Both Niagara (1953) and Bus Stop (1956) provided parts for Marilyn Monroe to accommodate a studio imposed stereotype and yet subvert its imposition. A dumb blonde transitions into a femme fatale. And when the dumb blonde becomes a feisty gal she demands and wins respect, says Alan Price.
In both films Monroe effectively exploits her sexual power over men: her tight clinging dresses being both a sensual invitation and a slinky suit of armour for Monroe’s constantly alert body. In Niagara Marilyn is trapped in her marriage to a psychologically disturbed war veteran – Joseph Cotten. Whilst in Bus Stop Marilyn is courted and literary lassoed by a country hick rodeo rider – Don Murray. She triumphs (even after dying in her Niagara role) to crush murderous behaviour and reform the immature.
Niagara (a beautiful colour film noir) employs the background of its stunning waterfalls as a character in its own right. Yet this set-up is not for a holiday but crime. Honeymoon couple Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter and Jean Peters) arrive at their holiday cabin to discover George and Rose Loomis (Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe) occupying their reserved abode. Rose tells them her husband isn’t well. The Cutler’s are content to accept another cabin but become increasingly concerned about George’s mental health and the Loomis’s unhappy marriage. Enter a young lover Patrick (Richard Allan) whom Rose has persuaded to kill George. Yet it’s Patrick who dies in the struggle leaving George to pursue Rose. The Cutlers change from being bystanders to helpers, with the police force, to track down a now frantic husband.
You can appreciate Niagara on three levels. As a liberating vehicle for Monroe (it was her first, and financially very successful, starring role); a noir that joyfully employs colour symbolism (the holidaymakers are provided with raincoats to resist the spray of the falls – black for the men and yellow for the women: with Marilyn wearing, at one point, black, yellow and red to exploit her conflicted, or harmonised, masculine and feminine energies) and director Henry Hathaway’s skill at integrating his natural locations to make Niagara Falls feel perfectly at home in its noirish plot.
Monroe presents us with an alluring and credible scheming woman as far as it goes. For there is still too much of the frustrated victim written into Marilyn’s part, and acted out, that conflicts with the real vulnerability conveyed when Marilyn is at her very best. Here she is not as forcefully vindictive as say Barbara Stanwyck is in Double Indemnity, nor as assertive as Jean Peters once was playing a girlfriend of a communist in Pick up in South Street.
Jean Peters would have been excellent playing the part of Rose in Niagara. It’s not a case of miscasting, having instead Monroe playing Polly, the wisely practical if conventional wife of an advertising man, but the correct actor persona. In real life Jean Peters hated being seen as glamorous or sexy and manages to bring a splendid warmth and wisdom to her Niagara character. This almost makes us forget, but its hard, her prostitute role in Pickup. Peters was a fine actor but not someone groomed to be a star and deeply resistant to that process anyway.
Marilyn Monroe was a cunningly created star, a hugely gifted actor, with a greater emotional range than Peters and a powerful erotic presence achieving miracles in some parts that severely underestimated her talent. I’m not saying she isn’t right in Niagara. But I sense strain: a struggle to get the femme fatale side to fully click. She bravely tackles Rose’s dark behaviour well enough but not so effectively as the yearning depicted in her loneliest moment – here Rose, as a sexually liberated female, in a tight purple dress, part sings along to her special song “Kiss” and it’s remarkably affecting. If I had to chose the roles that she didn’t have to ‘struggle’ through and are fully worthy of her talents, as an exquisite comedienne and commandingly serious actor, they’re to be found in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like it Hot, The Misfits and Bus Stop. Here you discover the unforgettable real thing: glowingly crafted performances and, most importantly for Marilyn, authentic.
Niagara is famous for the scene where Marilyn walks away from us, high heels on cobble stones, to establish the famous Monroe walk. It lasts for all of seventy feet of film. Most commentators have noticed, in an obvious sexist manner, that this moment epitomised the potent sexy wiggle of the dumb blonde. Yet if you carefully watch her walk it doesn’t appear affected or provocative at all (In interviews Marilyn always insisted that she walked naturally on and off screen.) In the context of the film Rose / Marilyn is employing all the shrewd resources of her body language to convey her triumph at the thought (mistaken) that her lover has just disposed of her husband.
Graham McGann’s 1988 book simply called Marilyn Monroe quotes the ballerina Margot Fonteyn who met Monroe in 1953 and perceptively observed: “She was astoundingly beautiful…What fascinated me most was her evident inability to remain motionless. Whereas people normally move their arms and head in conversation these gestures, in Marilyn Monroe, were reflected throughout her body, producing a delicately undulating effect like the movement of an almost calm sea. It seemed clear to me that it was something of which she was not conscious; it was as natural as breathing, and in no way an affected “wiggle”, as some writers have suggested.”
Fonteyn is correct to note the ‘balletic’ skill of Marilyn. This is an attribute Monroe shares with Jacques Tati, Charles Chaplin and Clara Bow. When these great talents performed each brought their own joyful, innocent and distinct movement to perfect and constantly accentuate the needed motion of a motion picture.
What then of Marilyn’s movement in Joshua Logan’s delightful romantic comedy Bus Stop? On the surface it’s a simple story of a naïve cowboy (Beauregard Decker) energetically played by Don Murray who finds his “angel” in Monroe (Cherie a singer hostess in a run down bar) and ‘kidnaps’ her to take home on the bus back to his ranch in Montana. His long suffering buddy (named Virgil Blessing, winningly played by Arthur O’Connell) being the only sensible barrier between Decker’s crass behaviour and Cherie’s charm. Logan directs with a lightness of touch, expertly handling the wide screen with the kind of prowess he exhibited in Picnic and South Pacific.
The scene to single out is the moment Murray and Monroe eloquently sprawl across the counter of a café where the bus party stayed overnight because of a snowstorm. It’s cinemascope poetry, a physically elongated love scene that encapsulates the film’s breakthrough to real romance and common sense. The hick stops fooling around. The singer looks like she’s getting the man she needs to respect her – something never accorded to Marilyn in real life. But in the fabricated happiness of a movie called Bus Stop we believe it and the agile Marilyn’s wonderful at convincing us that it’s happened. Perhaps the long shadow of Jean Harlow’s wit and the misbehaviour of Mae West are behind Monroe. Yet aren’t they more an encouragement for her to act well, serious and true without any obvious influence? Two movie stopovers then, always worth our attention: on a country bus and besides a thunderous waterfall that are inimitably Marilyn’s. Alan Price.
BOTH NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY