Marilyn !!! Part 2

 This is the second part of my review of eleven Marilyn Monroe movies. For the first part, just click HERE.

5 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) – Highly recommended – A classic musical comedy/farce 
starring MM and Jane Russell as two showgirls who travel to Paris in pursuit of love and money, not necessarily in that order. This is MMs megastar coming out party. It’s very funny; perhaps her best comic performance (although some would nominate Some Like it Hot for that honor).  Plus it has a great script and some good musical moments - featuring MM’s famous Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend number and the very campy Anyone Here for Love performed by Russell, strolling among a score of swimsuit clad male models.  And there’s a very silly, funny scene in a French courtroom near the end. At the time, Russell was the bigger star, but this movie totally changed that.  MM got a line inserted for her character, Lorelei Lee, that might just summarize her point of view on the dumb blonde routine. When her fiancée’s disapproving father (Charles Coburn again) expresses surprise that Lorelei is not the dimwit he thought she was, she replies, ”I can be smart when it’s important. But most men don’t like it.”   Directed by Howard Hawks. Pretty frickin’ great. 

(BTW, the 1925 comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, on which the movie is based, is quite funny and also great! You may want to check that out as well.)  

6 How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) – Not particularly recommended – This is okay, but nothing special. It’s something of a retread of the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes gold-digger concept. This time out, MM shares the spotlight with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, and MM comes in third. She shows her comic chops with a running gag about her being quite myopic. While the ladies do their best with a mediocre script, the movie has no sparkle. The story, about three attractive dames sharing a NY apartment seeking their fortunes through marriage, is dully predictable. The men involved include Rory Calhoun and William Powell.  

7 River of No Return (1954) - Not particularly recommended – Starring MM and Robert Mitchum,
River of No Return is somewhere between a Western and a man against nature story.  MM is a bar singer in the wild west during a gold-rush and is very luscious, even in jeans during a long interlude on a raft and camping by the riverside.  She also speaks in a voice almost like a real person, not the breathy sex kitten voice used in most of her earlier vehicles. Mitchum shows up to reclaim the motherless son that MM has been caring for over the last several weeks. Mitchum is a stranger in town; long absent from his son’s life for reasons that eventually get explained. MM’s boyfriend (Rory Calhoun) is the villain. MM and Mitchum are always watchable, of course, but the picture is just okay, even though it is pretty to watch and illustrates something of a moral. If, however, you were ever a Tommy Rettig fan (he played the kid in the 1950s TV series “Lassie” and in the 1953 cult classic The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.) you might want to see him in this.

  

8 The Seven Year Itch (1955) –  Recommended (with reservations) – This very popular comedy was adapted 
from a successful Broadway production  in which a fretfully neurotic married man, alone in his city apartment while his wife and child spend the summer in Maine, fights the temptation to have an affair with his new upstairs neighbor. Tom Ewell played the guy, Richard Sherman, for over 900 performances on the Broadway boards and reprises the role in this movie. The girl upstairs is MM, who’s very friendly and quite used to garnering enthusiastic male appreciation. In truth, though, it’s a hot summer, so she’s mostly interested in Richard’s air conditioner. There are some funny bits to be sure, and MM once again shows herself to be quite the comedian (or comedienne, as they said in the fifties). This is the movie famous for MM standing over a subway grate enjoying the breeze as her skirt blows up around her shapely legs. (In the fifties, seeing a young lady’s thighs was something of a thrill.) I must admit that I was increasingly put-off by Richard’s non-stop monologue, narrating his every thought out loud; it may have worked on stage, but after a while, I found it a bit annoying in the film; and the 1950s sexist male fantasy, even as a satire, has not aged well.  But taken as a comedic period piece, it's pretty classic.

  

