The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in
Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot
(1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the
undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as
the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s
seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know
her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling
pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest
pictures, or her final completed film, The
Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and
costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.
But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she
delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated,
delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on the run from an abusive
past who begins to unravel during a babysitting job at a New York hotel. I’d be
willing to guess that anyone who thinks Marilyn Monroe can be defined as an actress by the enduring
iconography and influence she inspired, or by the grim circumstances of her
absorption into a Hollywood system she hated and the sad death that resulted,
will be shocked by the nuanced, detailed, emotionally authentic work she does
in this movie. In retrospect, and with the benefit of 60-some years’ hindsight
and exposure to her most popular work, as well the Myth of Marilyn as analyzed
by Norman Mailer and countless others, her Nell seems to exist also on another
plane, certainly at a crossroads where, given a left turn instead of a right,
pursuit of opportunities for similarly intuitive and expressive roles might
have led, well, God knows where—somewhere other than where she and her legend
ended up, certainly, and possibly greater acclaim for her talent than her looks.
It’s a pointless game of “what if?”, or course, but she’s so marvelous in Don’t Bother to Knock that at some point
the audience is almost helpless to resist playing it, imagining the roles we
might be without and well as the marvels that might have been.
Nell takes her first tentative steps through the lobby doors
of the McKinley Hotel just as airline pilot Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) fails
in a last-ditch effort to salvage his relationship with the hotel’s sultry
lounge singer, Lyn Lesley (Anne Bancroft, in her movie debut), who has had
enough of his cynical attitude, his lack of “an understanding heart,” and his
resistance to commit to something more serious (i.e. marriage) than superficial
fun. Jed sulks in his room upstairs, Lyn’s voice haunting him through the
hotel’s in-house radio system, and eventually notices the visage of Nell in
another room across the hotel courtyard, dancing by herself. He’s caught Nell
in a strange reverie— while surreptitiously trying on the clothes and jewelry
of the woman whose child she’s caring for, Nell is swept away in a fantasy of
someone else’s life, though at this point we have only a clue as to past abuses,
neglect and emotional distress, some of which eerily echo the ones from
Monroe’s actual childhood.
On the rebound and intrigued, Jed uses a hotel map to
determine her room number, calls her and arranges for a visit. Once he arrives,
the two strike up a predictable romantic attraction until their would-be tryst
is interrupted by Nell’s young charge. Unnerved by the appearance of the young
girl and the realization that Nell who she’s said she is, Jed moves from “on
the make” to “on the defensive” as Nell’s delusional insecurity and possible
psychotic nature begins to emerge. As he witnesses this young woman unraveling
before his eyes, he refuses to take advantage of her strangely desperate
willingness to sleep with him. Instead, Jed develops a surprising sympathy for
Nell, the first emergence of the understanding heart longed for by Lyn. Then,
as Nell seems to slip in and out of recognizing who he is, sometimes replacing
Jed in her mind with the memory of a pilot boyfriend killed in World War II, an
equally unexpected and urgent sense emerges of just how dangerous Nell really
is, to herself, to him, and finally to the little girl who won’t stay asleep in
the next room.
Monroe and Widmark are an especially compelling pairing.
Perhaps because of the hard-nosed nature of the majority of his roles, Widmark
is hardly ever given enough credit for the degree to which he demonstrates
sensitivity to the needs and the nature of the actors with whom he frequently
shares tight spaces and situations, but to not recognize that quality here, in
his work with Monroe, and how it elevates their scenes together, as well as the
whole of the movie, would seem particularly perverse. In other pictures he’s
been a memorable fighter and even a fascinating lover, but the way he resists
being both in the presence of Nell’s crumbling, self-defensive psychological
fracturing is the crux of Don’t Bother to
Knock’s unexpected sympathy for its seismically disturbed female
protagonist.
