Summer of Marilyn: Niagra

This summer I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies for fun. I was supposed to watch Some Like It Hot this week but The Husband (this is a silly nickname I give my husband for the blog) wanted to watch Niagara so I said we should go for it since I’d never heard much about it.’

It was not the romantic or screwball comedies I’ve watched so far from her so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was a little nervous it was going to be super dark but it was more intrigue than darkness.

The Husband calls the movie light noir. He also pointed out that she was only in about 35 minutes of the movie but believed she completely stole the show, which I agree with now that I’ve seen it.

This movie is one of the first major acting roles Marilyn had, and she doesn’t use her signature breathy voice which answers the question I had before – that breathless speech wasn’t her normal speech. It was simply her signature voice. I liked hearing her normal voice because the other way she speaks is so fake to me and grates on my nerves. That could be because I have seen so many parodies of her over the years.

This movie came out in 1953 and from what I can see, quite a bit of it was actually filmed at Niagra Falls. It was directed by Henry Hathaway.

The other stars of the movie, who were in it even more than Marilyn, were Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters, and Max Showalter.

The movie starts with Marilyn’s husband at the falls in a place I’m pretty sure you can’t stand at anymore if you were ever allowed to in the first place. The man travels back to a cabin right next to the falls and I really wanted to know if that is a real place because the idea of a room overlooking the falls seems awesome to me. I can imagine it might also be loud, though.

I looked it up and it turns out the cabins are not real.

According to IMbd, “The Rainbow Cabins were not real cabins, they were movie sets built exclusively for the film at a cost of over $25,000. They were built in Queen Victoria Park directly across from the American Falls. The stone structure located by the Rainbow Cabins was torn down, but a similar one can be found in the same park at “Rambler’s Rest.””

The man returns to his room where Marilyn has been smoking a cigarette but then quickly pretends she is asleep which already eludes to the fact that she may not be what she seems.

We move over to a couple who are visiting Niagara Falls both for a delayed honeymoon and to meet up with the owner of the company the man works for after the man won a contest. They reserved a certain cabin but Marilyn and her husband are still in that cabin. Marilyn (Rose) convinces them to let her and her husband (George) keep the cabin because she says her husband is suffering from PTSD from the Korean War and had been in a psychiatric hospital.

The couple reluctantly agrees to move to another cabin, but they will continue to run into Marilyn (Rose in the movie) again and somehow get swept up in the crazy drama that will begin to unfold shortly after they meet her.

While sightseeing at the falls, the wife spots Marilyn making out with a man who is clearly not her husband and realizes there is a lot more to the story of George and Rose.

That becomes even more clear when Rose wanders into a party being held at the cabins, places a record on the player, and George doesn’t like it so he breaks the record.

The wife (Polly) goes to the cabin to help him take care of his hand which he cut on the record and he tells the couple that he met Rose while she was working as a barmaid. She is considerably younger than him, full of life and he thinks she hates him because of all his issues.

Pretty sure the couple (The Cutlers) didn’t want to know all that but, well, there they had it.

Things start to go off the rails pretty quickly for George and Rose and, sadly, for the couple trying to just have a nice holiday. I won’t give away too much but there is a murder plot and mistaken identity and – well, you just have to watch it to believe it. It’s pretty crazy.

I will give away that I really wanted to punch Mr. Cutler about three times in this movie. Maybe five. I, in fact, dislike Mr. Cutler so much with his goofy smile that I didn’t even bother to look up what the first name of his character was while writing this blog post. I don’t even remember the name of it.

The guy was so dismissive of his wife’s concerns the entire time that by the end of the movie I was rooting for a full-fledged divorce. One day I’ll write an alternative ending to the movie where she tells him she’d be better off without him because he acts like she’s a crazy, hormonal woman all the time.

According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film came from Walter Reisch who eventually wrote it with Richard Breen and Charles Brackett. They said most films that take place at the falls are romantic, but Reisch wanted a film with murder in it.

Monroe was suggested to play a main role by the head of Fox Studios, Darryl F. Zanuck. According to Wikipedia, Reisch liked the idea but when Zanuck suggested she play a villain, he wasn’t so sure.

“According to Reisch, “We thought that was a nice idea until there came a second telephone call that he wanted her to be the villainess, not the girl… My God! Here was the prettiest girl in the whole United States of America! But he insisted it was a great idea, so we finally did it. We didn’t know whether she would like it, but she had no objection, whatsoever—on the contrary.”

A bit of trivia:

Jean Peters who played Polly Cutler had originally been suggested for Marilyn’s role, but by the time the movie started to get made, Marilyn’s popularity had grown and Peters was switched to play the wife. (No big deal because the wife got more screen time anyhow).According to IMbd, even though she had a starring role,  was still under contract to 20th Century-Fox as a stock actor at a fixed salary, so she actually made less money than her make-up man did.”During filming of the shower scene, director Henry Hathaway had to keep yelling at Monroe to keep away from the shower curtain and away from the lights as she insisted on being naked (as she was under the bed sheets at the beginning of the film). To pass the censors of the time, the scene was darkened in post-production.Canadian officials didn’t like the film because they said it gave Niagara Falls a bad name by focusing on a murder taking place at it.The “Letterman Hospital” that Rose mentions at the beginning of the film, saying George was a patient there, was Letterman Army Hospital at The Presidio of San Francisco. Built in 1898, it cared for returning wounded soldiers from every major conflict, especially World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It was closed in 1994, the Army base at The Presidio was decommissioned in 1995 and the buildings of the hospital were demolished in 2002.  2005 Lucasfilm opened its headquarters on the site and named it the Letterman Digital Arts Center. (source IMbd)

Overall, if you haven’t already guessed, I enjoyed this film. It had me biting my nails and hooked until the end. While it did exploit Marilyn’s beauty and there were those moments of men gawking at her like they’d never seen a woman before like in other movies, it was still a great storyline.

If you want to read another review of the movie (which I didn’t agree with) you can click here.

Another review is here.

If you want to read about Marilyn’s fashion in the movie you can click HERE.

Up next for my Summer of Marilyn will be Some Like it Hot which was the movie I was going to originally watch this week. I was going to watch Niagra next week, though, so I just switched the two around.

After that, I’ll be watching:

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits