Death and the heroine: Vinod Mehta does Meena Kumari

Two years ago, an excerpt from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of Meena Kumari appeared in the anthology The Greatest Show on Earth. Reading it without context, I assumed Mehta’s book was a very personal project, which he was compulsively driven to write after years of fawning over Meena Kumari as a young man. His proprietary use of “my heroine” and “my tragedienne” to describe the then-recently deceased actress suggested this, as did the terms in which he celebrated her Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam performance: “Beautiful. How beautiful she appeared. For once the camera captured my heroine and did justice to a face that was now at its zenith […] Biting her man’s ear, ruffling his hair, caressing his neck, running her hands over his kurta, she created an environment of pulsating, titillating and mouth-watering sexuality.”

Now, reading Meena Kumari (republished more than 40 years after it first came out) in its entirety, the bench-posts shifted for me as a reader. It turns out the book was a commissioned project, and the repeated use of “my heroine” isn’t so much a marker of personal affection as a tic inspired by the New Journalism of Norman Mailer and others, which had so captured the young Mehta’s imagination. He is honest about this: it might even be said he takes introspection to showy extremes, repeatedly wondering about his own qualifications to write this biography; noting that having been away from India between 1962 and 1969, he was cut off from the Bombay film world for that period (though he had watched Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam just before leaving); and even admitting that his initial interest in the actress came via a larger fascination for another tragic, non-Indian movie star:

The source of my interest in Meena Kumari, I must point out, was not direct; rather it was nourished through another woman (white, naturally) who in my juvenile fantasy years exercised an erotic and emotional influence which I will not even begin to analyse. The woman was Marilyn Monroe and though my heroine and this woman performed thousands of miles apart, there were several parallels. Publically they had little in common; behind the scenes they were sisters. The same legendary physical powers, the same unfulfilled relationships, the same consuming irresistible wistfulness, the same self-destructive urges.

In this light, another of Mehta’s confessions is revealing. “The woman whose portrait I had been asked to sketch,” he writes, “interested me immensely – not while she was alive but once she was dead. I suppose this sounds callous, but it is true. In the timing and manner of her death my heroine assumed heroic dimensions.”

Which suggests a mild form of necrophilia underlying the relationship between the biographer and his subject. If that sounds morbid, there is something apt about it: consider how even Meena Kumari's defining role as Chhoti Bahu (which paralleled and foreshadowed aspects of her real life) involved her casting a spell of sorts on the film’s leading man from beyond her unmarked grave. When Mehta describes going to the actress’s grave shortly after her death and being shocked at how unkempt the Shia cemetery was, I thought of Chhoti Bahu’s sad fate – a melodramatic response perhaps, but an inevitable one when the line between a movie star and an iconic role becomes so blurred. And he is probably right that Meena Kumari would have seemed a less interesting figure to us today if she had lived to a ripe old age, not fully undone by melancholia and alcoholism but half-heartedly doing underwritten mother roles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Once you move past the disappointment of realising that this book is not a product of intense, no-holds-barred fandom, there are two things that work very well for Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography (as it has been re-titled). First, Mehta clearly worked hard on it as a journalist, researching meticulously, speaking to nearly all the key figures in his heroine’s life (a notable exception being Dharmendra, who granted him no audience despite repeated tries) and then trying to reconcile their often-contradictory stories into something resembling a narrative. The re-printing makes sense too: such an endeavour is arguably more useful today than it was immediately after the actress's death, when fans and voyeurs had easy access to many in-depth stories and interviews in film magazines.

Second, the author is a palpable presence in this book. Back in 1972, this apparently did not appeal to many readers and critics – in his new Introduction, he recalls some of the initial response: “I had produced an over-sentimental, maudlin life story compromised by the gratuitous insertion of my own personality into the narrative.” Today it should stand a better chance, partly because authorial presence in narrative non-fiction is more widely accepted and partly because Mehta himself – as one of the country’s leading magazine editors – is a person of greater interest now than he was then.

