New Yorkers are in for a silver-screen treat as a two-week retrospective, Marilyn Monroe: Celluloid Dream, opens with The Seven Year Itch at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Thursday, March 12.
- The Seven Year Itch (1955): Thursday, March 12 at 7 pm; and Saturday, March 14 at 1:30 pm
- Don’t Bother to Knock (1952): Friday, March 13 at 4:30 pm; and Monday, March 16, at 7:30 pm
- Monkey Business (1952): Friday, March 13 at 7 pm; and Monday, March 16, at 4:30 pm
- All About Eve (1950): Saturday, March 14 at 4 pm; and Tuesday, March 17, at 4:30 pm
- Niagara (1953): Saturday, March 14 at 7 pm; and Wednesday, March 25, at 4:30 pm
- River Of No Return (1954): Sunday, March 15, at 1:30 pm; Wednesday, March 18, at 7 pm
- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953): Sunday, March 15, at 4 pm; Thursday, March 19, at 4:30 pm
- How to Marry a Millionaire (1953): Tuesday, March 17, at 7:30 pm; and Friday, March 20, at 4 pm
- The Prince and the Showgirl (1957): Wednesday, March 18, at 4:30 pm; and Saturday, March 21, at 1:30 pm
- Let’s Make Love (1960): Thursday, March 19, at 7 pm; and Sunday, March 22, at 1:30 pm
- Bus Stop (1956): Saturday, March 21, at 4 pm; and Tuesday, March 24, at 4 pm
- Some Like It Hot (1959): Saturday, March 21, at 7:30 pm; and Monday, March 23, at 6:30 pm
- The Misfits (1961): Sunday, March 22, at 4 pm; and Tuesday, March 24, at 6:30 pm
Assistant curator Francisco Valente spoke about Marilyn for the Boston Herald
“Marilyn is eternal. When we think about moving images — the bright and dark elements of moving images — we always go back to Marilyn, because she really embodied our fascination with the contradictions of the industry. How she was a spectacular comedic performer. How she understood the world she was in, how that world worked. How what she could do in order to receive attention and admiration, something she did not have in her real life.
As you know, she was an orphan basically, moving from family to family. No one really wanted her in real life. She used cinema to receive that recognition and the love that she did not get in her real life. And she understood that perfectly. She looked at the industry at that time and many of those things are still valid today. How male-dominated it was. Mostly focused on male fantasies. The industry looked at her and wanted to create a new ‘dumb blonde’ for a mostly male audience.
She understood that — and turned it around in her own fashion and created this character called ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ Despite her own complications and troubles, she managed to embody everything that the industry represented.
These fantasies are fantasies as filmgoers that we’re looking for when we’re in the darkness looking at a film. Our secret desires. The images we see moving before us? She really knew how to play with it. When you read about her personal interests, you understand she knew exactly what she was doing. She was not dumb. She was incredibly clever and a great performer. Just terribly insecure, desperate for love and attention, which was something she did not have in real life. She found it tragically in moving images.
In her myth especially Marilyn will continue to spark interest. It’s our job to suggest there was something behind that myth and help people understand how it worked, how it existed, and why it will still live.”
The series features two unusual additions. Firstly, Don’t Bother to Knock is preceded by a short film with a murky history. Back in 1952, Marilyn had testified in court that she had not posed for a series of pornographic images being sold in her name by a mail-order company. The model was in fact Arline Hunter – who later recreated Marilyn’s own nude calendar pose for Playboy.
Avant-garde artist Bruce Conner saw The Apple-Knockers and the Coke – a 1940s ‘blue movie’, with a young Marilyn Monroe billed as its star – at a New York cinema in 1970. Once again, the leading lady was Arline Hunter. In what might be described as either postmodern commentary or artsy exploitation, Marilyn Times Five (1973) interspliced footage of Hunter with Marilyn’s vocals for ‘I’m Through With Love’ (from Some Like It Hot.)
Marilyn Monroe: Celluloid Dream also includes screenings of Mulholland Drive (2001), a surreal neo-noir mystery, which – although not directly inspired by Marilyn – follows the story of a hopeful starlet whose dreams are dashed in Hollywood.
Francisco Valente has written about Marilyn’s influence on director David Lynch for MoMA Magazine…
“Considered one of the greatest films of the 21st century, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive wasn’t even going to be a movie. Initially, Lynch proposed it as a pilot episode for a TV series that would have been a Twin Peaks (1990–91) spin-off, with Audrey Horne moving to Hollywood after the death of her friend, Laura Palmer, to fulfil her dream of becoming a movie star. Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, and arguably the greatest television series of all time, was itself born out of another failed project: an adaptation of Anthony Summers’s Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, a biography that focuses on the actor’s final days. ‘You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe,’ Lynch revealed in his book Room to Dream.
In Mulholland Drive, Betty Elms, played by a then-unknown Naomi Watts, is an aspiring blonde actress who arrives in Los Angeles without a place to live … On this long, unpaved drive, we will find that unfathomable visions want a piece of us. They have a home in our morbid curiosity; they found a place to grow in Hollywood’s dream factory, looking for the beautiful and innocent to embody them before they’re thrown into eternity. No one could save Norma Jeane, and Marilyn will never wake up again. And yet, we keep returning to the darkness of theatres to believe in the greatest fantasy of all …”
The Marilyn Report 