And that sympathy would seem hollow without the map of
misunderstanding and desperation provided by Monroe, in her widened eyes,
disbelieving of the hints of reality and overwhelming self-defensive fantasies
playing out behind them; in her carriage, at once unsure, unstable and
preemptively defeated; and in the tender music of her voice, which masks the
depths of her delusion, flattening out, becoming deeper, colder as she assumes
power over the girl, the shadows of an awful, victimized past threatening to
manifest themselves again, this time with Nell dispensing the pain. If she’d
never acted again after Don’t Bother to
Knock, if our memories of her weren’t so awash in images of “Marilyn,” I
think we’d probably remember Monroe’s Nell with much more respect and
admiration. Instead, after 60-some years of impersonation and appropriation of
her image for every possible commercial purpose, this remarkable piece of
acting has survived as a mere footnote, an echoing indicator of what Marilyn
Monroe might have done on screen if she’d been able to respond with more
resilience to the soul-grinding Hollywood machinery, if she’d been left alone
simply to act.
Don’t Bother to Knock is
a must-see for Monroe, and for Widmark, but this crisp, tight, visually
inventive picture, which clocks in at a trim 76 minutes, is filled with notable
and familiar talent on both sides of the camera. As mentioned earlier, it marks
the screen debut of Anne Bancroft and serves as a reminder of her astonishing
beauty and aplomb, which she possessed from the start and refined over the
course of a 50-year career in movies and TV. But a close eye will reveal plenty
of familiar faces roaming about the halls and the lobby of the fictional
McKinley Hotel.
Noir vet Elisha Cook
Jr. appears as Nell’s doting but impatient Uncle Eddie, an elevator
operator who gets Nell, who’s only just arrived in town from Oregon, the
babysitting job and who hopes (vainly, as it turns out) to turn her child care
into a profitable side business. And the great character actor Willis Bouchey plays the bartender who
lends a sympathetic ear to tales of Lyn’s romantic woes. Film fans will
recognize Bouchey from pictures like Pickup
on South Street (1953), The Big Heat
(1953), The Violent Men (1954), Them!(1954), Hell on Frisco Bay (1955),
No Name on the Bullet (1959), The
Horse Soldiers (1959), The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Panic
in Year Zero! (1962), alongside seemingly countless appearances on
television throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. Don’t
Bother to Knock was only this prolific actor’s second credited screen
appearance.
Veteran stage and screen performer Verna Felton plays the crotchety and meddling Mrs. Ballew, whose
incessant nosiness put her and her husband in the middle of the tense situation
surrounding Nell and Jed. Felton had performed on stage since the age of six
and in her adult years often played bombastic, mean-spirited matrons, of which
Mrs. Ballew was a prime example. But she also did a lot of voice work in Disney
classics such as 1950’s Cinderella
(she was the Fairy Godmother), 1951’s Alice
in Wonderland (the Queen of Hearts) and 1955’s Lady and the Tramp. Her film career was somewhat oddly bookended by
her vocal performances as matronly elephants, early on as Dumbo’s mother and
then, in her final screen work, as the voice of another mama pachyderm in The Jungle Book (1967). Felton starts
off Don’t Bother to Knock by railing
against the deficiencies of the McKinley Hotel to a very patient, very familiar
looking hotel clerk played by one Olan
Soule, veteran of over 250 film and TV appearances, usually as, yes, a desk
clerk, reporter, judge, detective or some other low-level bureaucrat. If you
don’t recognize Soule from such movies and TV shows as Dragnet, This Island Earth (1955), -30- (1959), North by
Northwest (1959), Wanted: Dead or
Alive, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Andy Griffith Show, Batman, Petticoat
Junction, My Three Sons and The
Towering Inferno (1974), among
many others, you probably haven’t been
playing close enough attention.
The father of the young girl left to Nell’s care is Jim Backus, known as the ineffectual
father tearing James Dean apart in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but of course even more for his two
defining roles, the snooty, moneyed but ultimately good-hearted Thurston Howell
III, one of the castaways on Gilligan’s
Island, and the voice of the indefatigably crotchety, visually impaired Mr.
Magoo. Veteran character actress Lurene
Tuttle appeared briefly in Mr.
Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) before taking on the role
of the mother who discovers firsthand the nightmare through which Nell has put
her child. Tuttle appeared prolifically on television from the ‘50s into the
‘80s, and she’s known to film buffs for appearances in Niagara (1953; again with Monroe), The Fortune Cookie (1966) and director Lynne Littman’s 1983 nuclear
holocaust drama Testament. But she
will be recognizable to most for her appearance as the doting wife to John
McIntyre’s Sheriff Chambers in Psycho-- “I
helped Norman pick out the dress (his mother) was buried in—periwinkle blue.”