And given the way this book is written, that is no small matter, for his voice – a distinct, opinionated one, sometimes acerbic, often bombastic, mixing sympathy with snark – comes through on nearly every page. Even on the ones dealing with dry biographical facts: a section about Meena Kumari’s (or Mahjabeen Bano’s) early years as a child artiste includes the aside “Purely on a personal level, I find my heroine’s film name nondescript, sterile and flavourless [...] She deserved something better. I think we could all spend an intriguing evening finding substitutes for ‘Meena Kumari’.” Offering a sociological summary of the year in which she was born, he notes: “You could get nicely drunk for 84 paise (a bottle of beer costing 28), buy a kilo of sugar for 3 paise, smoke a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes for 10 paise, get a woollen suit stitched for Rs 3, find a decent whore for Rs 4. This then was the scenario.” And after quoting from her account of how helpful her much senior co-star Ashok Kumar was during the Parineeta shoot, he can’t resist throwing in a “Like me, you are probably wondering where the director was while these lessons were going on.”

The book’s first section, which takes up 140 pages, is mostly linear and contains the biographical meat: the early years in penury, the first dalliances with the movie camera in films by Vijay Bhatt and Homi Wadia, the rise to stardom as an adult with Baiju Bawra, the tempestuous relationship with her husband Kamal Amrohi, the anecdote about a dacoit-fan who asked her to autograph his hand with his knife, the years of alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour – all of it leading up to a bleak portrait of Room 26 in the nursing home where she had her “deedaar” (last audience), and rounded off by an anecdote about the non-payment of medical bills, which brought a depressingly farcical quality to the last act of her life.

Having got the chronological stuff out of the way, Mehta then moves on to more abstract things in Section Two, commenting on his own feelings about his subject (which, one assumes, must have deepened during the writing of this book) and then assessing her as an actress and as a person. I don’t myself agree that Meena Kumari was miles ahead of her contemporaries, including Nutan and Waheeda Rehman, but there is little faulting his ability to make and sustain an argument. If the book’s first section was sprinkled with very superficial analysis that suggested Mehta had not closely watched or re-watched many of Meena Kumari’s films (“the music was good, the direction showed promise and my heroine was magnificent”), here at last we get something deeper and more thoughtful. He notes some of her special qualities such as a respect for phonetics and the cadences of speech (“too many of our present-day stars speak from the area of the mouth; my heroine went down a little and from some mysterious inner reserve produced the sounds of music”). And again, he gets personal in a good way. (“I find nuances of sadness on a woman’s face fatally irresistible.”)

But the final segment – about “the woman” – is possibly the weakest, because Mehta is placed in the bothersome journalistic position of providing a summary, of neatly tying together a life’s strands into a Narrative (even though he has spent a large part of the book protesting that this cannot be done). What emerges here is a casual sentimentalism that is at odds with much of the rest of the writing. Take this contradiction at the very end: the line “I do not ask you to worship Meena Kumari” is followed immediately by “if you have [understood her], you must join me in proclaiming that she was not only a great actress but a great human being”. Sounds like a case of proselytising to me! The book is at its strongest when Mehta is tentatively exploring, conjecturing, wondering out loud – telling the reader it was impossible to collect even one “undisputed” fact about this woman, or decode her mystery – and at its weakest when he is pronouncing judgements as if from a position of objectivity.

As for the actual writing, it is uneven – fluid and spontaneous at times, self-conscious at other times; showiness and grammatical awkwardness run together in sentences like “She set foot on this earth, head first, in the early hours of 1 August 1932”. (When Mehta writes “I was coming in a taxi a few nights ago”, one hopes it IS a case of grammatical slackness!) But the honest curiosity, the willingness to go off on an entertaining tangent every now and again, make up for the flaws in the prose. More problematic is the condescending tone of passages like the following, which Mehta himself – four decades older and wiser now – must now be embarrassed about: “All right, she was a third-rate poet. But does Raakhee write poetry? Does Hema Malini write poetry? Does Sharmila Tagore write poetry? Did Vyjayanthimala write poetry? Meena Kumari was not only the greatest actress of the last 20 years, she was also the most literate.”

Still, there is something refreshingly contrapuntal about a book on the Great Tragic Hindi Film Heroine being written in a humorous (but also affectionate and probing) tone by a UK-returned 30-year-old hung up on Gonzo Journalism. Still among the most unusual entries in the sparse body of accessible writing on Hindi cinema, Meena Kumari is whimsical in its range of references: Mehta brings up foreign films (from the work of the comedian WC Fields to Anouk Aimee in A Man and a Woman) and literature (the Dharmendra-Meena Kumari relationship is likened to the one between Lady Chatterley and Mellors in D H Lawrence’s novel!). And this naturally means it is show-offish in places. But I’ll take a biography like this – however esoteric or indulgent it might get at times – over a dry, prosaic, impersonal one. We already have too much of that sort of film writing.

