Bicycle Thieves

What a disaster of a production and film. Director Otto Preminger and star Marilyn Monroe feuded over her acting coach Natasha Lytess being on set and giving Monroe direction, with laid-back drunkard co-star Robert Mitchum reportedly serving as something of a peacemaker between the two, which nonetheless didn't prevent either from proceeding after the celluloid was in the can to abandon their respective contracts with Fox, both ending up forming their own production companies. Mostly, "River of No Return" was simply a terrible film to assign to either of them in the first place.

The basic idea of reworking the Italian neorealist classic "Bicycle Thieves" (1948) as a romanticized Hollywood Western with big movie stars and an Austro-Hungarian director known for film noir thrown together by Darryl Zanuck as if their names were pulled from a hat, surfing on the river rapids of an indoor hydraulic platform in front of blatant rear-projection footage (and while still managing to almost get stunt men killed and Monroe injured) would almost be inspired if it weren't so stupid. Clearly, the plan here was to ride the gravy train of Monroe's box-office draw for all it was worth without much if any consideration for nurturing it, throwing her into any random hodgepodge of a vehicle for her stardom and as frequently as possible. It works to an extent; far fewer would continue to watch junk like this were Monroe not in it.

Yet, before Monroe broke her contract, Fox only managed once to fully realize the appeal of her sexpot persona, with "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953). After gaining more control of her image and films, including selection of directors, there would be fewer productions and more with successful results, from "The Seven Year Itch" (1955) to "The Misfits" (1961). Here, though, and in the subsequent "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954), as Monroe appraiser Amanda Konkle suggests, the sexpot was made into an objectified and tawdry joke instead of the more innocent and knowing subjectivity Monroe otherwise sought to bring to it and did in better films. No wonder when next assigned to "The Girl in Pink Tights," she refused.

The "male gaze" stuff is so obvious here the film was cited in Laura Mulvey's influential essay. Monroe's show-girl allows for the unified looks without breaking verisimilitude of the audience of male characters within the film and presumed male spectator in the real audience watching the movie, as Mulvey summarizes. Note the shot where Monroe opens her legs during her second number as blocked by the back of the head of one of these in-film male character voyeurs--putting the spectator in the position of imagining performing public cunnilingus on her. And, this is before a plot involving attempted rape and abduction of her, by both the "good" and "bad" guys, as well as the war-painted Indians hunting the white man, gets going. Throwing the father-son bonding of Mitchum and son over the stolen bikes, or horses and rifles, or whatever, into the mix just makes it more unsavory.

Even putting aside the stuff that's misogynist, racist, and rapey, it's remarkable how incompetently unsexy this is, as starring the woman most associated with sex appeal we've ever had. First thing they do is dress her up like a Christmas ornament, then leverage next to nothing out of her spending most of the movie getting wet upon the vigorous rapids. More time is spent talking about undressing Monroe than showing it. There's an entire shower under a waterfall that we're informed happens entirely off-screen. Could they at least have got the filmmakers behind "Niagara" (1953) to come in for this one? This is such a wasted opportunity, an example of spectacular Hollywood ineptitude. I wouldn't return to it, either.

Works Cited
Konkle, Amanda. Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe. Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.