The seven year itch

USA 1955

Dir: Billy Wilder

100 mins

Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts; based on the play by George Axelrod

Rating: PG

Less hectic of pace than Some like it hot, this Billy Wilder adaptation in nevertheless stylish enough to make its basic staginess unimportant.  Tom Ewell is the married man, stranded in the heatwave-stricken city by his vacationing family, who entertains thoughts of bedding the model upstairs.  This being 1955, there is no bedding but much entertaining.  The innocently provocative Marilyn Monroe was never better cast than here, and the film was a seminal one in the formation of her image as the abused dumb blonde.

National Film Theatre, Feb 1977

George Axelrod's Broadway play about temptation in female form became the perfect vehicle for Marilyn.  Although hamstrung by 50s censorship, Billy Wilder managed to achieve the apotheosis of Monroe, effortlessly, by utilising a blast of hot air from a New York subway.  The cinemaScope screen could barely contain her.

National Film Theatre, Jun 1988

Marking the culmination of the 'super-starlet' period, this classic comedy has model Monroe providing an unwanted distraction to happily-married neighbour Tom Ewell.  It contains a central moment in the making of her image – the shot of her apparently happily displaying her body as her skirts blow up over a subway grating, said to have led to her divorce and since endlessly reproduced and reworked as a key Monroe icon.  While publicity used her personal suffering to excuse her sexuality, can we detect in the Monroe dumb blonde an innocence about sexuality that requires no excuse?

National Film Theatre, Dec 1980

George Axelrod's successful stage play concentrated on the gentle humour of a grass widower (Ewell) and his fantasies of sexual freedom.  Using the film as a star vehicle for Marilyn Monroe radically altered the balance, making it simply a blatantly funny sex comedy.

The Oxford companion to film