9 Bus Stop (1956) – Recommended – MM can act. Really! The film is about a young, egotistical, remarkably naïve rodeo cowboy named Bo (Don Murray) who ‘s never been off his Montana ranch. Now he’s on the bus heading to Phoenix for the big rodeo there, expecting to win every event. On the way his companion-chaperone, Uncle Virgil (the great character actor Arthur O’Connell) suggests that it’s time for this 21-year-old whippersnapper to find himself a woman – a notion that rattles Bo, who admits that he “don’t know anything about gals; nothing at all.” Accepting his uncle’s suggestion, Bo vows that he’ll find himself an “angel”, lasso her like a calf and take her home. Once in Phoenix, he finds his “angel” in world-weary saloon singer Cherie (MM). She’s not at all keen about going off with this wacky lunk as some sort of trophy. And she knows she’s no angel.  Even so, he gets her on the bus home against her will; but a forced stop at a roadside café during a blizzard forces Bo to find his humanity. The terrific screenplay by George Axelrod is adapted from William Inge’s Pulitzer prize winning stage play. Axelrod, who also wrote The Seven Year Itch, as well as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), knew what he was doing. The Cherie role was a godsend for MM, who completely and beautifully inhabits her character. The sexy voice from her previous hit films is completely gone; in its place is a hard-bitten voice with a credible Ozark accent and attitude to match. The movie as a whole is both comic and melodramatic. As a plus, there are some fun rodeo scenes. 

10 Some Like It Hot (1959) – Recommended – MM got top billing, but actually she’s got somewhat of a supporting role to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.  MM plays Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, a sexy singer/ukelelist in a travelling all girl band – Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopaters.  Curtis and Lemmon are a couple of musicians (they play sax and string bass respectively). They’re also the sole surviving witnesses to a Chicago mafia massacre and need to flee for their lives, pretending to be dames to join Sweet Sue’s band – on a train heading heading down to Florida. Joe (Curtis) becomes Josephine and Jack (Lemmon) becomes Daphne.  Various cross-dressing hijinks ensue, complicated by the fact that both men develop a crush on Sugar Kane. She’s gullible in that charming MM way and Tony and Jack do quite well in drag.  In fact, Lemmon’s Daphne character even attracts a gazillionaire admirer in Osgood Fielding III (the wonderful Joe E Brown) adding to the many complications. It’s all silly, madcap fun. Written and directed by Billy Wilder. The role of Sugar Kane may not be much of a stretch for MM, but she’s wonderful; and her male costars are fabulous. This is a bona fide classic. It doesn’t get my highest rating only because the dated gender attitudes occasionally rub against the comedy sixty years on. 

11 The Misfits (1961) – Highly recommended – Starring Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter. The screenplay was written for MM by her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, even though their marriage was largely on the rocks by that time. MM thought this was her best movie. It’s certainly her most interesting dramatic role. It was also her final completed film and likewise Gable’s last film – he died of a heart attack a few weeks after shooting was complete and a couple months before the film was released. The movie starts as a young woman, Roslyn (MM) is getting divorced in Renoo, accompanied by new friend Isabelle (Ritter). Roslyn is at a crossroads, not sure what to do with her life. When she and Isabelle meet aging cowboy Gay Langland (Gable) and his buddy Guido (Wallach), a taxi driver and renowned bush pilot, the men try to convince Roslyn to give Western ranch life a try – each hoping to hook up with her. Roslyn’s soul is stirred by the arid beauty and stillness of the Nevada outback, and when Isabelle supports the idea, she agrees to stay awhile. But times and attitudes have changed and the men – intent on rounding up wild mustangs for cash – are slow to realize that the old cowboy life is a thing of the past. This one holds up, and MM was right: she gives a pretty terrific performance.  The great director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Night of the Iguana, Prizzi’s Honor, etc] helmed this, MM’s last movie, as well as her first significant film, The Asphalt Jungle, above.] 

The first ten of the above films are available to rent at reasonable cost (under $4) on most streaming services (excepting Netflix). The Misfits is available free to Amazon Prime subscribers, and for rent on Vudu, Amazon, and some other services.

Marilyn!!! - 11 Classic Movies Reviewed

There are not many celebrities dead or alive more iconic than screen star Marilyn Monroe.  Elvis, Garbo, Bogart, Houdini, Michael Jackson, Muhammed Ali, maybe Madonna, and who else? Marilyn was stunningly sexy and attractive, controversial in her personal life, and possessed of that rare cinematic quality called “IT.”  

In the process of reading Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel Blonde recently - a 700+ page quasi-biographical tome about a fictional character named Norma Jeane Baker aka Marilyn Monroe -  “inspired” by a true story as they say nowadays – I became, not for the first time, fascinated by MM’s story:  the person, the actress and the myth; and so, decided to watch some of the key movies that formed the career of this 1950s megastar. I owed it to myself to fill in the gaps, right? So, over the next couple of weeks, the wife and I did just that. We watched eleven MM movies, all of which are available on most streaming services (except, as usual, not on Netflix).  Most (not all) are well worth a visit – or revisit.  

As a public service, I’ll describe and provide a mini-review of each below, along with my recommendations.

For those under, oh let’s say 60, who may have heard of Marilyn Monroe, may have seen the Warhol silkscreens, appreciated Elton John’s homage to her – the original 1973 Candle In the Wind, and so on, but are not of the generation that grew up knowing her story, Marilyn was THE American pin-up girl of the late 1940s and early 1950s, THE American cinema sex goddess of the 50s and early 60s, the epitome of the male gaze during those times, and paradoxically perhaps the most famous breaker of that era’s sexual taboos.  Her 1962 suicide symbolized to many the impossible contradictions and constraints imposed by Hollywood, the media, and the moral police on mid-century women. 

Born Norma Jean Baker in 1926 to a mentally ill mother, father unknown,  she became a virtual orphan, abandoned, raised by a succession of orphanages and foster families (at one of which she was molested at the age of ten) until she was married off at age 16 to a neighbor boy five years her senior to avoid a return to the orphanage. Shy, alone, unloved, needy, an insecure stutterer; she was also attractive, ambitious, something of a perfectionist, and ultimately a damned good actress. Determined to succeed, she used sex to meet increasingly influential men as a path up the ladder and hopefully as a pathway to love. Initially cast as a sexy blonde one-dimensional caricature, then as an uneducated but canny blonde looker twisting gobsmacked male admirers around her fingers, Marilyn Monroe made some of the most popular, financially successful movies of the 1950s,. Late in her career, Marilyn (hereafter, MM) was recognized as a solid actress, first for her considerable comic talent and eventually, though relatively briefly, for her dramatic abilities.  Yet, MM suffered terrible stage fright along with anxiety and insomnia, which lead to an increasing reliance on barbiturates (to sleep) amphetamines (to stay awake) and alcohol (to forget).

Throughout her career, particularly in the early films but revisited as late as Some Like it Hot in 1959, her character was set up as the epitome of the predominant male fantasy: a naïve, sexually available, blonde, child-woman knockout. She performed a significant role in refining this image, but it was initially fashioned by Hollywood men and tailored to the male gaze. It was both a reason for her success and a major contributor to her discontent, her mental instability and eventually her overdose death at age 36.

"I never quite understood it, this sex symbol. I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it be sex than some other things they've got symbols of."  — MM in an interview for Life magazine shortly before her death.

The Movies (in chronological order of release date): 

I’m going to start my reviews not with MM’s first film appearance, but with the first significant picture in which she got noticed.  That would be The Asphalt Jungle, released in 1950.

1 The Asphalt Jungle (1950) – Recommended – This is the movie in which MM first really got noticed. It’s quite a good period movie in its own right, directed by John Huston, about a big-time jewelry heist which is almost successful but eventually and dramatically unravels in the aftermath for a variety of reasons. It stars Sam Jaffe as the mastermind, Sterling Hayden as the muscle, Jean Hagen as Sterling’s girl (named “Doll”), Louis Emmerich as an eminent but corrupt lawyer – who agrees to finance the caper. MM has a supporting role as Emmerich’s blonde mistress, Angela.  Her screen-time is fairly small – and I don’t believe she was officially credited - but she’s very noticeable. This is the one where people came out of the screening, saying “Who was that Blonde?” 

  

 2 Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) – Recommended – This is a little B movie thriller, but it’s quite watchable and is, I think, the first feature in which MM has the lead, overshadowing her famous co-star Richard Widmark in the process. It also features 21-year-old Anne Bancroft in her film debut, as the saloon singer who dumps Widmark’s airline pilot for being too shallow. MM is a troubled young woman named “Nell” who gets a job at a hotel babysitting a 9-year-old kid (courtesy of her Uncle Eddie [veteran character actor Elisha Cook Jr.]), while her parents attend an awards dinner downstairs. And MM is terrific as someone we and Widmark (who, naturally, is initially attracted to her) gradually realize is more than a little nutty – and dangerous.

