t says plenty about Don’t Bother To Knock that we queued it up last night, popcorn and adult beverages in hand, having forgotten that we already watched it several years ago. That has less to do with the overall film than with Marilyn Monroe, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The film was based on Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, which was serialized in 1950 in Good Housekeeping magazine, and deals with a mentally disturbed babysitter watching over a child in a fancy New York City hotel suite.
Along with Monroe it stars Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft, with their three characters suffering respectively from derangement, detachment, and disillusionment—three ailments suggested to be caused or exacerbated by life in the big city. Widmark as a cynical single looking for easy action and Bancroft as a world weary torch singer working the hotel lounge don’t have any problems a change in luck wouldn’t solve, but the movie revolves around Monroe, who, thirteen credited roles into her career at this point, gets a chance to stretch her range as a nutty nanny in need of a lot more than just kind words to get back on the beam.
Monroe’s performance in this heavy drama is tough to judge. To us it feels a bit flat, but contemporary reviewers generally liked it, and it’s fair to say it helped her climb that last rung to the superstardom she’d reach a year later with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Watch that film and you’ll see that, while Don’t Bother To Knock asked her to stretch, it did so by requiring that she suppress her natural charisma. That’s no easy trick for an actor, let alone someone as incandescent as her, and that, in short, is probably why we forgot we’d already watched the movie. Monroe was so big in her other performances that this flick went down the memory hole. Her iconic movies feel as if they could only have starred her.
That’s our main issue with Don’t Bother To Knock—it feels like it could have starred anyone. Monroe just isn’t Monroe in it. But that possibly means her performance is a success. Watching it afresh, we can tell you it’s certainly a must for Marilyn fans, and will probably work for vintage film fans of all types. But those unschooled in the oldies might walk away from this effort thinking, Meh, I don’t get all the Monroe fuss. But the fuss was appropriate and deserved. Don’t Bother To Knock—not a film noir as labeled on many sites, by the way—premiered today in 1953.
