Don't Bother to Knock

 Don't Bother to Knock is an intelligent and efficient low-budget thriller, most notable for Marilyn Monroe's performance.  The film was made in 1952 and directed by Roy Baker for 20th Century Fox.  The movie is best described as an unassuming film noir, fairly short and designed, it seems, for showing as the first part of a double feature with a bigger budget, more glamorous movie. The picture is very well-written, plausible, and entertaining.  Monroe plays a naive country girl and she is convincingly innocent and hapless, not a femme fatale but a young woman who needs (and deserves, it seems) protection against the heartless world around her.  The actress isn't playing the part of a sex bomb here and she initially seems to be rather plain and guileless. The film is a study of serious mental illness, disassociative schizophrenia, and Monroe seems helpless and appealing until her madness turns her into a psychopathic criminal.  The action in the movie takes place entirely in a hotel in downtown New York, the McKinley, and this place isn't posh or luxurious -- in fact, the hotel seems rather dingy with a night club displaying murals of Indians on horseback in what seems like Monument Valley, a disgruntled chanteuse and, of course, a cynical bartender. (The night club has clearly seen better days).  The McKinley has permanent residents, including a nosy old woman and her long-suffering husband who observe their neighbors from the window of their suite -- these are characters who seem to have migrated out of one of Hitchcock's lesser pictures and, in fact, the film gives the impression that it is imitating the Master of Suspense.  Elisha Cook, Jr., who seems to have appeared in about half of the movies made between 1940 and 1960 appears as an elevator operator who gets to utter the ancient jest that his profession has its ups and downs. There are no frills in this movie but it's genuinely frightening and, even, has one scene that startles the audience with its brutal implications.  

Nell (Monroe) is brought to a hotel room at the McKinley by the elevator operator to babysit an eight-year old girl.  The girl's father is the avuncular Jim Backus here playing a writer of newspaper or magazine editorials in town to be feted at a testimonial dinner -- he's going to be given some kind of award.  Backus' writer and his wife are upper crust:  the woman owns expensive gowns, perfume and jewelry.  At the bar downstairs, the caddish Jed, a commercial airline pilot, is arguing with his girlfriend, Lesley Lyn, a torch singer in the night club.  Lyn thinks that Jed is unwilling to commit to her and that he lacks an "understanding heart" so she has written him a letter breaking off their relationship.  Jed, as played by Richard Widmark, is entitled, arrogant, and callous. His girlfriend seems justified in ending their affair.  Jed goes upstairs to his hotel room and, looking out the window, sees the fetching Nell in a room across the air shaft.  He flirts with her and, after a phone call, comes to the room where she is supposed to be babysitting.  It's pretty clear to the viewer that something is wrong with Nell.  She's shed her frumpy street clothes and put on a slinky kimono owned the mother of the little girl that she's watching.  And she's put on the wealthy woman's earrings, a diamond wrist band, and her perfume.  Jed can't believe his good fortune and sets out to seduce Nell, an endeavor that really requires next to no effort.  Nell is anxious to have sex with Jed and seems about to hop into bed with him.  She's locked up the little girl in the bedroom in the suite and ignores her tears and pleas to be released.  Jed is very pleased with himself until he begins to perceive that Nell has mistaken him for someone else -- in fact, she's slipped into a fugue state in which she believes Jed is her boyfriend who was lost in the Pacific War.  (Jed is himself a combat veteran).  Nell is completely deranged and a close-up shows us that she has scarred both wrists with suicide attempts.  When Nell's uncle played by Elisha Cook comes to the room, she brains him with a lamp and knocks him out.  Jed is horrified and doesn't know that the little girl is now gagged and tied in the dark bedroom in the suite.  It's clear to him that Nell is completely crazy.  When the little girl's mother comes to the room to check on her daughter, she finds Nell preparing to kill or mangle the child.  The women fight and Nell escapes, shoplifting a razor blade in the store in the hotel and wandering around in a delusional state.  Nell is about to slash her own throat when Jed approaches her (he's gone down to the Club to make another attempt at persuading the singer, Lesley Lyn, not to dump him.)  Jed speaks kindly to Nell and shows an "understanding heart".  Poor Nell is disarmed and taken away to a mental hospital.  Jed has become a better man, more kind, gentle and understanding.  The chanteuse decides to give him another chance.  

Reportedly, Marilyn Monroe modeled Nell's behavior on her own mother's conduct.  (Monroe's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.)  Monroe is very good and quite frightening, both unpredictable and obsessed with Jed whom she believes to be her dead lover.  There's a scene in which Monroe seems poised to pitch the little girl out an open window on the eighth floor of the hotel that is quite scary and shocking.  When the snoopy old lady sees Monroe putting her hands on the little girl who is leaning out of the window, she screams and the audience in the theater must have screamed as well -- I jumped; it's an early example of a very effective horror-movie "jump scare."  Widmark is good as the cad who turns into a hero.  (The shadow of World War II hovers over everything; today we would say that there's all sorts of PTSD in evidence in the film.)  The bar singer gets to perform a couple of nifty songs for our entertainment.  There are some poetic lines:  Nell says that when she fled Oregon where her parents beat her for showing interest in men, the bus passed trucks on the highway "all lit up like Christmas trees."  The effective, functionally lucid camerawork is by the great Lucien Ballard and there's a wild percussive score by Lionel Newman, sort of like Bernard Herrmann's work for Hitchcock.  The film has a sort of anthropological/archaeological interest, depicting a lost world of lounge singers, shabby hotels, and testimonial dinners.  I thought this was a very good picture.   

Later Roy Baker became known as Roy Ward Baker.  Baker was a British filmmaker who worked on occasion in Hollywood.  My earlier reference to Hitchcock is pertinent.  Baker clearly works in a vein influenced by Hitchcock's films.  His most famous movie is the extremely grim A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic.  Baker worked as a genre director -- he made Westerns, crime pictures, and, at the end of his career, a number of horror movies, some of them reputedly very good.  Baker's last movie was made in about 1980.  He lived until 2010.