Look, it is nearly impossible to provide enough artistic and critical corrections to Andrew Dominik’s Blonde in one essay. And that is not what I am aiming to do here. Where the Joyce Carol Oates novel, which I did read, is clearly from the beginning a highly fictionalized work as it merely refers to a bicycle messenger as “Death,” and treats “Marilyn Monroe” as a catch-all white whale for the various pitfalls that women in Hollywood can/do fall in to, film can take the abstract and make it literal. Not only that, but it can make it exploitative.
So let us look at 2012’s Forever Marilyn, a seven-film Blu-ray collection containing some of her biggest/best films and a sprinkling of some of her mediocre ones. Sure, I have my gripes with it but when taken in totality, this is a fine place to start your examination of Monroe’s work if you are a neophyte. Or a great reminder of what a talent she was if you have not experienced her work in a while.
On paper Howard Hawks might seem like a square peg for this round hole, but if you really watch his films than a certain pattern seems to emerge that marked him as the perfect choice. While the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, John Wayne, and Gary Cooper starred in some of his beloved classics, these male figures are largely defined by their jobs and one or two other signifiers. The women they encounter (memorably played by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Angie Dickinson, and Lauren Bacall, just to name a few) are mysterious, sardonic creatures with heavy pasts and vastly more sexual experience and knowledge. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes situates two such women in the leads with Jane Russell’s man hungry tough talker and Monroe’s near parody of a beautiful gold digger.
The two open the film singing a song laying out their characters, Monroe takes every opportunity to vamp and play it up while Russell stays back cool and bemused by it all, before launching them on a transatlantic cruise. The narrative only pauses long enough to deploy another musical number that either comments upon the plot, develops character, or provides an ironic counterpoint to the material. Imagine the gal pals from Gold Diggers of 1933 dropped into the consumerist fantasia of 1950s cinema while keeping the push-and-pull of material comforts versus authentic feeling of the narrative.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is how it treats the typical object of the male gaze as fully fleshed out beings capable of gazing right back into the camera. In fact, Russell and Monroe often appear to be looking directly at it as if completely aware of their potency and power over the male characters in the film and the audience watching. Monroe seems to puncture hers with a wink while Russell does it with an eye roll. It is the battle of the sexes being waged between female star and the cinema’s inherent voyeurism.
Russell and Monroe demonstrate not only sexual agency throughout but intelligence and self-awareness. Think of their two best known solo musical numbers as proof positive. Russell’s “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” finds her hornily parading around a barely clothed mass of muscular men. They play subservient second fiddle to her in an all-black ensemble while decked out with jewels and heels. She saunters, vamps, and sarcastically begs for or dominates these indifferent men for their attention. For once, the male body is reduced to anonymous sexual spectacle for the audience’s consumption.
Then there is “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the centerpiece of the film and a moment so often referenced, parodied, and appropriated that its initial power and function has been largely lost. Monroe’s Lorelei Lee has been (temporarily) tossed aside by her love interest because his father thinks she only likes him for his money. While knowing that he is in the audience she performs the number essentially playing up the image of her as a gold digger with a mercenary wink and nod. If these people are going to assume that her only intentions with this man are monetary then so be it. Diamonds will be her lone comforts in her metaphorical old age.
Of course, the punctuation to this scene, and indeed much of the film, is Monroe delivering a repartee that provides the synthesis to the entire film:
“Say, they told me you were stupid! You don't sound stupid to me!”
“I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it.”
Popular legend has it that Monroe pitched that last line. I struggle to think of another that could better summarize her magnetism and persona up to this point. Neither one of these women are anyone’s dumb plaything, but Monroe especially is dumb as a fox here. Gender is a performance, these two working girls know it, and they are masters of the form.
But she is only part of the central trio of beautiful blondes looking to marry rich here with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable rounding out the group. Bacall does her smart, tough dame thing but for comedic effect rather than as an alluring femme fatale. She even gets a wonderfully meta crack in the film (“I've always liked older men… Look at that old fellow, what's-his-name, in The African Queen; absolutely crazy about him.”) while engaging in a May-December romance with William Powell. As her career would go on to develop, Bacall would strengthen her comedic skills in films like Designing Woman, Sex and the Single Girl, and most notably as Barbra Streisand’s over-the-top mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces. This was Bacall’s first comedy and she shows a wit and acidic delivery that had been present in her dramatic parts but shines differently here. The steel with curves could create something softer when given the chance.
