Bad Movies We Love About Marilyn Monroe

GOODBYE NORMA JEAN (1976). Here we have the only MM bioflick that comes close to fully achieving its (modest) aims: no pseudo-intellectual psychological insight, no sirree, just lots of four-letter words and plenty of t&a. Misty Rowe, a sort of talent-free Charlene Tilton, seems comfortable taking off her bra-the primary requirement of her role as Norma Jean Baker trying to break into The Biz. The film's tone, such as it is, is set up by Norma Jean's foster mother's thuggish date, who growls, "I spent a buck sixty on you, now I want some action here!" So, too, do the drive-in audiences this soft-core fantasy was made for, and boy oh boy, do they get it: in the first nine minutes, Norma lean's been ogled once, propositioned twice, felt up once, stripped twice, and been thrown out of her foster home. Soon after, she's raped by a cop, snapped by a photographer she has sex with, named "Miss Whammo Ammo," then embarks on a sleazy modeling career. Her agent offers up this memorable monologue: "These cheap magazines come and go like the clap. I don't envy you. You won't like most of what you're doing. You'll meet every kind of creep and deviant you've ever heard about, and some new ones too... but it's a living." So, too, is appearing in movies like this one, to judge from the determinedly blank, "I won't think about this today, I'll think about it tomorrow, back at Tara" expression on Misty Rowe's face.

As so often happens in real life, being handcuffed and gagged for photo sessions soon leads to Norma Jean's getting the opportunity to meet the head of a big movie studio in his office. "I don't believe in formalities," he says, dropping his trousers, "they bore me." Misty Rowe gets to deliver an unforgettable response: "There was a time, not too long ago, when that would have shocked me. Now I'm just disgusted.. You win-I'll be your degraded whore." She then drops a pillow onto the floor in front of him, adding, "but not before I give you a message from every girl who ever had to kneel in front of a slimey scum like you for a chance to work: how we hate you, because you make us hate ourselves." Understandably, Norma Jean takes sleeping pills to help her forget; less understandably, she sees a vision of her unkempt, straight-jacketed mother in the mirror. "Take a good look, 'cause this is how it'll be for you, baby, before you know it," she is warned. "The tomcats are after you, with their sweet words, their promises, and their hard cocks!"

Needing cash, Norma Jean makes a stag film, which gets her a come-on from a lesbian movie executive. When she rejects the advances ("I'll make you love it") the exec knocks Norma Jean to the floor and rages, "You dumb little bitch!... Now, you can walk out of here now, and you're finished, or you can walk into that bedroom like a good girl." Who could resist this woman's charm? After she's done as she's told but doesn't get a screen test, Norma Jean tries to kill herself, Just then, a kindly old producer with a bad ticker who has taken an interest, offers to pay for plastic surgery, and by donning a platinum blonde wig, voila!...Norma Jean looks just as much like Marilyn Monroe as Misty Rowe possibly could. (How much does she look like her, you wonder? Well... It's worth noting that Misty didn't find her real niche in showbiz till she became a regular on the syndicated TV series "Hee Haw".)

When she makes love to the older producer-which kills him-Norma Jean at last gets the screen test she's longed for. When it's being shown to the studio brass, she secretly watches from inside the projection booth. And though the filmmakers are laughing out loud (clearly seeing clips of the same performance we've been watching all along), Norma Jean just knows she's good. And she knows that she'll at last be offered a studio contract. And she knows she's finally made it to the big time. She leans against the wall next to the projector and mutters the film's final line, the bit of dialogue that puts this movie into the pantheon of Bad Movies We Love: That's the last cock I'll ever have to suck!"

THIS YEAR'S BLONDE (1980). "Biographies are my bedtime reading-they're the best stories in the world to put you to sleep," agent Johnny Hyde tells starlet Marilyn Monroe in one of the three TV films that made up "Moviola," the TV mini-series based on Garson Kanin's book, Now, you've just gotta love any TV bio that so brazenly verbalizes its own true sentiments, and flirts openly with the reason the audience may have tuned in: there's no Seconal in the house. And you gotta love such over-the-top touches as the couple's round bed covered in pink satin, purchased, apparently, from a Harlow garage sale. But, in fact, there are other reasons to catch this, one of the few MM bios with anything at all on its mind. The film wisely eschews any attempt to tell MM's whole story, and satisfies itself instead with showing us the machinations of the flesh-peddling powerbrokers of Tinseltown, to whom MM was just one in a long line of sirens. This so-called "romance" of an actress wannabe and a powerful womanizing/agent/shows MM and Hyde as two users who set out to use each other and happened to fall in love. Best of all is the on-target, trenchant dialogue that captures the way moguls talk, then as now. When Fox chairman Joe Schenck loses the favors of budding starlet MM (Constance Forslund) to William Morris agent Hyde (Lloyd Bridges], Schenck dismisses Hyde as follows: "If Hyde had been born a girl, he'd have been a hooker and given it away free. He couldn't become a hooker, so he became an agent. Same thing." Another of Hyde's industry pals, seeing that Hyde's going off the deep end over MM, says to Hyde, "I know that a man who lives in the pastry capital of the world is not going to be done in by one cupcake." Bridges is excellent as Hyde, equal parts Hollywood smoothie and killer car salesman. Where the him lets one down is, predictably, with the casting of Forslund as MM. Admittedly, Forslund is at a disadvantage in playing Monroe at an early stage, before she'd honed her trademark mannerisms. Nevertheless, when Hyde declares, "she's one of a kind," Forslund seems nothing of the son-she's just another cupcake.