[A somewhat related post: a long review of Lois Banner’s biography of Marilyn Monroe]

Blonde on blonde: a new biography of the many Marilyn Monroes

[Did a shorter version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“She looks both triumphant and afraid,” writes Lois Banner, describing a nude photograph that a young model named Norma Jeane posed for in 1949, “With one arm extended and a hand in her hair, she looks as though she might be climbing up a wall – to achieve an exciting future or to escape a threat.” The photo – “A New Wrinkle” – is included in Banner’s Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox and her description is spot on: framed against a lush red velvet curtain that seems like it might swallow her up, Norma Jeane – the future Marilyn Monroe – could be from one of those classical paintings of rape where the subject is presented (invariably by a male painter) as both seductress and quarry. But of course, Banner’s words also suggest Monroe’s tempestuous push-pull relationship with her own myth – with the stardom that made her universally desired as well as conflicted and depressed.

“A New Wrinkle” was an early version of Marilyn the ethereal pin-up girl (the picture – which she posed for because she needed money – caused a stir when a conservative, early-1950s Hollywood learnt of its existence), but Banner’s grounded approach is more accurately reflected in the first two images included in the book, which are atypical for a Monroe biography. One is a drawing of witches and other grotesque figures that Marilyn said she saw in recurring nightmares; the other is an autopsy sketch, which coldly depicts the scar from a surgery to remove endometriosis, a gynaecological condition that afflicted her for much of her life. Bald, flat-chested, anonymous, mannequin-like, the figure in the autopsy drawing is a morbid reminder that the Marilyn Monroe persona was often a blank slate, a repository for other people’s fantasies – and that the woman behind it has remained an enigma for generations of fans, critics and biographers.

“I was drawn to writing about Marilyn because no one like me – an academic scholar, feminist biographer and historian of gender – had studied her,” Banner explains, admitting that she had once dismissed Marilyn as a sex object for men but later felt impelled to re-evaluate her, and to wonder if a proto-feminist lay beneath the dumb-blonde image. Her book emphasises the many contradictions in the life of a girl who had low self-esteem and a speech impediment, but who succeeded in “manufacturing” a confident alter ego. (In high school, Norma Jeane described herself as “the mmm girl” – a play of words that encompassed both her stuttering over the letter M and the effect her physicality had on the boys in her class.) It is a portrait of the sex symbol posing for the famous subway-grate photograph with her skirt billowing up, but also the story of the woman who, later that same evening, had a violent argument with her husband Joe DiMaggio, who was incensed by the sight of “several hundred men looking at her crotch”.

Among other paradoxes, Banner notes that while Marilyn was a “goddess” on the outside, universally desired for her body, on the inside she had a hormonal disorder that caused extreme menstrual pain and may also have made it difficult for her to have a child. Though a symbol for unbridled female sexuality, she may have learnt how to perform an exaggerated version of femininity by watching a man (the female impersonator Ray Bourbon). She often played po-faced characters, the butts of other people’s jokes, but was known to have a wry sense of humour in real life (someone as wacky as Jerry Lewis was impressed by her knack for absurdist comedy, and even Groucho Marx, with whom she worked in a lesser film titled Love Happy, described her as a combination of Mae West and Little Bo-Peep). Marilyn modeled herself on earlier movie temptresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, but also strove to haul herself out of her ditzy image by turning to high literature (from Thomas Wolfe to Dostoevsky and Balzac), performing Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses on stage, and stating a desire to play Lady Macbeth and Grushenka in The Brothers Karazmov; and in the process she sometimes resorted to the intellectual poseur’s strategy of reading selectively rather than reading well. (“When she browsed the shelves in Pickwick’s bookstore, she’d find an interesting paragraph in a book, memorise it and then go on to find another book.”)

It’s a fascinating story, with enough material to fill dozens of books – as indeed it has over the decades. The Passion and the Paradox has all the essential biographical information, from a childhood that was spent being shunted around foster homes (Banner gives more space to Marilyn’s early life and to the personalities of the many women who raised her than most previous biographers have done) to the final years: the bouts of depression, the overdependence on painkillers, the liaisons with the Kennedy brothers and the build-up to her mysterious death. But the “psychological” Marilyn is here too. Banner analyses her actions and choices and how they intersected with the larger world around her. In an effective structural decision, she includes a ruminative 30-page midsection titled “The Meaning of Marilyn”, which temporarily breaks the narrative as well as the fourth wall between author and reader.

