On Marilyn Monroe: An Opinionated Guide is a new book by Richard Barrios, published in hardcover, digital and audiobook formats by Oxford University Press. Barrios is a film historian whose previous books include TCM’s Must-See Musicals (2020), in which Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was featured.
Here’s a brief outline for On Marilyn Monroe…
- Offers a meticulous chronology of Marilyn Monroe’s life
- Emphasises Monroe’s work, eschewing sensationalised rumors and speculation regarding her personal life
- Corrects misconceptions and errors about her life and work as an actress
And a full synopsis…
“Marilyn Monroe has been gone for over sixty years, and yet people are still talking about her. What, exactly, is the spell she casts on so many? Stunning, exciting to watch, incredibly famous, Monroe lived a very public life and died young, with a sad suddenness. All of this is true, and yet there is so much more to her story.
On Marilyn Monroe: An Opinionated Guide looks past the sensation to the real legacy -her richly varied body of work. Both during her life and following her death, Monroe was dismissed as more of a phenomenon than an actor, often an object of ridicule instead of a performer whose work could be taken seriously. Even when films such as The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot saw immense success, Monroe seldom got her due as the inventive and accomplished performer she was. The truth that lay behind the dazzling surface was that she was one of the hardest working of actors. Rigorously applying both skillful technique and an inherent charisma, she was able to create truly unforgettable performances.
In this lively guide, Richard Barrios looks beyond the ballyhoo and legend at Monroe’s best-known films, and some that even today remain obscure. Besides her films, it also addresses the work she did on television and the stage, as well as her underrated abilities as a vocalist. Both an informative study and a perceptive critical assessment, On Marilyn Monroe: An Opinionated Guide gives this brilliant performer the attention she desired-that of an artist whose work deserves both examination and celebration.”
On Marilyn Monroe has already garnered praise from the Telegraph‘s film critic, Tim Robey…
“A book on Marilyn Monroe that focuses on the work, and – wait – her acting ability, rather than the mythological proportions of her celebrity? It’s a rather damning indictment of all the existing literature on Monroe that this should feel so revolutionary – and so urgently needed.
Instead, we look in hugely refreshing detail at her career, which means a close chronological analysis of every performance she gave on film, with a view to understanding her potential – both dazzlingly realised at points, and poignantly untapped in so many ways. Her sparkle on screen was not only irreplaceable, in its mingling of sadness and joy, but took a lot of underrated graft. From her earliest appearances as a 21-year-old ingénue fresh off the boat at 20th Century Fox – walk-on roles you could blink and miss – the Monroe we follow into the 1950s, her single decade of stardom, shows far more nous about her own talent than she has usually been ascribed.
Barrios bats away the prejudice that comedy is an easier calling, and the sexist idea that Monroe could only embody ‘dumb blondes’, rather than mischievously playing up to that trope when it served her … It’s his deft balancing of critique and biography that’s the winning ticket: the book not only proves how intensely acting mattered to Monroe, but what a taxing burden on her psyche it became simply to keep improving.”
Ysenda Maxtone Graham reviewed it for The Times …
“You have the world’s most stunning actress who exudes a uniquely devastating sex appeal: Marilyn Monroe, no less. Birth name upgraded, nose tweaked, chin tweaked, teeth straightened, hair dyed platinum-blonde, hairline raised by electrolysis: camera-ready, fame-hungry, excited to be on the books as a contracted aspiring actress.
And you have the Hollywood studio system of the late 1940s and 1950s, run by myopic corporate incompetents who fail to see how lucky they are to have this magical creature walking in their midst, desperate for roles that will do justice to her talents. Only very occasionally the best of the actress and the best of the studio. system briefly mesh together. Sublimity is the result.
This eloquent and thoughtful book focuses on Marilyn Monroe’s work – yes, her work, and not her private life and not her mysterious death. Thousands of books have already been written about those … The author of this book, the American film buff Richard Barrios, expresses what many people feel when they watch some of the lower-quality films Monroe was obliged to appear in while under contract, mainly with Twentieth Century-Fox: ‘They have Marilyn Monroe, for Chrissakes, and all they can give her are these nothing little roles in the unimportant movies.’
To the men in charge at Twentieth Century-Fox, especially the head producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, Monroe was just one of many studio blondes on the books available for eye-candy purposes. She was seen as needy, unpunctual, a bit of a joke … The book can’t actually avoid being about Monroe’s life as well as her work because the two are inseparable; her emotional fragility is palpable in every scene she acted in.
We see Monroe labouring over her paltry roles for months on end, trying to come up with a ‘backstory’ and build up something meaningful even for the most sketchy minor characters. And after all that hard work the reviews just focused on her ‘derriere.’ This, Barrios writes, was ‘corrosive and exhausting.’ Just a handful of times it dawned on Hollywood that Monroe might be at her best and most dazzling as a comic actress.
With its mouthwatering prose, this book achieves the desired effect of luring us back to Monroe’s films, the good and the bad. ‘She studied intently, she worked damned hard, and in a real sense she accomplished something that was often quite miraculously transcendent.'”
And Hadley Freeman had her say in the Sunday Times.
“I fell for Monroe as a teenager and a giant poster of her dominated my bedroom for years … No one before or since her has more effectively combined vulnerability and sexuality, so that when she reached out to the audience, the audience lovingly and protectively reached back. And it still does, 60 years after she died at the age of 36, alone, unsaved and unprotected.
Barrios meticulously goes through every film and television show she appeared in, or almost appeared in, and has a good turn of phrase … He is also amusing and correct about Monroe’s bizarre over-enunciations, which were almost certainly the fault of her first acting teacher, Natasha Lytess … But it’s very much not true that he avoids speculation … In defending Monroe from prurient lechery, he errs too far the other way, as if her sexuality were a mere sideshow when it’s as essential to her immortality as, say, her comic timing.
Barrios is absolutely right that Monroe is underestimated. There have been many imitators – from Jayne Mansfield to Madonna – but only Monroe’s films have endured, and that’s because she was a better actor, and especially a better comedian, than many appreciated in her lifetime and beyond. It’s all in the films. The books can say what they like, and they will. But to paraphrase Barrios, the movies are enough.”
The Marilyn Report 
2 Comments
Comments are closed.