3 Monkey Business (1952) – Not recommended – This movie – not to be confused with the classic Marx Brothers romp of the same name from 1931 - has Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers as a happily married middle aged couple, with Grant,not for the first time, playing an absent minded, easily befuddled scientist, called Barnaby Fulton here.  Fulton has been working on a formula for an elixir that will “cure” aging, testing it out on a lab chimp called Esther. When Esther starts acting .. er .. childish, Dr Fulton tries the formula on himself and, you guessed it, starts acting giddy like a hyped-up teenager. (Grant was in his late 40s at the time.) He takes off with the boss’s hot blonde secretary, buys a cool MG roadster, drives crazily fast, goes ice skating, etc. The secretary, of course, is MM, who’s not very competent and was hired for her looks alone (“Anyone can type”, explains the boss, Mr Oxley (Charles Coburn, always excellent). For me, the story seemed tired, too predictable and not very funny – despite a slate of usually very good writers. It does have a few some good lines, though. Perhaps the best is when Mrs Fulton (Rogers) calls MM’s character “a pin-up girl.” Grant replies, “But half infant”, and she retorts, “Not the half that shows”. MM, as usual, is the best thing about every scene she’s in.

4 Niagara (1953) – Recommended – Another thriller but in a more noir style, this one set at Niagara Falls, principally at a quaint mid-century motel where Jean Peters and Max Showalter show up for their belated honeymoon. This is where they meet the sexy blonde bombshell “Rose” (MM) and George, her weak cuckolded husband (Joseph Cotton). Rose, it turns out has plans to ditch her man Double Indemnity-style. [Hopefully you’ll understand the reference, but if you haven’t seen Double Indemnity (1944), with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G Robinson, that’s another must-see classic.]  MM is terrific as a bad person. 1953 was a great year for her, career-wise – she starred in three successful movies, this being the first. Niagara also features exciting photography of the great falls. Yes, it’s about 15 minutes too long, so as to feature an unnecessary yet action-packed ending, but still worth it. Showalter is mildly annoying; the other lead actors are all good. It is particularly interesting to see Cotton as a distraught cuckold.  

 

The remaining 7 reviews are available in Part 2 of Marilyn!!!  These include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,  Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch and Bus Stop. To get there, click HERE.

Marjorie Prime (2017): Remember?

Marjorie Prime is a strangely charming, emotionally evocative, thought provoking little movie that was released in August 2017 to considerable critical acclaim, but little public notice. I imagine the distributor didn’t know what to make of a small, intelligent, talky drama about memory and loss.  In any event, little was done to promote it. I was completely unaware of the picture at the time. The movie quickly became available on video and has since found its audience. 

I initially saw Marjorie Prime in November 2017 on the advice of a friend, and just loved it. In fact, when I mentioned this movie in my recent review of Tesla, which also was written and directed by Michael Almereyda, I was sure I had reviewed the film back then. But it turns out I started to write that review but never finished it. Maybe this was a good thing, because when I decided to finish the review this week, I took the opportunity to watch the movie again. On my second viewing, not only did the picture hold up – legitimizing what I remember as a quite favorable first impression - but in many ways it was enriched the second time around. 

What’s it about? From the official website: 

            In the near future, a time of artificial intelligence, 86-year-old Marjorie - a jumble of disparate, fading memories, has a handsome new companion who looks like her deceased husband and is programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance? Marjorie Prime is based on Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer - nominated play, exploring memory and identity, love and loss. 

This tells you too much, perhaps, and at the same time Is an inadequate and not very enticing synopsis. So, let me augment a little. First off, the idea is that computer generated holograms designed to look and sound exactly like a loved one, and learning as they go, have been developed to serve as companions, confidants and, well, friends for elders like Marjorie, as well as for people suffering profound grief, depression and other human difficulties of that sort. Marjorie, an intelligent, well-educated, cultured woman - once a highly accomplished violinist – has been slipping lately - both her health and her memory. Her family has gotten her one of these holographic companions, known as “primes”, to keep her company and help her maintain the memories she has left. 

Marjorie Prime features superb acting by a small ensemble, starring Lois Smith and Jon Hamm. Smith, 87 at the time, is simply terrific as Marjorie, sympathetically reflecting her intelligence on the one hand and her troubled spirit on the other: awareness and concern about her gradually corroding memory and the increasing burden she presents to her family. Still, she seems more at peace with her impending demise than everyone else in her orbit. Hamm, in the best performance I’ve seen from him since the early days of Don Draper, plays an incarnation of her late husband Walter, who has been dead for fifteen years now. Interestingly, Marjorie has selected an image of her husband not as he looked near the end of his life, but as she remembers him in his mid-40s prime (no pun intended). Walter Prime, as he’s referred to, is an absolute marvel – in manner, tone, personality, intellect and usefulness. Where Marjorie has memory lapses, Walter Prime has data gaps – which Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law, and sometimes Marjorie herself, fill in from time to time, to which he soothingly replies, “I’ll remember that,” and he does. Remarkably, he thinks for himself as circumstances warrant - imagine Alexa with agency and a physical presence; for example, when he suspects that a troubled Marjorie might be soothed by some music, he’ll selects something he thinks she’d like to hear, turns it on, and asks, “Is this all right?”  Truth be told, Marjorie quite enjoys talking with him.

