The Seven Year Itch is showing at the Vista Theatre on Sunset Drive in Los Feliz, LA, on Wednesday, July 23 at 2 pm.
The screening is hosted in the Video Archive Cinema Club, a 20-seat micro-cinema showing rare VHS movies from the personal collection of cult filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. (Could this have been the inspiration for the Monroe lookalike waitress at retro diner Jack Rabbit Slim’s, as played by Susan Griffiths in Tarantino’s 1994 smash hit, Pulp Fiction?)
“The title The Seven Year Itch refers to a dubious piece of psychology suggesting married men tire of their wives after seven years and start looking around for a mistress. Many of the laughs in George Axelrod’s script come from Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) twisting himself into knots over whether he’s that type of guy or not, which the play answers one way and the movie answers another. Director Billy Wilder does his best to bring Richard’s tortured conscience to visual life, with sequences that toggle between fantasy and reality, creating not only a window into his thinking but also opening up what’s mostly a one-room stage play … Virtually all the energy in The Seven Year Itch comes from Marilyn Monroe, whose sexual confidence is as weirdly innocent as it is incandescent, as if she doesn’t comprehend her own power.”
– Scott Tobias, The Guardian
UPDATE:
The Video Archives Club has shared this photo of Quentin Tarantino’s Seven Year Itch cassette – the original VHS release from 1979 – via Instagram.
The Marilyn Report 