In so doing, she situates the Monroe persona in the context of its time – “the ultimate blonde in a nation both fascinated by sexuality and uneasy about it, involved in both an ongoing sexual revolution and a conservative reaction against it”. (As one of Marilyn’s husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller, once wrote, America at the time “was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams.”) She makes special note of the function that Marilyn’s star-making roles may have served in a diffident, post-WWII era – the fact that she was regularly paired opposite older men or unremarkable Plain Joes may have been a subliminal ego-booster for the “regular” American guy. And she presents a nuanced view of the apparently all-American girl who could – perhaps due to her own troubled childhood – relate to marginalised people: reading Leftist literature during a time of the Communist witch-hunts; identifying with the black hero of Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson.

This is a compendious biography – reflective, scrupulously researched, moderately well written – though it isn’t aimed at the reader who is principally interested in Marilyn’s films. I get the impression Banner isn’t much of a cineaste: there is a formalness in her descriptions of even major movies (The Asphalt Jungle “fits into the genre of film noir, a postwar category generated by Cold War fears and influenced by German Expressionism that highlights social corruption and often features an evil, seductive vamp”). But otherwise, her distinct voice is a reminder that good analytical biographies can tell us much about the personal concerns and biases of the writers. “I was intrigued by similarities between my childhood and hers,” she writes; she was born a little over a decade after Marilyn, grew up in a geographically and culturally similar milieu, won beauty contests as a young girl and (according to her) had the opportunity to aim for movie stardom, but chose a different career path. Consequently, there is the hint of a doppelganger perspective (or at least a “what if” perspective) here – one that offers a thoughtful counterpoint to some of the earlier biographies and theses.

For example: in a capsule review I recently read of Some Like it Hot, David Thomson – an intelligent, sensitive critic – proposes that Marilyn was naive, unaware of how her screen persona was being used by director Billy Wilder; but this book presents evidence to suggest that Marilyn didn’t like the fact that her character Sugar Kane was a foil for the two male characters in the story and that she wanted Sugar to have a more distinct personality. (Years earlier, while shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she had insisted that her character speak the line “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” By the time Some Like it Hot was made, she definitely had her hackles up when asked to play a stereotype.) And as Banner herself notes, because Marilyn’s first husband Jim Dougherty said she was a virgin when they married, some male biographers dismissed her claim of being sexually abused as a child. This is a non-sequitur – sexual abuse doesn’t necessarily entail penetration – but it tells us something about the simplistic way in which a certain kind of man may view sexual assault or women’s “purity”.

I had a minor problem with the occasional bombast of Banner’s claims. Her Prologue is characterised by sentences like “Significant among my discoveries about Marilyn...”, “Revealing and analysing her multiple personas is a major contribution of mine...” – and later, “I will excavate the layers that lie underneath [her childhood], probing the texts and counter-texts...” Stretched beyond a point, this is tiresomely self-aggrandising language, and these claims – suggesting grand epiphanies and solutions – turn out to be contrary to the spirit of the book itself. For instance, Banner makes much of the question “Was Marilyn a feminist?” and then addresses it in a perfunctory, open-ended way in her Afterword. There is nothing wrong with this open-endedness – in fact, it affirms the author’s honesty, her willingness to acknowledge that a complex life cannot be easily explained – but why make the question sound so central in the first place? Especially when this book’s real strength lies in the attentive, well-rounded way in which it raises questions about Marilyn’s life and psyche, examining them from various angles but also permitting them to hang in the air if necessary – much like the girl in that photo, frozen on the cusp of becoming one of the great icons, and sacrificial lambs, of a cultural zeitgeist.

[An old post about MM is here]

Film classics: Some Like it Hot

Of the many great directors who worked in Hollywood between the 1930s and the 1960s, Billy Wilder’s films have probably dated the best. Even while admiring the brilliance and the prolificacy of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock or William Wyler, one usually has to make adjustments for a few touches of over-sentimentality in their films. But Wilder’s best work – notably Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17 and The Apartment – has a hard-edged sophistication that’s instantly appealing to present-day viewers. I often get defensive about favourite old films, especially when watching them in the company of a viewer who’s been weaned on modern cinema and is liable to find them quaint, but I’ve never had this problem with Wilder’s movies.

