, but, alas, the scene became one of the most iconic ever in a movie.

Overall I enjoyed this movie, even if I didn’t like some of the messages underlying the plot. In the end, the craziness was drawn to a close before it got too crazy but the in-between stuff that seemed to suggest that men running around on their wives was okay wasn’t a great message for me. I do know that most of it was being said as a joke and that part of the message really was that it wasn’t actually okay to be done.
And, yes, I really liked Marilyn in this movie. She was so free and joyful. Yes, she was sexualized, just like in her other movies, but she also held her own as an actress, playing the comedic parts with ease and pure entertainment.

Next up for me for Marilyn Movies is Monkey Business.

After that, I only have two more movies:

All About Eve and The Misfits.

Both are dramas.

If all goes to plan, I’ll be writing about Monkey Business next week, on August 3, All About Eve on August 10 and The Misfits on August 17th.

(Monkey Business is available for free on YouTube, for those who might like to watch along.)

Summer of Marilyn: Niagra

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

This summer I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies for fun. I was supposed to watch Some Like It Hot this week but The Husband (this is a silly nickname I give my husband for the blog) wanted to watch Niagara so I said we should go for it since I’d never heard much about it.’

It was not the romantic or screwball comedies I’ve watched so far from her so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was a little nervous it was going to be super dark but it was more intrigue than darkness.

The Husband calls the movie light noir. He also pointed out that she was only in about 35 minutes of the movie but believed she completely stole the show, which I agree with now that I’ve seen it.

This movie is one of the first major acting roles Marilyn had, and she doesn’t use her signature breathy voice which answers the question I had before – that breathless speech wasn’t her normal speech. It was simply her signature voice. I liked hearing her normal voice because the other way she speaks is so fake to me and grates on my nerves. That could be because I have seen so many parodies of her over the years.

This movie came out in 1953 and from what I can see, quite a bit of it was actually filmed at Niagra Falls. It was directed by Henry Hathaway.

The other stars of the movie, who were in it even more than Marilyn, were Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters, and Max Showalter.

The movie starts with Marilyn’s husband at the falls in a place I’m pretty sure you can’t stand at anymore if you were ever allowed to in the first place. The man travels back to a cabin right next to the falls and I really wanted to know if that is a real place because the idea of a room overlooking the falls seems awesome to me. I can imagine it might also be loud, though.

I looked it up and it turns out the cabins are not real.

According to IMbd, “The Rainbow Cabins were not real cabins, they were movie sets built exclusively for the film at a cost of over $25,000. They were built in Queen Victoria Park directly across from the American Falls. The stone structure located by the Rainbow Cabins was torn down, but a similar one can be found in the same park at “Rambler’s Rest.””

The man returns to his room where Marilyn has been smoking a cigarette but then quickly pretends she is asleep which already eludes to the fact that she may not be what she seems.

We move over to a couple who are visiting Niagara Falls both for a delayed honeymoon and to meet up with the owner of the company the man works for after the man won a contest. They reserved a certain cabin but Marilyn and her husband are still in that cabin. Marilyn (Rose) convinces them to let her and her husband (George) keep the cabin because she says her husband is suffering from PTSD from the Korean War and had been in a psychiatric hospital.



The couple reluctantly agrees to move to another cabin, but they will continue to run into Marilyn (Rose in the movie) again and somehow get swept up in the crazy drama that will begin to unfold shortly after they meet her.

While sightseeing at the falls, the wife spots Marilyn making out with a man who is clearly not her husband and realizes there is a lot more to the story of George and Rose.

That becomes even more clear when Rose wanders into a party being held at the cabins, places a record on the player, and George doesn’t like it so he breaks the record.

The wife (Polly) goes to the cabin to help him take care of his hand which he cut on the record and he tells the couple that he met Rose while she was working as a barmaid. She is considerably younger than him, full of life and he thinks she hates him because of all his issues.

Pretty sure the couple (The Cutlers) didn’t want to know all that but, well, there they had it.

Things start to go off the rails pretty quickly for George and Rose and, sadly, for the couple trying to just have a nice holiday. I won’t give away too much but there is a murder plot and mistaken identity and – well, you just have to watch it to believe it. It’s pretty crazy.

I will give away that I really wanted to punch Mr. Cutler about three times in this movie. Maybe five. I, in fact, dislike Mr. Cutler so much with his goofy smile that I didn’t even bother to look up what the first name of his character was while writing this blog post. I don’t even remember the name of it.

