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Rating: Marilyn has not yet appeared in any reviews on DeBaser. Strange to say, considering we are talking about a monument of 20th-century culture, cinematic and otherwise. I'll take it upon myself to break the ice, unworthily reviewing a milestone in her career.
Why Marilyn? I adore this splendid woman; and I adore her because even today, an image of her still turns me on. Something she would have been happy about, since Marilyn always joyfully declared that sex is the foundation of everything; if something doesn't work, it's because the Main Engine isn't activated. Put like that, it almost sounds like a vulgar translation of the sublimation of sexuality that even Freud couldn't have defined better.
Many things came easily to Marilyn; especially being Marilyn. Yet, in her life, she was also unfortunate, caught up in dirty business, giving herself away in the wrong way yet always innocently (or not? There are photos of her - the world is flooded with images of Marilyn, like the Madonna, Jesus Christ, and Elvis - where she has such a shrewd expression that I would be inclined to believe the opposite; but often Marilyn was everything and the opposite of everything).
"The Seven Year Itch" (a silly and puritanical title for the original "The 7 Year Itch") is one of the most popular films from that immense cinematic genius and mischief-making spirit, Billy Wilder (one of the 3 directors worth spending 2 hours of your life in front of an illuminated screen). The mischief of the original title is scattered throughout the film.
Tom Ewell (priceless) is the bourgeois Mr. Richard Sherman, an indispensable employee of a publishing house that transforms "Crime and Punishment" into "The Killer Nurse" and various delights, condensing literary classics worse than "Reader's Digest" but tastier. Left in the city's sultriness by his wife and child in complete Little Astronaut, gone on vacation to the lake, Sherman is actually left alone with his hypocrisy of a Good American, common sense, healthiness, no alcohol, and no cigarettes, and sad vegetarian food (he's a smoker always on the verge of impossible redemption). Insulated by this mental straitjacket of principles and holding the paddle his son forgot to take for vacation, he will find himself at home with the only true Revolution every people oppressed by Dictatorships must fear: Sex, personified by its One True Incarnation on celluloid. Marilyn. Like a cyclone, the unnamed platinum beauty will storm into the life of the deranged employee, incapable of unbuttoning and/or restraining his zipper, almost more in love with his hesitations than with the liberating girl, whose habits include putting lingerie in the freezer, innocently appearing naked on the balcony (it all stems from a vase falling from the Girl's window) and flaunting a Body that actually frightens men more than it excites. (The rest is bar talk among men...)
The Truth is unbearable for 99 percent of human beings, especially males, and Marilyn is the Truth, one of the Truths our pagan existence is made of. The fateful trapdoor will allow the two friends to enter each other's houses, playing "tagliatelle" on the piano (when Sherman tries to woo The Girl with Rachmaninoff, posing as the Intellectual-Male-To-Then-Seduce, she counters with the terrifying Tagliatelle, and Wilder delivers justice to this male type and intellectualism tout court in favor of Nature).
Another false myth, especially in our days, is the obsession with beauty; dismantled by the Goddess NormaJean through the emotion towards "The Creature from the Black Lagoon"; a fantastic cinema-in-cinema essay that still to this day chills for how it seems to the viewer to be witnessing an event unfolding there and then, and not a film using another contemporary film. This is followed by a clattering subway ride with the consequent display of the Divine's legs and panties (justly letting her Sacred Potta cool down). This immortal scene was actually reshot in studios after, for publicity, Wilder (the old great SOB Billy) had Marilyn blowing in the street, creating logical and blessed traffic jams. The girl adores Richard (who is a real mess even if sympathetic) because she lacks nothing and certainly doesn't need to hunt for hunks, for Beefcakes. Look at that: among the Viennese Genius's various merits is that of having created an incredibly sensual woman, apparently ditzy yet capable of taking life as a perfectly fitting glove and, above all, who loves to be alone (Marilyn was an orphan; I quote her exact words: "I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because of talent or beauty but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else."). That little rented attic where we imagine Marilyn flitting about in panties for the workers' joy, that apartment that can only be lived in alone is sheer delight for Marilyn, heroine of Independent Femininity, more so than 10, 100, 1000 feminists.
As we all know, nothing is consummated except Sherman's hallucinated paranoias, who, incapable of seizing the moment, prefers to feverishly fantasize about all imaginable and possible consequences if he "had only consummated" such a prime filly... The return to the fold and the quiet family life, with the return of wife and child, are experienced by Richard with joy, almost as a close call. Once again, the divinity descended to enlighten a man on Love, yet again was chosen over by safety, bread, and circus.
I love this woman, who perhaps never existed and perhaps never died; the other, the bride of DiMaggio (the only one who truly loved her, ignorant and innocent almost as much as she), the Stanislavskian intellectual, wife of the cold Arthur Miller, JFK's doped-up mistress never existed either. It's an Idea.
"I'M NOT INTERESTED IN MONEY, I JUST WANT TO BE WONDERFUL" (Marilyn Monroe)
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