His acerbic, always-literate screenplays (full of throwaway gems that you’ll miss on a first viewing) are key to this effect; their observations on the celebrity machinery, the dangerous side of the media, the compromises of modern living and Coca-Cola (!) seem just as relevant today as ever. [Watching the media circus that developed around Prince, the little boy trapped in a well near Kurukshetra a few weeks ago, I thought instantly of Wilder’s 1951 script for An Ace in the Hole, about a reporter who exploits a tourist guide’s cave accident.]

So engaging are Wilder’s screenplays that it’s easy to forget he was just as assured a director as a writer. His visual sense is demonstrated in the opening sequence of Some Like it Hot, wherein poker-faced gangsters and determined-looking policemen spray bullets at each other during a madcap car chase. When it’s all over, the title card “Chicago, 1929” appears over a shot of liquor bottles being smuggled in a coffin; it’s Prohibition time, and this entirely wordless sequence by a master wordsmith is a great establishing scene – capturing in just a few economical shots everything that one associates with a particular time and milieu.

Shortly after this, the words do flow, and how! The plot involves two jazz musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who witness a gangland massacre and escape by pretending to be part of an all-girl band headed for Florida. On the train is the alluring but ditzy Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and soon a comedy/romance of errors commences. Meanwhile the gangsters, led by “Spats” (the veteran George Raft) are still hot in pursuit.

Given that Some Like it Hot is the definitive cross-dressing comedy – a genre that lends itself to low humour – it’s remarkable how sophisticated it is compared to the other films that followed in its wake. There are elements of slapstick as well as some risqué humour (“Get a load of that rhythm section!” exclaims Jerry as a scantily dressed band member prances by), but nothing that’s embarrassingly over the top. The laugh-out-loud moments have dissipated over the years, but the fine one-liners (or two-worders, as you’ll see right at the end of the movie) and sight gags (a hot water bottle used as a cocktail mixer; a gun hidden in a golf bag) still hold up well.

The comedy goes hand in hand with meaningful character growth, especially in the way Joe and Jerry gradually get in touch with their feminine sides. Anyone who’s only watched Jack Lemmon in post-1970 films associates him with careworn, self-analytical characters in heavy-duty dramatic films such as Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome and Missing. Some Like it Hot is a reminder of what a brilliant, warm comedian he was in the early days. In this performance you can see how much fun Jerry seems to be having as a woman after the initial discomfort; you can understand why the millionaire Osgood Fielding III (a superb supporting performance by the broad-faced Joe E Brown) falls in love with him. (Whenever I look at the standard movie poster of this film, with the three leads on it, my eye is instantly drawn to Lemmon’s warm smile.)

Also note the gradual development of the romance between Sugar and Joe (who begins the film as a sexist cad), and how Monroe gamely allows herself to look undignified in some scenes without sacrificing that famous mix of sexiness and vulnerability. This role was a big stepping stone in her attempt to be taken seriously as an actress, though unfortunately for her there’s so much else of note in the film that she is quickly overshadowed. Sugar’s crooning of “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and her final, tender reconciliation with Joe at the end of another song are moments that could have elevated any film to classic status. In this case, they are just two high points in a movie packed with them.

[Did an edited version of this for the New Sunday Express. Some previous posts on classic films: Strangers on a Train, Yojimbo, M*A*S*H, 8 1/2, Spartacus, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twelve Angry Men, Peeping Tom, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Duck Soup]

To Marilyn on her 80th

[When Baradwaj Rangan of The New Indian Express asked if I could send in a quick, impromptu piece about Marilyn Monroe – the peg being that her 80 birth anniversary went by recently – I forgot all about my phobia of short deadlines and made a beeline for the laptop. Not because I’m a big MM fan, but because it gave me an all-too-rare opportunity to write something about Old Hollywood – which was the one subject I could comfortably have done many long theses on in my adolescent years. This piece, especially the snippets on some films at the end, was a happy change from some of the writing I've recently been doing.]