The guy was so dismissive of his wife’s concerns the entire time that by the end of the movie I was rooting for a full-fledged divorce. One day I’ll write an alternative ending to the movie where she tells him she’d be better off without him because he acts like she’s a crazy, hormonal woman all the time.



According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film came from Walter Reisch who eventually wrote it with Richard Breen and Charles Brackett. They said most films that take place at the falls are romantic, but Reisch wanted a film with murder in it.

Monroe was suggested to play a main role by the head of Fox Studios, Darryl F. Zanuck. According to Wikipedia, Reisch liked the idea but when Zanuck suggested she play a villain, he wasn’t so sure.

“According to Reisch, “We thought that was a nice idea until there came a second telephone call that he wanted her to be the villainess, not the girl… My God! Here was the prettiest girl in the whole United States of America! But he insisted it was a great idea, so we finally did it. We didn’t know whether she would like it, but she had no objection, whatsoever—on the contrary.”

A bit of trivia:

  • Jean Peters who played Polly Cutler had originally been suggested for Marilyn’s role, but by the time the movie started to get made, Marilyn’s popularity had grown and Peters was switched to play the wife. (No big deal because the wife got more screen time anyhow).
  • According to IMbd, even though she had a starring role, Marilyn Monroe was still under contract to 20th Century-Fox as a stock actor at a fixed salary, so she actually made less money than her make-up man did.”
  • During filming of the shower scene, director Henry Hathaway had to keep yelling at Monroe to keep away from the shower curtain and away from the lights as she insisted on being naked (as she was under the bed sheets at the beginning of the film). To pass the censors of the time, the scene was darkened in post-production.
  • Canadian officials didn’t like the film because they said it gave Niagara Falls a bad name by focusing on a murder taking place at it.
  • The “Letterman Hospital” that Rose mentions at the beginning of the film, saying George was a patient there, was Letterman Army Hospital at The Presidio of San Francisco. Built in 1898, it cared for returning wounded soldiers from every major conflict, especially World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It was closed in 1994, the Army base at The Presidio was decommissioned in 1995 and the buildings of the hospital were demolished in 2002.  2005 Lucasfilm opened its headquarters on the site and named it the Letterman Digital Arts Center. (source IMbd)

Overall, if you haven’t already guessed, I enjoyed this film. It had me biting my nails and hooked until the end. While it did exploit Marilyn’s beauty and there were those moments of men gawking at her like they’d never seen a woman before like in other movies, it was still a great storyline.

If you want to read another review of the movie (which I didn’t agree with) you can click here.

Another review is here.

If you want to read about Marilyn’s fashion in the movie you can click HERE.

Up next for my Summer of Marilyn will be Some Like it Hot which was the movie I was going to originally watch this week. I was going to watch Niagra next week, though, so I just switched the two around.

After that, I’ll be watching:


July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Summer of Marilyn: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies for the summer.

I have a confession.

I think she might annoy me a bit.

I know. Isn’t that awful?

It’s just that her breathy voice and the weird things she does with her mouth are so distracting to me. I know. Sacrilege to any hardcore Marilyn fan.

Maybe all her little gestures are annoying to me because I am a heterosexual woman and none of that does a thing for me.

Regardless, I’ve heard so much about her over the years, I figured I should actually watch her movies and see if she was any good or not.

So far, I have watched two of her movies all the way through and have decided that, yes, she was a good actress, but she was also put in a lot of stereotypical roles because of her large chest and pouty lips. I am hoping not all of her movies were like that, but these first two on my list here.

Of course, I have only watched the screwball comedies she was in so they would focus on her beauty as part of the plot points.

This week I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blonds with Marily and Jane Russell.

The movie starts with Marilyn getting proposed to – well, she’s getting a ring at least – by a bit of a nerdy man. That’s a theme in her movies – she’s always attracted to nerdy men with glasses.

As I started to watch the movie, I remembered I have seen it before. It has been years since I have seen it, though, so I totally forgot it was a musical. I should have remembered since it is the movie where Marilyn performed Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.

Anyhow, the movie continues with Marilyn and Jane, who are showgirls, deciding to go on a cruise to Europe. The women are also best friends even though they are very different. Marilyn (Lorelei in the movie) likes a man to be rich and buy her diamonds while Jane (Dorothy) likes a man to be fit and doesn’t care about wealth.

HyperFocal: 0

They both like to make men watch them, however.

There is a lot of skin shown in this movie, including a scene where Jane dances with members of the Olympic team who are also traveling on the ship to Europe. They are wearing only tiny, skin-colored shorts, the entire time. Little Miss asked, “Why are those men naked?” I realized at that moment that watching the movie with her in the room might have been a bad idea, even though it is way more tame than the movies out today.

