Yes, more Marilyn!

So great to present MM in one of my favorites, Henry Hathaway’s Niagara at the Academy Museum on September 11, for their ongoing Marilyn Monroe. Enjoy Marilyn, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters and Casey Adams in this gorgeous, dark & demented dream of a movie. Thank you to the Academy Museum and Amy Homma and everyone who came out for the matinee.

An excerpt from my introduction:

In Niagara – Marilyn is a dark fantasy woman who burns so brightly in her pink dress, teetering walk, and red lips that she haunts the movie even after she leaves the frame. She’s a symbol. But Marilyn humanizes her too.

She’s able to balance this symbol – of lust, rage, murder – and with such surreal (there’s that word again, but it applies here) and dare I say, almost Jungian power, that in an act of something like cinematic transference, the buried desires of Jean Peters (the supposed “good girl”) begin to rise to the surface– as she is so drawn to Rose and especially Rose’s tortured husband. She keeps seeing them, and as the movie goes along in its unique way, she especially sees him, as if she has almost conjured this couple.

There’s a key scene to look for where I think Jean Peters is all in with this couple – when Joseph Cotton smashes the record Monroe dreamily plays. He injures his hand. Peters goes to him, tends to him, leaving Casey Adams sitting outside with Marilyn. It’s all dark in the cabin and, really rather romantic, as she tries to understand this distressed, depressed man who talks about the river and the falls and …. so much boiling underneath this man. You can see the glorious view from the falls – the honeymoon cabin Peters and her husband were supposed to occupy. And then finally, her husband enters the cabin, rather cluelessly not thinking … “Why is my wife alone with this man?” Instead he’s knocked out by the view. Joseph Cotten says, “You got yourself quite a girl” and Adams says, “Well she’ll do for now.” She’ll do? It’s a joke but it seems intentional to me.

Peters is drawn in –and all of this, I feel, becomes emblematic of what’s buried within her, and perhaps many women or men. 

And I feel the movie knows this – how psychological it all plays. Another scene — you see the gorgeous Rose – emerge from her Niagara Falls cabin in that pink dress to play her favorite record, “Kiss” a song that becomes the film’s haunted refrain. “There isn’t any other song! she will say. She sings along while the young vacationers just stare at her – transfixed and almost frightened of her. She’s beautiful, but scary, like something out of a David Lynch reverie – it’s off putting.

Not surprisingly David Lynch said Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer started from Marilyn Monroe and so did Mulholland Drive – he said, “You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too.” Lynch even recorded a song about Marilyn – in  2001 – from his album BlueBob, entitled “Marilyn Monroe, I Love You So.”

Both Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara have Monroe as dangerous women – women one desires – and in a cinematic way— whether from the window of a hotel room in Don’t Bother to Knock or from the courtyard of a Niagara Falls vacation cabin – viewed from a distance but once close-up, they realize there is something damaged there – and sad – and dangerous. She’s a disturbance to the order, perhaps, but she also shows how the order can reign in women who wish to be free – represented by Jean Peters…

Revel in Niagara’s beauty, darkness and mystery and its — and this is also a term that’s overused but I think it’s deserved here – almost Lynchian power. After all, as David Lynch said, “Everything’s about Marilyn Monroe.”