A Month of Marilyn Monroe
What a glamorous month!
I don't believe I've made a secret of the fact that I'm not much for Marilyn Monroe. Her talent outweighed the box everyone forced her into, her life was cut down way too short, and in the decades since her death she's been reduced to myth and cautionary tale and I'm of the opinion that we should finally, and firmly, let her rest.
That being said, it does feel like in the last 10-15 years, more and more people are focused on how exploitative Marilyn's life and afterlife are and her legacy is being treated with more respect. Since TCM honoured Marilyn in what would have been the month she turned 100, it was a great chance for me to go beyond her popular image and discover a few new movies that went against the grain of how she's remembered today.
I'd seen a lot of her bigger films before this month, including All About Eve (blink and you'll miss her), Niagra, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, The Misfits, and, of course, Some Like it Hot. I'd also seen some lesser known films, like Clash By Night, We're Not Married!, Monkey Business, The Prince and the Showgirl, and Let's Make Love.
I still have a bunch left to see, but alas, only three new-to-me Marilyn films played this month. They were...
Ladies of the Chorus (1948)
This was one of Marilyn's earliest films and it was a great showcase of her acting talents before she was claimed by pop culture. A sparse story about a mother and daughter who work in the chorus and navigate their changing relationship offstage as Marilyn falls in love, this is a very charming performance from Marilyn and it gives a glimpse of her talent before she was a star.
Don't Bother to Knock (1952)
This melodrama felt like a grab bag of plotlines all centralized in a hotel where Marilyn plays a babysitter with a loosening grasp on reality the longer the movie goes on. Again, she's magnetic here, holding her own against Anne Bancroft and Richard Widmark.
Bus Stop (1956)
I kept waiting for that psycho cowboy to get his head stepped on by a bull but the fact that this is called Bus Stop and sadly not F*cker Cowboy's Brains Get Splattered Everywhere is the greatest movie crime.
If you offered me a million dollars to guess what the plot of Bus Stop would be before I watched it, I guarantee this would have never entered my brain. Marilyn plays a world-weary aspiring actress who unknowingly and unwantingly gains an admirer in the naive, possessive, dumb-as-a-post, never-left-the-farm, absolute jerk of a cowboy, Bo. Because he's the pre-cursor to a red-pill alpha male, he mistakes a brief moment of flirtation as love and spends the rest of the movie forcing Marilyn's character to leave with him because they're going to get married (WHAT?!), ultimately leading to him kidnapping her onto a bus and acting like a f*cking psychopath in the bus stop as the passengers wait out a storm.
AND THEN MARILYN HAS THE AUDACITY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM THE NEXT MORNING AS HE RELUCTANTLY APOLOGIZES TO EVERYONE BUT HER? I beg your god damn pardon?
Marilyn's great. Her accent work (Ozarks) is goofy, but she plays Cherie perfectly. You get the sense that she didn't really have to pull from some deep, inaccessible part of herself to draw out a layered performance here.
I hate this movie.
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So I don't know that I would say this month turned me into a Marilyn fan; I think I'm just as appreciative of her talent as I was at the beginning of the month, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to see layered performances from her early, middle and late career.
July's Star of the Month: 'Singers as Stars'.
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