Grable, meanwhile, leans into her bawdy, salty persona, which by this point had made her queen of the lot at Fox and lead numerous films to big box office. Her character, Loco, is the life of the party and a real girl’s girl. The off-screen comradery that the three women developed was evident in the final film. For as much as Monroe’s vexing lateness and reliance on her acting coach annoyed the other two, they saw that it came from a place of wanting to do good work, stage fright, and a need to protect the more vulnerable places of herself. Grable and Bacall befriended the neophyte yet meteorically rising star. The press was eager to cook up a fight between the rising starlet and the reigning queen yet Grable is said to have told Monroe, “Honey, I’ve had mine. Go get yours.”
Frankly, that is what endears me to this movie – the female friendship and the chemistry between the three of them on display. The story is serviceable enough as three Manhattan models try to land rich husbands to varying results, but I would not mark it down as one of the undisputed classics in any of their filmographies. It is an incredibly enjoyable one, though. One of those ultra-cozy three or three-and-a-half star films that you can watch repeatedly and laugh at the slapstick, the word play, the sitcom setups and payoffs.
At the center there is Monroe’s near-sighted model who refuses to wear glasses because, as Dorothy Parker quipped, “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” This is just patently absurd because she looks adorable in them. Yet the image of her that probably endures the most is the modeling sequence where Bacall looks sophisticated and intelligent in a floral print dress and parasol, Grable shows off her famous legs in shorts and a sweater, and Monroe walks out in a red bathing suit accented with sparkly jewels. The three of them are three distinct visions of feminine beauty for the time period and project their unique personas in their body carriage and costuming.
And you know what? That is more than enough to gladly spend 90-something minutes on. Three fabulous leading ladies getting to be funny and glamorous in equal measure in silly and elaborate scenarios? Yeah, that is the charming stuff right there. One wishes that the script were an all-timer, but considering that this helped Bacall expand her career, gave Monroe access to better parts/films, and let Grable essentially exit the film industry on a high (reviews for her in particular were glowing at the time), How to Marry a Millionaire charms and does what it needed to do for everyone involved.
This is not to say that River is a bad film, but rather a perfect serviceable and average western. It does demonstrate that Monroe had more going on than just the bubble-headed gold digging vamp of the previous two films. In fact, the two megawatt stars get some damn fine entrances, even if the subsequent narrative beats do not live up to them. Monroe is introduced as a saloon singer strumming a guitar (she does a passable job at miming the fingering). She is glancing off into the distance looking tired, plaintive, and vulnerable while performing “One Silver Dollar.”
Mitchum is introduced to us chopping down a tree then wandering back into town from who knows where. He is reunited with a long lost son (Tommy Rettig) he never knew he had. This man clearly needs some kind of redemption. Since it is the 1950s, his redemption is clearly in the form of a nuclear family – the love of a good woman and being a father to his son. Never mind that Monroe has a no good fiancé (Rory Calhoun). There must be a villain and a roadblock to the final act’s redemption and the domestication of the trio.
Yet there is something compulsively watchable about the whole thing. Call it the power of movie star charisma, chalk it up to the CinemaScope imagery or the natural beauty of the locations. Preminger knew he was not a good fit for Americana and his lack of comfort with action sequences and special effects work shows in the water rapids scenes. They are clearly in a studio tank with rear projection getting bounced around by a handful of guys in the crew. Preminger left during post-production and let Jean Negulesco complete reshoots and editor Louis R. Loeffler in charge.
In her later years Monroe dubbed this film a “Z-grade cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery and the CinemaScope process.” I think her critical assessment is perhaps too harsh if not inaccurate. Contemporary critical reception was largely of the script is weak but it is enjoyable enough variety. If for nothing else, Mitchum radiates macho sexual energy while Monroe is a luminous goddess who projects tough survivor and fragile creature in equal measure. While not the best western either one of them made (we will discuss hers later while his include The Lusty Men, Blood on the Moon, Dead Man, and Track of the Cat), River of No Return is a prime example of charisma and star power making practically anything worth watching at least once.
Meet the Donahues (Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnnie Ray), a family act that eventually settles down from the road by sticking the kids in a private Boston school and reworks the act. Mom is a songstress, Dad is an all-around entertainer, and the three kids inherit a variety of skills. Ray is a singer, O’Connor is all-around performer just like his pop, and Gaynor is a passable singer and great dancer.
