By Brian Karpas
When you look up the word “icon” in the dictionary, most likely there will or there should be a picture of Marilyn Monroe. Not even a worded description, just her image alone should tell you what an icon is. From her breakout year in 1953 till her untimely death in 1962 at the age of thirty six, Marilyn was the musical comedy queen. With her smart dumb blonde persona, sultry singing voice, beauty, and gorgeous outfits that showed off her astounding hour glass shape, Marilyn Monroe became arguably the most indelible movie star of all time. When you watch a film like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or How to Marry a Millionaire, you can see how suited Monroe was to the genre. However, this wasn’t always what Marilyn’s image was. Yes, she was sexy, but she wasn’t always funny. When you watch her in her films pre Gentlemen, you can see the makings of a sultry dramatic lead. Someone who had noirish undertones to her style that was breezy and natural. I look at some of her early work and can’t help but think how vastly different her image would have been if the musical comedies 20th Century Fox found for her, never happened.
Marilyn Monroe was always going to be a star. Her early career is the story of a woman who worked her ass off before becoming the international star she did. She was a model, posing for countless magazines pre and post World War Two, did commercial work, jumped from studio to studio, and appeared in countless small parts in films before finally resigning to 20th Century Fox in the late 1940s. In this period between being resigned and 1953, Monroe starred in films that were darker and showed a completely different side to her.
The first of these was 1951s The Asphalt Jungle, where Marilyn plays Angela, the mistress to Louis Calhern’s Alonzo Emmerich. The next year was even bigger for Monroe. She had a small but important role in the adaption of Clifford Odets’s Clash by Night. However her bigger role that year was Don’t Bother to Knock. In this film, Monroe plays a disturbed Babysitter who recently was released from a Sanitarium. I want to spend a little time on this film, because this is the film that really makes my case. In this movie, Marilyn gives a deeply rich performance that is incredibly vulnerable, horrifying, sultry, and alluring. This was her first opportunity to be a real femme fatale and she really does nails the genre. Monroe earned praise for her role and was cast the next year in another femme fatale role in Niagra. Fox seemed to be starting to chart Monroe’s career as not a comedic beauty, but a sultry dramatic lead. However, as I pointed out earlier, Niagara wasn’t the only film of her’s released in 1953, she also had Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire released that year as well. So why didn’t Fox keep her career as a sultry ingenue going?
As we all know, Hollywood is first and foremost a business. Studio execs have always looked at who and what is bringing big bucks and even though Marilyn’s latest noir, Niagara, was a hit, the film was not the same kind of smash that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, the two comedies that had her play dumb, were and although her other noirs such as Asphalt, was enormously successful, she was not the lead and therefore she wasn’t seen as responsible for the films grosses. So Fox, being a business, and also being in control of Monroe’s image, decided that the musical comedy route was where she should go. They chose to focus on one thing and make Monroe into a 1 dimensional character that will bring in big bucks, instead of seeing they had someone who was versatile and able to play vastly different genres.
I’ll often watch one of Monroe’s early film performances and start to think of what else she should have done if she was able to go down a career path that honestly seemed more like what she wanted to do. I’ll watch a performance of Kim Novak’s and think “wow Marilyn could’ve done that.” I love Kim, and think she is fabulous, but sometimes I think Monroe would have slayed us all if she were the lead in The Man with the Golden Arm or Pal Joey, instead. I even think she would’ve been an excellent candidate for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. Monroe tried to take control of her career and tried to get herself back on the track of sultry and dramatic roles in the peak of her career with films like Bus Stop or The Misfits, however audiences only saw one persona and wanted only one persona from Marilyn, because that is what we were conditioned to want from her. Marilyn Monroe to me is one of the most gifted and fascinating actresses, because I don’t think she understood how talented she was and is truly a shame we did not get to see all of her talents be nourished properly. We never got to see how far her talents actually went, but I am thankful we at least have some of her early work to show her abilities as not just a movie star, but as an actress.