A hot summer night. A white dress. The breezy blast from a subway grate.
That’s all it took for Marilyn Monroe to become a legendary sex icon. The movie was The Seven Year Itch and the by-now famous scene comes midway through the picture as Marilyn stands on a subway grate and waits for the next passing train to “cool her ankles.” Her skirt billows up like a curtain parting to give us a peek at her unmentionables. In fact, the “unmentionables” also remained “un-see-able” since the scene was heavily censored, the camera never going above her knees.
The Catholic League of Decency (along with the Production Code Administration) claimed audiences in 1955 just weren’t ready for that much Marilyn. Nor were they permitted to watch a married man commit adultery with the Century’s Sex Goddess. Thus, the consummated affair in George Axelrod’s 1952 hit Broadway play became a sloppy, drunken kiss between Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) and the Girl (Monroe) on the screen. With the precision of a fussy dentist, censors removed nearly all of The Seven Year Itch’s teeth.
Nearly all, because, after all, this movie was directed by Billy Wilder. As he did in movies like Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and Some Like It Hot, the legendary pushed the Hollywood envelope in this silly little farce about “a typical Manhattan man” who sends his wife and son away to the seashore for the summer, only to find himself skirting temptation with Miss Monroe’s skirts.
Sherman is your average 1950s milquetoast husband with his pasty, rubber-jowled features and bearing the pockmarks of his hen-pecking wife. Underneath that boring exterior, however, is a raging, seething, giggling, eyebrow-wiggling sexual beast. Mr. Ordinary is just waiting for Miss Extraordinary to come along. Enter the nameless girl who sublets the apartment upstairs. In her every scene, Marilyn Monroe oozes so much sex you expect to see a stagehand coming along behind her, mopping up the spillover.
The Seven Year Itch is far from a subtle movie (combine the eye-rolling antics of Mel Brooks with the innuendo of a Three’s Company episode and…well, you get the idea). In the early, pre-Girl scenes, we witness Sherman chattering in non-stop monologue that he’s gonna keep those promises he made to his wife: he won’t smoke, he won’t drink, and—above all—he won’t ogle extramarital women. Yeah right, buddy.
Of course, it doesn’t help when Marilyn coos to him: “When it’s hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox.” Gulp.
In a movie that’s “all about Eve,” our Adam goes about making a riotous fool of himself: inviting Marilyn down to his apartment for a drink (accompanied by a forbidden cigarette), then taking her out to a movie (with a little post-cinema ankle-cooling on the subway grate), and finally allowing her to sleep in his bed (he takes the couch—i.e., the psychiatric session position). It all comes to a feverish boil in Sherman’s brain as he’s nagged by his conscience, his fantasies and his wife’s voice. Meanwhile, he just can’t help making puppy eyes at the girl in the billowing white dress.
For a while, The Seven Year Itch barrels along as a hilarious satire, taking jabs at everything from the advertising industry to From Here to Eternity. Sherman’s fantasies are distinctly Walter Mitty-ish in nature (though mama’s boy Walter would never let his tongue hang out like this!) and it’s fun watching him try to get through the same manuscript at his publishing company (the book they’re considering is Man and the Unconscious; the chapter he reads over and over is “The Repressed Urges of the Middle-Aged Male”).
Eventually, the movie’s sexual heat loses its steam. Blame it on the writing (Wilder and Axelrod doom the motion picture by staying too faithful to the stage-bound original), blame it on the censors (without the actual act of adultery, there is no conflict), but don’t blame it on the director or the stars.
Wilder is always a pleasure to watch (okay, okay, there is the unmentionable disaster of Buddy, Buddy late in his career) and many of his films are entrenched at the top of my all-time favorites. This is not his greatest effort, but even a weak Wilder is still like a sharp arrow to the brain. Despite the dragged-out theatricality of The Seven Year Itch, the director keeps the pace popping.
Speaking of popping, Marilyn is near the peak of her breathless, giggly-girl persona here. Sure, she’d go on to try her hand at more serious stuff (The Misfits), but no one could coo and wiggle and gasp like MM and The Seven Year Itch makes marvelous use of her champagne-bubble personality. And no one—and I mean no one, brother—could make men feel so licentious as she did when delivering this line: “It shakes me, it quakes me. It makes me feel goose-pimply all over.” Double-gulp.
At the center of the movie is Ewell, the repressed Everymale, who spends most of the 105 minutes pacing, panting, fretting and sweating. This was Ewell’s shining hour in the movies (one year later, he’d play a similar role in The Girl Can’t Help It, a less-successful knock-off with Jayne Mansfield). The plain-Joe actor, reprising his role from the stage version, nimbly keeps the movie snapping along with his stream-of-consciousness chatter and angst-ridden fantasies. [For all you trivia buffs out there, here’s an interesting tidbit: Walter Matthau did a successful screen test for the role, but 20th Century Fox was unwilling to take a risk on an “unknown.” Matthau would have to wait another nine years before getting his big break in Ensign Pulver.]
The Seven Year Itch may not be the greatest sex comedy ever made (Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is a better contender for that title), but it’s a nice way to pass a hot summer’s evening. Go ahead, “cool your ankles” with this breezy flick.
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