Rhapsodies

Well after a brief holiday break I decided to start the year with something simple and fun with the works of Marilyn Monroe.

The first on my list was Howard Hawks‘ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I mostly knew about this movie through having read about half of the very funny original book by Anita Loos. The movie is a very loose adaptation, telling the story of the beautiful and extremely… innocent showgirl, and unrepentant gold digger, Lorelei Lee played by Monroe.

The plot begins with Lorelei and her best friend Dorothy, played by Jane Russell, traveling to France in a luxury liner to meet Lorelei’s mark… er… finance there. From there hilarity ensues.

This is a fun film in a fluffy kind of way. A lot of the songs feel a little forced but they are done well enough that it doesn’t matter. For me the ditzyness of Monroe’s character gets grating really fast. Fortunately we have the sexy sarcastic Russell to appreciate. Lorelei comes off as the sweet innocent child who doesn’t think anything bad will ever happen to her… Dorothy’s the grownup who holds her hand when she has to cross the street.

Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch is the film with everybody’s favorite picture of Monroe holding down her skirt as standing on the subway grate (on the posters anyway… the censors wouldn’t allow it to appear in the original movie)

Seven Year Itch is an adaptation of the stage play with the same name starring Tom Ewell as Richard Sherman. Sherman is a New York publisher who’s home alone for the summer having sent his wife and son off to Maine for vacation. Left to his own devices he is torn between boredom of a new diet and nothing to do but his job and the guilt of temptation while staying on the staying on the straight and narrow constantly being judged by his vivid imagination.

Into this comes a beautiful young woman, played by Monroe who has just moved into the apartment above his. A complete innocent who makes him want to throw all of his promises to the wind while worrying that his marriage is falling apart due to a phenomenon known as the seven year itch.

This is pretty much Tom Ewell’s show with nearly half of the movie is him monologuing. Everything else rotates around him with everyone else serving as props and obstacles. In fact there were a few instances when I was watching this I was willing to believe that Monroe’s character was another of Sherman’s fantasies.