Of Marilyn Monroe's many early films, one that deserves to be revisited is Howard Hawks' Monkey Business. In this madcap 1952 comedy, Marilyn – no longer an ingénue but not yet a star – played second fiddle to a baby chimpanzee as well as to the human leads, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, but she was both wide-eyedly endearing and arrestingly sensual in her short role – a combination that set the tone for the rest of her career. The movie never became part of the Marilyn cult and for that reason it's refreshing to watch today – a reminder that there was more to her than the scenes that have been so widely referenced and parodied over the decades: "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friends", the skirt billowing up over the New York subway grating, the movie stills with the femme fatale posing languidly against the background of the Niagara Falls. In Monkey Business one can see the rough outline of the image that would make MM one of the icons of 20th century popular culture, without being overwhelmed by the image itself. Somehow, even the fact that the film is in black-and-white helps; it defies the gorgeous Technicolor poster stereotypes one normally associates with the actress. Here, it’s possible to see Marilyn as just another attractive young supporting actress, albeit one with that most elusive of qualities: it’s difficult to keep your eyes off her when she’s on screen, even when she’s sharing space with the great Cary Grant.

The threadbare plot of Monkey Business involves a scientist trying to develop a "fountain of youth" potion. Marilyn, being forever young herself, wouldn't have needed it – she died at 36, quickly becoming one of the many celebrities whose mystique partly lies in the fact that we never saw them old and wrinkled, complaining curmudgeonly about how much things have changed since their day, muttering platitudes about “the pictures getting smaller”.

On June 1 this year she would have turned 80, an idea that's as hard to process as, say, a pot-bellied, 65-year-old Jim Morrison croaking out verses from "An American Prayer" on the David Letterman Show in front of a bored young audience. Or an aged Madhubala being cajoled into playing a silly role in Dev Anand's latest ego project. Cruel as the thought might seem, Marilyn's iconic status probably hinges on her sad early exit. It's hard to imagine her sustaining her stardom past the mid-1960s. Hollywood became leaner and meaner as that decade progressed and despite her latter-day resolve to be taken seriously as an actress, and the Method-acting grit on view in her final film The Misfits, it's unlikely that she would have been able to effect a 180-degree turnaround in her screen image.

Nor would it have been easy to simply vanish into oblivion. Greta Garbo managed it, but that was in a less celebrity-obsessed age, and besides Garbo really did "want to be alone". Marilyn probably wouldn't have had the willpower to drop out of sight for good. She was famously insecure, famously needed to be loved and sought after; chances are she would eventually have been sweet-talked out of retirement and made to parody her own screen image in some B-grade summer comedy – perhaps as Britney Spears's hep grandmom in a teen-movie turkey. What better way to shatter the fond memories of millions of film buffs.

So happy birthday to Norma Jean, and may her star shine evermore – even as we allow that had this been a real birthday rather than a birth anniversary, the celebrations may have had to be muted.

Recommendations:

Some Like it Hot
Billy Wilder's acerbic comedy with smashing performances by MM as singer Sugar Kane and by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as murder witnesses in drag. A pox on those who thought Curtis looked hotter than Marilyn!

The Prince and the Showgirl
Not a top-notch film but one that's worth seeing just for a demonstration of the unfathomable mysteries of Star Quality. This was largely an ego project for director-actor Laurence Olivier, trying to show he could step out of Shakespeare mode and make a (relatively) contemporary film opposite a leading Hollywood actress. By all accounts Marilyn, though initially keen to work with one of the world’s most respected classical actors, felt very uncomfortable and out of place during the shooting. Watch the film today, however, and none of that shows; all you see is the Floozy stealing every scene from right under the nose of the Great Actor.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
The classic musical about two gold-diggers, played by MM and Jane Russell. Some fine setpieces including the career-defining "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friends" and quite a few breezy comic scenes. However, it’s difficult today to see why this was her vehicle to stardom: most people now prefer Russell’s knowing performance as MM’s wisecracking friend. And she was a brunette.


Bus Stop
MM’s first attempt at being a "serious actor" – by toning down the make-up to appear unglamorous for her role as a melancholy saloon singer, and more importantly, by turning in a thoughtful, poignant performance. Unfortunately, it still isn’t among her most widely seen films.

P.S. I always thought MM was devoid of mystery thanks to all the hype, but one time I found her genuinely alluring was in that small role in Monkey Business. It’s an avowedly silly film and has dated in some obvious ways, but I recommend it to anyone who likes any or all of the following: Cary Grant; Ginger Rogers; screwball comedies; chimpanzees; and of course, Marilyn.