***Out In The 1950s Film Night- Marilyn Monroe’s Don’t Bother To Knock- A Film Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Don’t Bother To Knock, starring Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark, 1952

You know how your mother, when you were ready to go out on your own, set up your own household and family, always harped at you to make sure to get references when you hired anybody for a service. Well maybe that advice was not so far-fetched. Maybe better references would have stopped things from going awry in the film under review, a minor Marilyn Monroe black and white film, Don’t Bother to Knock. In any case one should not rely on the recommendations of a sniveling hotel elevator operator trying to get a wayward niece gainful employee. And the minute that I saw that the referring party here, the elevator guy, was Elisha Cook, Jr., last seen as a no –account cheap gunsel in the 1941 film adaption of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon I knew mother was onto something.

Here’s the skinny. A couple staying in a New York hotel, not the Plaza from the look of it, needed a baby-sitter for the night in order for hubby to receive some newspaper award. Presto. Elisha volunteers his niece, Nell (played by a young not blonde, Marilyn Monroe), and the deal is done. No problem right. Wrong, wrong about six different ways. I will not get into the issue of baby-sitters getting a bad rap in film, either as social monsters or as incompetents, but this Nell as it turned out had just come east from a three year stay at a mental institution. Reason; terrible parents and devastation over the loss of her World War II flyboy lover killed in a crash out in the deep.

As the film progresses Nell acts more and more erratically especially when cross-court neighbor Jed, a commercial pilot, comes a courting after a certain amount of telephone and window flirtation. Acts more erratically toward the helpless if precocious child, Bunny, in her care. Jed is strictly on the rebound since his honey, a torch-singer (played by Anne Bancroft) playing downstairs at the lounge, has called the whole thing off, saw him as just another love ‘em and leave ‘em guy and she wanted something more. So Jed is gloomy although once he copped to Nell’s condition, or at least that he wanted no part of someone who was that disturbed he decided to flee back to his torch-singer, and that something more she was talking about. But not before Nell tried to vicariously seduce Jed thinking he was her dead flyboy, bopped the nervous Elisha on the head when he checked up on her, tied up the poor child, had a fight with the child’s mother when she checked up, and then tried to do herself in with razorblades before she is checked and taken away (that was not her first time with the blades she had it out West and got that three year stay for her efforts). So you can what I mean about that reference thing.

Oh yah, Marilyn’s performance seemed strictly out of that method acting school she belonged to, a little wooden, coming out of the blocks. A little wooden like the storyline and action of this film. If you want Monroe at her height then you had better see Some Like It Hot or The Misfits this one is strictly a rising star learning her craft.