Where does Monroe fit into this whole thing? Well, she is barely in it. Fox promised her the lead role in The Seven Year Itch if she did a role in this to help boost its box office potential. She is a hat check girl who dreams of being a star, naturally. She engages in a romance with O’Connor and gets to do a few musical numbers. We spend far more time with the other performers, much to this film’s detriment.
O’Connor and Dailey do what they can to salvage the production, but the other three are an albatross it cannot overcome. Ray was hired because he was a huge singing star at the time and the studio hoped he could become their very own Frank Sinatra. Just a tiny little problem, Ray is a charisma vacuum in front of the camera and incapable of acting or dancing with any demonstrable skill. The studio quickly learned of their problem and allegedly rewrote the script to get him written out as fast as possible. He leaves the family act to become a… priest? Even watching it this decision feels entirely like it comes from left field.
While Merman and Gaynor, tremendously talented as they were, just never learned to modulate for the camera. A few years before her passing, Gaynor gave an interview with CBS Sunday Morning where she stated that her film career was so brief because the movie camera did not like her and she did not like it right back. While Merman just never seemed to realize she could do more with less in front of a camera as she is always playing to the back row. This was a persistent problem with her limited forays onto the big screen. Something about what they could do on the stage just never translated when stuck in front of a movie camera.
For her part, Monroe does what she can with the thinly sketched role. She turns up the combustible sensuality in numbers like “Heat Wave,” “Lazy,” and “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.” It is actually here that the difference between Monroe as a person and Monroe as an actress are evident. When she is merely the hat check girl, we get meta-jokes about her following the advice of her coaches about how to speak and perform. Then it all switches once she is in a fabulous designer gown and singing and giggling in front of an audience. Or even in a rehearsal in the case of “Lazy.” Something within her illuminates and she appears to demand our attention. Monroe becomes aware of the power of her sexuality and gender and plays them up for everything she’s got, which was quite a lot as it turns out. Ed Sullivan described her performance of “Heat Wave” as a flagrant violation of good taste, and I cannot think of a greater endorsement for watching that scene alone.
But apparently O’Connor did not share my low opinion of the film. In an interview from 1979, he claimed this was the best film he made. Better than Singin’ in the Rain? I do not see it in the slightest. But I am glad that he enjoyed his time making this and thought highly of it, even if I vigorously disagree with his assessment. Although watching him and Gaynor do a spoof of Dailey and Merman is a hoot.
And so we close what is dubbed “Book One” in this collection. The next volume is nothing but one towering classic after another, but I do so wish that they had stuck one more film in the set to make it an even eight. There are a handful that I have in mind, but I will discuss them later on. Let us get back to the actual films in this collection and start diving into “Book Two.”
Her first pairing with Billy Wilder, the director that she made two of her greatest films with, finds Monroe as The Girl, a nameless siren that might very well be the fevered horny imaginings of Tom Ewell’s lustful married man at play. The Seven Year Itch both adapts a popular Broadway play to the screen and allows for Wilder to comically explore one of his favorite subject matters, adultery. Part of me does wonder what would have happened if Wilder had gotten his original choice for leading man, Walter Matthau, but the results may have wound up incredibly similar if a bit spikier with Matthau’s hangdog expression and penchant for sardonic delivery.
In the original play, Ewell’s married man really does have an affair over the summer with the beautiful blonde upstairs but there is something about this being the imaginings of a sexually frustrated man that plays better. When The Girl, and Monroe as a star power, emerges into the film everything pauses to simply bask in her charm and beauty. At once completely innocent and seemingly unaware of her appeal, Monroe makes The Girl a magnetic creation as the film plays her casting for meta-commentary. At one point Ewell’s Richard sarcastically states, “...and I’ve got Marilyn Monroe in the kitchen.”
The Seven Year Itch at times seems preoccupied with the very idea of Monroe as a sex symbol and the sexual neurosis and hysteria of the married working class man in the audience. Their proxy spends much of the film recalling, with dubious accuracy, various points at which beautiful women apparently tossed themselves before him. The fact that he’s having this conversation with an imaginary version of his wife while she knits and cuts him down to size is enough to keep an army of therapists in business for years.
In fact, a majority of the film is simply watching Richard’s neurosis and sexual hang-ups take hold and blossom. The proximity to this screen goddess causes his already manic state to worsen. One dream finds him thinking about his wife coming home to catch him in the midst of sexual congress only for her to shoot him dead. His own lustful urges cannot be tamed or controlled while The Girl seems completely unaware of the erotic pull of her very presence. In some scenes she dials up a husky speaking voice or overplays the lip movements and makes her eyes appear heavy lidded as if she were affixing quotation marks around her sensuality. You sense that Monroe thought this whole sex symbol business was quite a gas. While other times she seems wide-eyed and indifferent to the attention given to her.
It was The Seven Year Itch that transformed her from upcoming starlet gaining a lot of attention and considerable fan frenzy to Marilyn Monroe, the cinema’s preeminent screen siren and supernova movie star. It is not hard to see why as the film dissects her screen persona for all its various moods and colors, for all its impenetrable qualities and vulnerabilities. The iconic image is of Monroe standing over the subway gate while the rushing by car whooshes her dress up, but there are several moments that seem to poke fun or comment upon her nascent iconography. Think of Monroe talking absentmindedly about her nude modeling past or the dream sequences where she wears glamorous gowns and parodies her dizzy blonde persona. Even more revealing is her reaction to Richard making a pass at her and her shrugged off, “It happens to me all the time.”
All of these contradictions make The Girl into both the Madonna and Whore, which is why I so firmly believe that this character does not exist and is simply the complicated, contradictory creation of a frustrated male psyche. She is both the child-like innocent (she likes dunking potato chips in champagne, is often wearing white) blessed with womanly appeal (those dresses are snug in just the right places) and the kind of sexual magnetism that keeps nature going (the subway scene). Behold the 1950s ideal vision of womanhood and a symbol of the ascendant sexual revolution.
It was after the success of this film that Monroe took more control over her career and starred in various passion projects. She demonstrated considerable dramatic chops and surprising good accent work in Bus Stop, stole the show from Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, fought the studio for more control over her work, and went off to New York to study at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. There is a popular legend that the notoriously shy and perfectionist Monroe performed a scene from Anna Christie with Maureen Stapleton. A young Ellen Burstyn was present for that scene and said it was one of the greatest performances she saw there and that the “luminous quality she had on the screen was oddly enough not reduced, but enlarged in life.”
Many of the Actors Studio contemporaries like Burstyn, Stapleton, and Martin Landau had nothing but glowing praise for her abilities as an actress. And a great actress she was if not an outright artist of the form. Her work before Actors Studio had plenty of intelligent little details and choices but her final run of performances post-Method training show a noticeable improvement. She adds shades and textures of drama to her comedy or harnesses her personal turmoil for effective use in her dramatic roles to a much higher degree.
It was also around this time that the film industry started taking her more seriously and garnering her with prestige. BAFTA nominated her for The Seven Year Itch and The Prince and the Showgirl (Best Foreign Actress), the Golden Globes nominated her for Bus Stop (Best Actress – Musical or Comedy), and she won the David di Donatello and Crystal Star Award for The Prince and the Showgirl (Best Foreign Actress). With her combination of magnetic screen presence, talent, beauty, and smart business moves, Monroe was at the height of her prowess during this time.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest comedic films ever made, it topped AFI’s 100 Years 100 Laughs and has routinely appears on lists compiling the best of the best, Some Like It Hot starts off as a Prohibition Era gangster story. We open in 1929 Chicago and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre witnessed by two hapless musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) who promptly get in drag and go far away to sunny Florida to let the heat die down and escape retribution from Spats Columbo (George Raft). (What an expertly named gangster and I wonder if the ghost of Damon Runyon was seething with jealousy he did not conjure it up first.) The comedy starts slowly before going screwball and breakneck as soon as Curtis’ dubbed feminine voice is first heard.
On the run from both the cops and the mob, Joe/Josephine (Curtis) and Jerry/Daphne (Lemmon) merely trade one kind of pursual for another. Now these two have to deal with the lascivious glances of horny millionaires drying out in the sun, busy-handed bellboys, and, in the climax, even the very gangsters they tried to escape from in the opening act. The topsy-turvy world of Some Like It Hot has these two boys in drag, one of whom consistently has to be reminded of his birth gender and not getting lost in the illusion along the way, as objects of desire while they seem to be the only red-blooded men in the film who even pay attention to Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Monroe).