MARILYN: THE UNTOLD STORY (1980). This TV mini-series might better have been called "Marilyn: The Oft-Told Story". Certainly, with its two-night format, it's unquestionably the longest MM story, though that's by no means a recommendation. Based on the hook by Norman Mailer and, in one of the most elusively-worded screen credits in history, "other sources," this troubled maxi-production boasts-if that's the word-three different directors, and it plays like none of the three ever screened any of the scenes shot by the two others. That would at least explain the some-times awful, sometimes passable, sometimes brilliant performance by Catherine Hicks as MM. Had she worked solely with just the right one director, hers might have been the definitive portrayal. Sheree North, the onetime '50s Fox starlet who was groomed to keep Monroe in line (and even made movies MM turned down), is cast here as-no! yes!-Monroe's institutionalized mother, which at first seems a comedown so tacky you'd never believe it if you read it in a Jackie Collins novel. However, buried in the back-end credits is the fact that North was also the film's "dialogue coach," and one cannot help but wonder if it was therefore North-and not any of the three revolving-door directors-who deserves the credit for coaching Hicks into her few sterling scenes. (Hicks has never heen as good since.) Trying to fit in every detail of the whole 36-year saga, the mini-series generally flips through the famous highpoints in patented idiotic style, often with hilariously improbable dialogue. During a really cheap-o recreation of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, MM meets Arthur Miller and delivers this eye-opening hello: "I'm getting a terrible reputation," she says, "I never wear my undies and I'm always late," Miller's riposte is perhaps the single greatest non sequitur in the entire history of Bad Movies We Love: "I'd like to write something for you someday."

The filmmakers have so much trouble thinking up scenes to fill out the bloated running time that the show stops cold for long, long montages (MM drives through the desert; MM and Miller walk the streets of NY) while someone named Syreeta sings on the soundtrack. When writer Dalene Young does, infrequently, come up with something for the characters to talk about, one is almost convinced there was, indeed, a good movie to be made out of MM's life. Late in the show, Monroe's depicted as maddeningly self-involved, and Miller (played with real bite by playwright/actor Jason Miller, no relation) makes no attempt to hide his disgust with her. "You're lethal, you and that baby doll characterization you dreamed up," he rages. "You're made of steel-you've beaten the studios, you've beaten me, you've beaten everyone." Hicks, in response, manages to be both harrowing and heartbreaking, both monster and victim. It's anguishing to watch Miller as he realizes, at last, the full extent of her madness. For a fleeting moment, one thinks, if only the mini-series had elected to focus in on this fascinating mismatch from the outset. But, no-one then recalls Arthur Miller's own play, "After the Fall," which tried that exact ploy to very little success. In any case, all too soon the mini-series slides right hack into standard ol' tacky-movies-about-MM fare, and even seems to know this about itself: as MM swims in the buff on the set of Something's Got to Give, the director tells her that she's doing beautifully, and she shoots back, "Oh, Mr. Cukor, it's the same old thing-a had script and a dumb blonde." Exactly-we could hardly put it better ourselves-but the sad fact is that those few glimpses of real fire in "Marilyn: The Untold Story" suggest it didn't have to be so.

INSIGNIFICANCE (1985). Nicolas Roeg's bizarre meditation on metaphysics, McCarthyism, and MM, Insignificance, answers the heretofore unasked question, "What would Monroe and Albert Einstein have talked about if they had ever spent a night together?" Based on a little-known play, it's a precious-sounding piece with characters who don't have names, just iconographic labels like "The Actress," "The Senator," and so on. That the movie version works as well as it does is a tribute to both Roeg's own skills as a fascinating filmmaker, and to his astute casting of his wife, Theresa Russell, as "The Actress"--in other words, MM. Though she's never become a major star (in no small part because she works with her husband on off-center movies like this one!, Russell possesses real star quality-and it is exactly this that separates her from all the other actresses who have tried to play Monroe. Russell is so utterly convincing as the none-too-bright woman who finds herself trapped inside her own deadhead creation, she's able to make pretentious fines such as "Ever notice how 'What the hell' is always the right decision to make'" seem freshly minted.

Set in 1954, Insignificance opens as MM is filming the famous scene from The Seven Year Itch where her skirt is blown sky-high by air coming up from prop fans underneath the subway grating. Below, a movie grip looks directly up MM's dress and says, "I saw the face of God." The first half of the movie is filled with high comedy of this sort, the best of which is a sequence in which MM says to Einsten (Michael Emil), "You honestly believe I understand relativity? Swear to God!" and then uses balloons and model trains to prove she does indeed. In large part because it isn't trying to present the so-called "facts" of Monroe's life in any linear manner, this film is the only one that's succeeded in capturing the inherent dark humor in Monroe's surreal situation: when the Joe McCarthy character comes across MM sleeping in Einstein's bed, McCarthy assumes she's a lookalike hooker-who else could she be! "That's astounding!" he says. "You could be her spitting image." "I know," replies a sleepy MM, who's heard this more than once before, "if I were eight years younger, and I took better care of myself."

That McCarthy is played by Tony Curtis, who co-starred opposite MM in Some Like It Hot, adds depth to the gag, and allows for some delirious little throwaway hits throughout, as when Curtis spots vintage period movie magazines with real photos of himself and Monroe when they were decades younger. The movie sags in its second half, when it tries to feign concern for the inevitable demise of MM's unhappy marriage to Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), Still, if you haven't seen it, go out and rent this film, and he sure to stick around for what can only be called the big finish: the explosion of the atom bomb, culminating with the literal, on-screen meltdown of Marilyn Monroe. You can almost hear Roeg chortling, "Now, that's entertainment!"

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Edward Margulies is one of the Executive Editors of Movieline.

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