The Seven Year Itch

Many years ago, I drove onto Manhattan island in the late summer during a heat wave.  The city was suffocating, like a sauna in which the red hot stones had also been used to cook cabbage.  The entries to the subways were infernal and, when I looked upward  I expected to see the skyscrapers melting like tallow candles.  It's this sort of heat that drives the negligible plot of Billy Wilder's 1954 comedy, The Seven Year Itch.

An uninteresting Everyman played by Tom Ewell deposits his wife and son at the train station.  They are fleeing the heat of the Summer for Maine.  A prologue to the film shows the Indians on the island also engaging in the custom of exiling wife and children to the cooler north woods and the movie purports to be sociology -- this is what inevitably happens when married men are set free during the height of the summer heat.  Ewall's character is the editor of books sold by their salacious covers.  (His firm's version of Little Women shows half-naked damsels on the cover and purports to be the truth about life in "a women's dormitory.")  Ewell is assigned to edit a copy of something like the Psychopathia Sexualis written by Kraft-Ebbing and, alone at home, he imagines all sorts of liaisons with sexy anonymous women.  His upstairs neighbor turns out to be Marilyn Monroe in a role so archetypal and suggestive that she doesn't even get a name.  Ewell meets Monroe's character when she drops a tomato plant in an iron pot and almost kills him on his back terrace.  She comes down to his apartment and he haphazardly tries to impress her -- he's too abashed to make any attempt at real seduction.  She's friendly and the relationship develops into something that looks to the world like spectacular adultery, but is really chaste.  Meanwhile, Ewell, also, fantasizes that his wife is having an affair with the hunky Tab Hunter-like, Tom McKenzie.  Monroe's character moves into Ewell's house to take advantage of his air-conditioning.  More comical misunderstandings ensue, although the film really isn't very funny.  When Tom McKenzie shows up, he can't believe that the feckless and dull hero has a beautiful woman living in his house:  "What do you want me to believe?" he sneers.  "That you got Marilyn Monroe in your kitchen."  In fact, Marilyn is in the kitchen making cinnamon toast.  Ewell, suspecting his friend of seducing his wife, sucker-punches the man and knocks him unconscious and, then, flees the seductress for the Maine woods, departing with such alacrity that he forgets his shoes.

There's nothing to the movie and it lags seriously.  The film was based on a Broadway play by George Axelrod and it's obvious in the mise-en-scene.  The picture seems claustrophobic and the two leading characters (the show must have been a "two-hander" on Broadway) are caricatures that strike only one note and that repeatedly.  Everything about the film is prosaic and limited -- even the famous scene where Miss Monroe has her skirts blown over her head by a subway train passing under a grate doesn't really work in the movie.  Viewers will recall the scene from an iconic promotional photograph -- the image doesn't look that way in the film and the actress is shot from an angle in which her upper body is not visible.  Indeed, the sequence looks anonymous in the movie, leading to the surmise that a body double has been used and we're not even seeing Monroe's real knees and thighs.  (The promotional shot is much more revealing.)    The picture works on  your imagination, fraudulently seeming to be more salacious than what we're actually shown.  The girl refers to a photo-shoot in which we imagine her to be naked.  In fact, when we're shown the picture, it's nothing special -- Monroe is wearing a bathing suit.  Similarly, Monroe tells a story about getting her toe caught in the bathtub drain while bathing (in icy water because of the heat).  For some reason,
Wilder inserts a shot showing the actress in the bath tub, but she's chastely posed with bubbles covering her entire body -- an image that's inconsistent with the account of the ice-water in the bath.  Monroe is beautiful, but what she promises throughout the film's 90 minute running time is inaccessible and, certainly, unfilmable.  If she were to really embrace the sad sack Ewell (who looks a little like Art Carney), the film would combust and the movie would melt before our eyes.  So it's all tease with no follow-through.  Ewell (who played similar roles with Jayne Mansfield) is wholly without any kind of charisma.  He's supposed to be impersonating every horny husband suffering the titular "seven year itch", but the man is dysfunctional as a romantic lead, dull, and without a trace of comic instinct.  He's simply not equal to Monroe's breathy cream-colored apparition is silk pajamas or slinky evening gown and, so, as if by perverse design, the film can't go anywhere interesting.  Monroe is playing against a homely mannequin and, although she can do lots of things, she can't kiss the life into Tom Ewell.  Imagine how great the film would be if Ewell's part were played by an actor like the middle-aged Buster Keaton or, even, the man proposed for the part the young Walter Matthau.  It's like a forcing Monroe into a romantic role with Karl Malden.