Introduced while trying to board a train, Sugar Kane gets wolf whistled by an errant bit of steam. It might take roughly 30 minutes for her to appear but once she does Some Like It Hot becomes as much about the ways that the feminine sex experiences sexual bartering as it is about all the rest (obliterating gender, sexuality as malleable, money as the ultimate aphrodisiac, and bone-deep cynicism about everything). Monroe’s Sugar Kane has a weariness that was unthinkable in her films and performances from just five years earlier. No longer the dewy ingenue, Monroe had spent roughly a decade in the industry being underestimated so she knew this woman’s troubles and dreams intimately.
Wilder later stated that her gift was that of delivery. “She can read comedy better than anyone else in the world.” Whatever problems occurred between the pair in this and The Seven Year Itch never quite kept him from talking about her talents and strengths. Yes, he complained about her lateness, nerves, and unreliability, but he also stated that when he saw her up there on the big screen that none of it mattered. She was worth it and delivered the goods.
Her knowledge of gender and sexuality as performances within themselves is on display throughout. The transition she undergoes while absentmindedly strumming the ukulele before getting up to sing “Runnin’ Wild” is like a light switch goes on. Even better is Monroe’s justifiably famous rendition of “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” Wearing a sheer gown with starbursts across the nipples, she flirtatiously dips above and just below the spotlight as if doing a burlesque and teasing the illusion of nudity. Whatever her personal demons may be, Monroe never demonstrated them in her various roles. Sugar Kane is perhaps the zenith of her creative powers. She deservedly won the Golden Globe for Best Actress – Musical or Comedy. One can only chalk up her Oscar snub to her notorious reputation.
The cascading sexual identities and performative, if not mutable, nature of outward presentation is underscored when Curtis decides to adopt yet another to romance Sugar Kane. Wilder, always cynical and distrustful of American capitalism, has Curtis adopt a loopy Cary Grant impression while masquerading as a dweeby Shell Oil heir. That this character is modeled entirely off of a private fantasy shared with Josephine moments earlier is not lost on the viewer. Even this beta male creation is a gendered performance calibrated specifically to the whims and fantasies of one character. Wilder would go on to bigger and broader satire of American capitalism in just a few years with One, Two, Three which practically imagines Coca-Cola as the American identity writ large.
Wilder’s generally jaundiced views on love and marriage appeared throughout his career, but rarely have they been this mercenary. Well, maybe in Kiss Me, Stupid where a little role-playing and infidelity does a marriage good. Here Joe E. Brown’s hangdog and perpetually horny millionaire takes one look at Daphne and practically salivates. Their romance is almost sweet and endearing in some warped way. Entranced by this bank account, Daphne practically takes over and Jerry is ready to give it all up and live the life of a much younger wife to an obscenely wealthy older man. Or the ways that Sugar Kane rebukes romance and love until she meets Shell Oil Junior then she practically strips herself and rediscovers her groove.
Yet it is Lemmon that anchors and propels the plot. His justifiably beloved and praised performance is one of the greatest in his long and prestigious career. This was his first pairing with Wilder and they would go on to make further enjoyable films like The Apartment, Irma La Douce, and The Fortune Cookie. Here, Lemmon’s Daphne, he spends far more of the running time in drag than Curtis, becomes the comedic centerpiece. A fearless and manic creation, Lemmon’s character perhaps best exemplifies how the film routinely obliterates sexual and gender identities, or demonstrates that they operate on a spectrum with the right push.
Lemmon’s genius is best viewed in a scene after a date with Brown’s Osgood Perkins III. Seemingly love struck and shaking maracas, he insists that he will marry Osgood for his money and the security that will provide. Curtis’ Joe demands that he repeat “I’m a man” as a mantra, a callback from an earlier scene where the mantra was used so he would not seduce Sugar Kane. This time it is to remind himself of the impracticality of the budding romance and marriage proposal. It all leads up to the famous final line which ends this swirling, kaleidoscope of drag performances and Kinsey scale demonstrations with an ellipsis rather than a period. Some things in life are perfect. Some Like It Hot is perfect.