The talent behind the scenes on Don’t Bother to Knock turned out to be equally impressive.
Screenwriter Daniel Taradash already
had Golden Boy (1939), Knock on Any Door (1949) and Rancho Notorious (1952) to his credit
when he adapted, with lean intelligence, mystery writer Charlotte Armstrong’s
novel for this 20th Century Fox production. Taradash’s very next
project, From Here to Eternity (1953), would win him the Academy Award for
Best Screenplay, one of eight Oscars that classic picture would take home. He
would go on to write the screenplays for Picnic
(1955), Bell, Book and Candle
(1958), Morituri (1965) and Hawaii
(1966).
Director of Photography Lucien
Ballard’s first jobs were on Morocco (1930)
and The Devil is a Woman (1935) for
Josef von Sternberg in the early ‘30s. Ballard worked his way through a
boatload of shorts and B-movies, often uncredited, until his first job as
co-director of photography (with J. Peverell Marley) on Jean Renoir’s Swamp Water in 1941. He soon embarked on
a full-fledged career as a lead cinematographer, shooting films like Orchestra Wives (1942), John Brahm’s shoestring
spectacular The Undying Monster (1942)
and Robert Wise’s The House on Telegraph
Hill (1951), all before providing
the creative photographic realization of Don’t
Bother to Knock, one of 30 pictures he lensed in the decade of the ’50s
alone. (Others included Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 The Killing and Budd Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Alone in 1958.) But Ballard is best and most
reverently remembered for his collaborations with Sam Peckinpah, realizing the
brutal beauty of the director’s vision in such pictures as Ride the High Country (1962),
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The
Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972)
and, perhaps most memorably, The Wild
Bunch (1969).
By the time Roy Ward
Baker made Don’t Bother to Knock,
he’d already kicked off his directing career with a stunning debut—The October Man (1947) starring John
Mills as a man who suffers a head injury in a bus crash and becomes chief
suspect in a brutal murder case. That triumph was followed by dramatic efforts
such as Operation Disaster (1950), Highly Dangerous (1950) and The House in the Square (1951; aka I’ll Never Forget You). Don’t
Bother to Knock was the first feature he directed in America and demonstrated
anew the skill and virtuosity Baker had already displayed in The October Man, and it was quickly
followed by the delirious brilliant 3D western Inferno (1953), starring Robert Ryan, Rhonda Fleming and William
Lundigan. In 1958 he directed not the
first, but certainly the best-regarded account of the Titanic disaster, A Night to
Remember, which some fans of James Cameron’s Oscar-winning epic are willing
to admit outdoes even that film for sheer effectiveness. Baker soon returned to
Britain where he directed several episodes of UK TV shows such as The Baron, The Saint and The Avengers.
But he may be most well-known to genre fans for the elegance, tension and
purple passion he delivered as the director of such Hammer studio classics as Quatermass and the Pit (1967; known in
the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth),
Moon Zero Two (1969), Scars of Dracula (1970), The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
(1974) and, most memorably, The Vampire
Lovers (1970). Baker was also the go-to director for several horror
anthology films for Amicus Films in the ‘70s, including Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973) and And Now the Screaming Starts (1973).
If you’ve already seen Don’t
Bother to Knock, by this point you need no convincing. Nevertheless, I
invite you to read writer Sheila O'Malley's assessment of the film and Monroe’s performance. Sheila’s
essay, written in 2010, is a brilliant, perceptive, sympathetic piece of
analysis that far outshines any attempt I’ve made here to dig into what Monroe
does in this relatively neglected entry in her filmography, and it’s a worthy
appreciation of the movie itself. And if you haven’t seen Don’t Bother to Knock yet, bookmark Sheila’s piece and save it
until you have— the movie is currently streaming in high-definition on Netflix
and is available on DVD and streaming through Amazon. I highly recommend you
seek this treasure out soon and avail yourself of the surprises it holds, not
the least of which is the evidence of Marilyn Monroe’s emotionally resonant
acting talent, her very own understanding heart. In the face of decades of cultural assumption to the contrary,
that amounts in my mind to a major cinematic rediscovery, as well as an
opportunity to contemplate with some solemnity the missed opportunities down a
road not traveled.
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