Here’s a Marilyn gallery we hope is of value to everyone — to those young enough not to have seen these films before (in which case we envy you!), or to those who’ve seen every one of them, since they’re all movies you can watch again and again. A crucial question: Are Marilyn’s five greatest roles also her five greatest movies? Mostly, but not always. “Clash by Night” is actually a better film than “Don’t Bother to Knock,” which came out the same year (1952) — but Monroe’s tough small turn in “Clash” can’t match her eerily accomplished performance as a babysitter with serious mental issues. And “All About Eve” (1950), which features a very young Marilyn for one blissful scene, might be the greatest film she was ever in — but it’s not a major performance. Those qualifications aside, yes, these are Marilyn’s greatest roles and her greatest movies. Taken together, they’re a showcase of her incandescence, her bedazzling beauty, her sly comic talent, and (when you watch “The Misfits”) the future she might have had as a dramatic actress. More than ever, she looks like a movie star out of a dream.
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Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection It’s a paradox, and a bit of a shock, when you first encounter early Marilyn. We think of her as an ingenue who gained in stature and confidence. But in 1952, when she was 25, Monroe made two movies and displayed a wily adventurous actor’s confidence in both of them. In the stormy “Clash by Night,” she plays a cannery worker who isn’t about to let any man tell her what to do, and in “Don’t Bother to Knock,” she gives an accomplished high-wire performance as a babysitter who’s gradually revealed to be a distraught head case. The entire film takes place in a hotel, where Richard Widmark, as a jilted lothario (it’s Anne Bancroft who’s doing the jilting!), tries to get a private party going with Nell (Monroe), who’s minding the child of two of the guests. Monroe didn’t start to study Method acting under Lee Strasberg until 1955, but her performance here feels like a minor Method wonder: She’s yearning and fierce and sensual and discombobulated, all at the same time. She’s better than the movie (which is all about Widmark’s loutish character learning empathy), but this is an eye-opening encapsulation of what a deadly serious actress Marilyn always was.
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Licensing/Merch To this day, Lorelei Lee, the showgirl Monroe plays in Howard Hawks’ sublime musical romantic buddy comedy, is often described as a “dumb blonde” — because she’s obsessed with diamonds, and with landing the kind of rich man who can provide them. But if you look at what’s onscreen, there’s nothing dumb about Lorelei; she’s a whip-smart conniver. She just has her values in the wrong place. The tension “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” spins around is this: How much should a girl be caring about diamonds when she’s living in a material world run by men? Monroe, delivering witticisms that can cut glass (old tycoon: “Have you got the nerve to tell me you don’t want to marry my son for his money?” Lorelei: “I want to marry him for your money”), gives a performance of lyrical sparkle, as she and Jane Russell — as the moody amorous Dorothy — go on a cruise to France, flirting and scheming all the way. It’s Monroe’s eroticized dreaminess in the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number that elevates it into one of the most enthralling musical sequences on film.
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The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Licensing/Merch No Marilyn moment — no movie moment — is more iconic than the one in which she stands over a subway grate, in her pleated white halterneck dress, and lets the updraft blow the skirt up, producing a look on her face that’s essentially a symbolic orgasm. Monroe plays an aspiring New York actress, known only as The Girl, who works as a TV toothpaste spokesmodel, and Tom Ewell is the geek downstairs whose wife and son are away for the summer. Will she scratch his seven-year itch? Monroe’s performance encapsulates one image of her: the doe-eyed, cooing, outrageously sexy and accommodating love bunny who is utterly oblivious to her effect on men. She was never more gorgeous than she is as this cuddly platinum goddess, yet she was also never more of a stylized comic presence. The joke of “The Seven Year Itch” is that Marilyn is playing a pure fantasy the movie knows all too well is a fantasy.
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The Misfits (1961)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection It was Monroe’s final performance, and a movie that became as legendary for what was happening offscreen as on (her marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote the screenplay for her, was falling apart, and Monroe’s chronic on-set lateness tipped over from habit into full-blown dysfunction). Yet part of the skewed power of John Huston’s aridly fascinating modern-day Western is that it seems to be channeling all that downbeat, cracking-up, end-of-the-world energy. In the most impressive serious performance she ever gave, one that points to the career she might have had if tragedy hadn’t intervened, Monroe plays a divorcée at loose ends, fragile yet with a luminous air of freedom, who hooks up with an aging cowboy (Clark Gable, quite marvelous) and his buddies (Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach), then tries to stop them from wrangling and killing a pack of wild mustangs. What she’s really fighting for is a world where men don’t squeeze the life out of women.
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Some Like It Hot (1959)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection The first and still greatest of Hollywood’s cross-dressing comedies — a movie in which the gender-bending undercover farce and the cross-wired romantic hijinks attain a spirit of such giddy complication that it begins to play like some wacked contempo version of Shakespeare (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream of Chiffon”). But in the middle of the antic identity charades is a luscious oasis: Monroe’s performance as Sugar Kane, the ukelele player in an all-girl band, who leaves her whiskey-tippling melancholy behind when she’s pursued by Tony Curtis’s fake millionaire — who, like Cary Grant (who he’s doing an impersonation of), has the wiles to hoodwink Sugar into pursuing him. In her last quintessential Marilyn performance, Monroe acts in a luminous yet knowing daze, aglow with a cockeyed innocence that feels like the very spirit of love.
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