There are several ridiculous moments as a private detective follows Lorelei on behalf of the father of her fiancé, who thinks Lorelei is simply a gold digger. The private detective and Jane fall for each other, which, of course, complicates things. There is also this whole thing about Lorelei trying to con an old, rich, married man out of a diamond tiara and later being taken to court to answer for the theft of it. Then there is that sexy dance scene in court by Jane, which was totally bizarre to me, but supposed to be funny. I’m such a prude – I just found it disturbing.

When I watch Marilyn movies and see how absolutely gorgeous she is, I am one, jealous, but two, aware of what it took to get her to that place of beauty because I once read an article about all the plastic surgery, dental implants and other physical changes she had to read that perfection.

As I watched the movie I also wondered if her movie voice was really her voice. Like is that how she talked when she asked for a fresh towel at a hotel or asked her assistant to get her a cup of tea? Or did she yell at people with a thick accent – like a Brooklyn or Boston accent? “hey! I’m walkin’ here! Whatreya’ doin’”

I mean, why did she talk like that? Was it considered sexy back then? I find it a little annoying today but that’s probably because I’ve heard so many parodies of her voice.

After a Google search, I learned from Vogue magazine that the breathy, whisper she spoke in was something she used to overcome a childhood stutter. She kept it for her acting and it became her signature voice. So, yes. It was her real voice and she used it in her everyday life. Not like Michael Jackson who totally faked that high voice, but I digress….

Now, When I saw Marilyn sing that famous song, I wanted to know if it was her voice so I Googled that too. The answer was yes and no. She did most of the singing, but an actress and singer Marni Nixon actually supplied part of the notes – the higher notes – which are the notes I thought weren’t hers.

Jane Russell matched Marilyn in this movie with her talent and humor. I do believe she was the better singer, but she and Marilyn were such a fun pair and worked well together.

The bottom line is that I liked the movie, but, as a self-declared prude, there is a lot I could have done without. For one, I didn’t need to see Marilyn and Jane in such skimpy clothes so much. I definitely didn’t need to see all the cleavage and I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at these women essentially using their bodies and sexuality to get what they wanted. Men were portrayed in this movie as too stupid to think when the women were around because, according to the movie, they were both too hot to handle. Men couldn’t be around them without melting into a sexually aroused mess.

I know that some will say that a movie like this was needed to show that women can be in control too and use their sexual prowess to get what they want – like men have been doing for years – but I don’t like it when either sex does that. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have some fun watching the movie. It just wasn’t my favorite movie because the whole theme of “Marilyn and Jane are hot so men will fall over them” just was overplayed and overused in my opinion.

If you would like to watch the movie I am sure you can find it streaming, but I also found it on Youtube here:

Next week I will be watching Some Like It Hot, which is another screwball comedy with Marilyn, Jack Lemon, and Tony Curtis.

If you would like to join in watching the movies with me, here is the rest of the schedule for the Summer of Marilyn:

July 6: Niagra

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Next Classic Movie Impressions feature: Summer of Marilyn

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 1 Comment

I am going to be doing another Classic Movie Impressions feature this summer and so far, I am offering it up for whomever might like to jump in during the rest of June and part of July.

Erin from Still Life, with Cracker Crumbs is too busy in June for this feature and I know Katja has been busy as well, but the invitation for her to join in is totally there.

Anyone else who wants to join may do so as well and at any point. You don’t have to watch or write about all of the movies to be a part.

Now, onto who I am featuring this summer.

Marilyn Monroe.

So yes, the feature will be called A Summer of Marilyn.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know I featured Paul Newman for my summer movie watching last year and Cary Grant for this spring.

I thought I should choose an actress this time around and decided on Marilyn when I discovered how many of her movies we own on blu-ray. I’ve also been a little fascinated with Marilyn because of how Hollywood really abused and used her until there was nothing left of her. It’s a story with a sad ending but I guess I am looking for some happiness she might have experienced in the making of at least a couple of these movies.

I’m going to kick off the feature this Thursday with How To Marry A Millionaire, which I watched on that wonderful Saturday where I had where five hours to myself with no responsibilities and no one else to care for.

If you want to quickly watch it, or have already seen it, and want to jump in, go for it. Or you can share a post later and just link to mine and I’ll let readers know you’ve shared your views too.

Without further ado, here are the movies I plan to watch and the dates I plan to blog about them on:

June 15: How To Marry A Millionaire

June 22: Gentlemen Prefer Blonds

June 29: Some Like It Hot

July 6: Niagra

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits