What Happened on Twenty-Third Street

This works best if Marilyn Monroe is understood as the male protagonist's fantasy, or dream girl come alive--another case of his imagination run amok, not always to his liking; otherwise, "The Seven Year Itch" is a film outdone in the collective imagination by its own publicity. The New York location shoot (actually on 52nd and Lexington in this case) for the scene where the air from a subway grate lifts Monroe's white dress above her knees and even above her underwear turned out to be entirely a publicity stunt, the footage discarded and replaced with reshot footage from the Fox backlot. The photographs of that publicity stunt would prove more iconic than the actual scene from the movie, which isn't as risqué--knees but not panties. One sees more in the Fox Movietone sneak peak newsreel, where a full-body cutout of Monroe raises her dress above her crotch, where the newsreel camera lingers until it pans down to Monroe's birthday cake with a single phallic candle sticking upwards towards the cutout. It's those photographs more than anything that have been imitated in everything from "Tommy" (1975), "The Woman in Red" (1984), and "Pulp Fiction" (1994), to "The Smurfs" (2011). Yet, the film manages to be more objectifying or fetishizing in its male gaze, too, with the camera cutting Monroe off at the legs.

The story of the photo shoot is more compelling, too, than the film's scenario: thousands of onlookers, mostly men, showing up in the middle of the night to watch and cheer on the shoot, perhaps ruining it, Monroe indulging retake after retake, husband Joe DiMaggio storming off, and eventually their divorce. Billy Wilder would later admit the film was prudish and wished he hadn't made it. The Sexual Revolution was being instigated outside, and the film only hints at it, including with its Kinsey-like report of a psychologist's book on husbandly infidelity or the model's clothed pose as opposed to the nude Monroe of "Playboy"--tame stuff compared to the real thing.

Enter Tommy Ewell's neurotic married New Yorker; the guy's a walking, talking, self-narrating, sexually-repressed Hays Code. Any time he wants to do anything too fun with Monroe, he steps in to remind himself that's against the Code. Wilder would finally abandon the Code with "Some Like It Hot" (1959), also starring Monroe. But the imagination here is limited by movies, as well as the two-bit books the protagonist publishes. One of his fantasies is straight out of "From Here to Eternity" (1953). Later, and before the subway grate, they exit a movie theatre discussing "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954), the othered monster of the male gaze personified, look but don't touch.

Yet, this is the most pure cinematic example of Monroe as sex symbol, and in a mostly innocent head-turning and non-misogynist way, her pleasure over his frustration, the "Romeo and Juliet" balcony scene reversed with her coming downstairs, the girl too hot to exist anywhere but in an air-conditioned movie theatre, her character even lacking a name except for being referred to as "Marilyn Monroe" as a joke. Tellingly, that was in the play already, before it was adapted to film. It's hard to overestimate what an impact Monroe had on 1950s culture and subsequently. The playwright for this one, George Axelrod, was but one among the obsessed, going on to make "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (adapted to film in 1957), which lampoons Monroe by way of her imitator Jayne Mansfield, adapting another Monroe film in "Bus Stop" (1956), and adapting a novella inspired by Monroe, Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (adapted to film in 1961 and for which Capote campaigned for the casting of Monroe instead of Audrey Hepburn).

Watching this again, I wonder if it didn't specifically inspire Capote's novella. As well as the woman exploiting sex to get what she wants, I'm especially thinking of the door buzzer business, of the Holly Golightly ringing up her neighbors to let her into the apartment building. Both characters introduced similarly. There are even a couple male interior decorators, if one knows what he means, living upstairs, to go along with the book's coded queerness from a gay author--explicitly excised from the film adaptation (that Code again). Regardless, "The Seven Year Itch" was a comeback role for Monroe after her year hiatus from Hollywood, walking out on and renegotiating her lousy contract with Fox, studying Method acting in New York. The film, but especially the publicity, only increased her fame. On its own, it's not a very important film, but everything surrounding its production mattered a great deal.