There’s just too much here for me to even know where to start writing so I’ll just scatter my thoughts in rough. It’s yet another in my current spate of movies I know I loved the last time I saw them but the fact is, “last time” is getting to be nearly a decade ago in some cases, lol, so I’m just checking. My bulletproof defence of this movie as an entry in my Top 100 list, and a good place to start, is that, hey, if you’re gonna make a list of the best movies ever, you have to have a Marilyn Monroe movie in there; and while this movie ain’t exactly Marilyn (that would be Some Like It Hot, if you wanna go in that direction), it is without a doubt the best work she did.

But there’s more to this movie than Marilyn. There’s Arthur Miller’s screenplay; John Huston’s direction; co-stars Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter, Montgomery Clift; Alex North’s score (for some reason I always kinda thought of this guy as some kind of temp score replacement guy but he’s fast becoming a fave); Russell Metty’s photography. You can learn everything you need to learn about the Oscars from the fact this movie didn’t even merit a single nomination. I was expecting to find at least a supporting actress nod for Ritter or something. I guess it was too far ahead of its time. And boy is it – the production design is practically timeless. Marilyn Monroe could walk around today the way she looks in this movie and nobody would bat an eyelid. It could be only the slightly muffled, crackly sound that gives away the movie’s age.

“You’re the saddest girl I ever met,” Gable (a leading man playing a guy called Gay, hehe, ok that’s the other giveaway …) tells Monroe when they meet. For me that’s what it comes down to – despite all this movie’s other qualities, its how the Monroe connection resonates across time as you watch every second of her screen time. While all her roles showed how attractive and bubbly she could be, this is the one that makes it possible to actually fall in love with her, to feel like you’re actually seeing a real person in there. It’s perhaps the saddest performance – I feel the need to add, if it was a performance – ever filmed, and the best she ever gave or ever would.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 11:52 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.