The primary supporting cast of Geena Davis as Marjorie’s fifty-something daughter Tess and Tim Robbins as Tess’s husband/Marjorie’s son-in-law Jon is also superlative. Tess and Jon moved in with Marjorie sometime after Walter’s death to help care for her. Money was not an issue – these folks are well off, to say the least. Tess is smart and extremely competent but has a lot of unresolved issues with her mother - something we’d expect in this sort of domestic drama.  Jon, as the outsider – though he and Tess have been married for thirty years or more – is the more philosophical, “objective” one and tries to help his wife maintain an even keel. There are family secrets haunting this group that gradually and artfully emerge. But I won’t tell.

Even if I hadn't mentioned it already, you'd quickly - within the first five or ten minutes -presuppose that Marjorie Prime started out as a stage play.  There is little of what we’d call action. It is mostly conversation – clever, revealing, wryly honest; much of which occurs in and around Marjorie’s lovely seaside home – mostly in the living room or sitting at the dining room table. The movie was filmed in Amagansett in far eastern Long Island, and the setting of the house, with its lookout over the wide, empty, sandy beach and the powerful, endlessly crashing waves of the Atlantic just beyond, provides a visual and philosophic respite from the physical and psychological interiority of much of the story.

Thematically, Marjorie Prime is concerned with aging, of course, but particularly and at the same time more generally, with ideas about the intersection of memory and identity. When we are young, our sense of who we are as individuals is defined by our temperament, our personal history (i.e. memories and understandings of our past), and by our so-called potential – hopes and expectations for the future. Who we will be is as much if not more the issue than who we are now.  As we approach the other end of life, however, identity morphs into a contemplation of who we were. Future aspirations are less relevant (or achievable), while memory inevitably assumes a more prominent role. 

Remembrances are selective, highly subjective and notoriously unreliable. The scientific consensus seems to be that what we call a memory isn’t a recollection of what actually happened or even an accurate replaying of our original experience. Rather, when we “remember” an experience, we reconstruct it from the images, sensations and emotions that our mind brought up the last time we tried to recall it. We are retrieving our last visit to the memory, not the original data. As Tess explains to Jon during the film, what we call memory is like a copy of a copy of a copy of an old photo. Each time we revisit, the “memory” is modified in some way – simplified by the omission of some details, shaded by our ego or conscience or emotional state, by our natural tendency to be the hero of our own story and our desire to see ourselves as right most of the time. 

Pop quiz:     When Marjorie and her A.I. companion Walter Prime discuss the past and he asks her if she remembers this or that emotionally redolent event from “their” past, does it matter if the recollected story is complete or accurate or actually true at all? How about if the conversation is between Marjorie and her daughter Tess? Or between Tess and Jon, discussing Marjorie’s life memories?  [Hint: somehow, even to us in the audience, the “truth” does seem to matter.]

Does it make a difference if the story is recalled by an A.I. holographic person or a biological person?             -  Discuss.

When Marjorie Prime won the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the jury lauded its “imaginative and nuanced depiction of the evolving relationship between humans and technology, and its moving dramatization of how intelligent machines can challenge our notions of identity memory and mortality.“ The critical consensus on the film more generally is pretty high – it has a 90% “Tomatometer” score on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metascore of 82 on Metacritic.com.  In fact, most everyone I know who has seen this picture has quite enjoyed it. 

If, like me, you liked Spike Jonze’s Her starring Joaquin Phoenix a few years back – in which a lonely writer falls in love with a personalized (audible but not visible) operating system called Samantha (seductively voiced by Scarlett Johansson) - I think you’ll also quite like Marjorie Prime. The story in this movie is completely different, but the focus on the potential benefits of and the human repercussions from AI is similar. Even if Her left you cold, you may well find that the homey domesticity of Marjorie Prime and its far less flashy use of a similar sci-fi premise is more appealing and interesting.

99 minutes  

Grade: A-

Available free with Amazon Prime Video and with the library-affiliated streaming services Kanopy and Hoopla (both of which require membership in an affiliated public or university library). Also available to rent from AppleTV, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon, and other streaming services.