The melancholia hanging over the film is there from the very first scene as we witness Roslyn (Monroe) applying her makeup while practicing her speech in prep for her divorce proceedings. She is staying with an older woman (Thelma Ritter) who casually mentions that this would be the 77th divorce that she has witnessed. The two of them meet Gay (Clark Gable), an aging cowboy, and Guido (Eli Wallach), Gay’s friend and handyman who took the women to the courthouse. The quartet spend the evening drinking and talking while Gay and Roslyn slowly develop a romantic connection.
Much of the film is spent following around these sad characters and adds a fifth misfit, Perce (Montgomery Clift) a burnout rodeo performer, before rollicking off to the mustang chase that has largely been referenced and alluded to before this. Roslyn’s sensitivity and humanist beliefs stand in contrast to these “live free or die” salt-of-the-earth types. She finds the casual violence of their lifestyle unnerving and disturbing while they find her reactions to it strange, if not childish as they believe this is just the way that things are and have always been.
The sense of dread and loneliness is palpable long before we go out into the desert for the mustang sequence. Amid expansive cracked and dried out vistas, these characters chase after this symbolic representations of their own selves. These men are chasing after something that is no longer necessary and emblematic of the ways in which these people have been rejected and left behind by time. There hangs over The Misfits leading into this climax a meta-commentary as director John Huston’s gambling problem effected the production just as much as Clift’s side effects from a nearly fatal accident marked the rest of his life, Monroe’s struggle to leave behind her sex symbol past and be seen as a complete person beyond the men who saw her merely as goddess or healing balm, and Gable’s machismo refusing to acknowledge how time had caught-up with him.
For me, the strongest performance here is Gable’s as he nakedly lays bare the regret and stubbornness lurking beneath his extremely masculine screen persona. He is a man out of step who has drunkenly squandered his relationships and refused to change or grow along with the times. What he needed in his youth has become a crutch and threatens to leave him alone and devastated. That this would be Gable’s final performance is somehow fitting. He pours everything he was capable of delivering from his long and storied career into this part and ends his career with a definitive role. He is alternately father and lover to Roslyn, co-conspirator and antagonist to Perce and Guido, and Gable nails every nuance of the part keeping up with the Actors Studio trained co-stars and sometimes appearing more honest than they do in a scene.
In fact, the final scene of Gable and Monroe alone in the car and driving off into the distance packs a bigger emotional wallop given their fates shortly after production ended. Gable would die before the film opened while Monroe would die roughly a year later. Equally troubled co-star Clift would pass away about four years after production wrapped. The sense of loss is tangible in the film.
For her part, Monroe show just how much that Actors Studio training had paid off for her dramatic work. She leans into the vulnerability, trauma, and sadness at her core and develops a fully fleshed out persona in Roslyn. Her fearlessness in finding and exploring the truth of this woman makes you wonder what else she could have accomplished in the nascent filmmaking styles and techniques of the New Hollywood period. Would she have found time away from the big studios to go make an earnest little film with John Cassavetes like Judy Garland did in A Child Is Waiting? Would she have gotten into more dramatic parts and moved away from the comedies that had largely defined her career? Would she have fought for substantial parts in literary adaptations and earned more industry respect?
These “what if” questions haunt your thoughts as the film comes to a close. Yet there is also something entirely poetic and circular about Huston being the last director she finished a film with. Way back in 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle, Huston cast Monroe in a small but pivotal role that helped launch her career at the studio into bigger parts. Now here was Huston at the very end, once again working with her in a pivotal dramatic role.
I would argue all of these roles are a “key” to understanding the woman behind the legend. The one who labored to be a great actress, to escape beyond the giggle and jiggle persona that the studio wanted from her. The woman who managed to do just that by subverting the dumb blonde persona every chance she got or demonstrating an aptitude for drama, a musical understanding of language and its potential for delivery.
June 1, 2026 makes the centenary for Monroe. Truly, she was one of the defining American pop figures and icons of her era. While time has abstracted and turned her into something amorphous or reductive, her work endures. She had more talent and range than the breathy giggle and tightly dressed popular image would have you believe. She was a great film artist who took from the women that came before her and turned it into something wholly unique and individual. A template that has been referenced, remade, remixed, and emblazoned across a variety of media and artistic means yet nothing compares to the original.
Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe. You were a gifted comedienne, an underrated dramatic actress just blossoming into your potential, and a fascinating persona. Perhaps your greatest achievement and performance was simply being “Marilyn Monroe,” a vulnerable but sexual screen goddess that played with femininity’s conventions and its societal limitations and expectations.
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