 Tagline: It TICKLES and TANTALIZES! - The funniest comedy since laughter began! Featuring one of the most iconic images in cinema history, this classic Billy Wilder comedy will seduce you on Blu-ray. Marilyn Monroe lights up the screen as a voluptuous actress known only as "The Girl," who moves into the apartment above a married man named Richard (Tom Ewell.) While Richard's wife and son are away for the summer, his marriage vows are put to the ultimate test by The Girl's sexy charm and unwitting flirtations. Will the smitten Richard stay faithful or will he succumb to "the seven year itch"? Storyline: With his family away for their annual summer holiday, New Yorker Richard Sherman decides he has the opportunity to live a bachelor's life - to eat and drink what he wants and basically to enjoy life without wife and son. The beautiful but ditsy blond from the apartment above his catches his eye and they soon start spending time together. It's all innocent though there is little doubt that Sherman is attracted to her. Any lust he may be feeling is played out in his own imagination however. Written by garykmcd Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on August 2, 2012 -- She was the innocent girl next door and a va-va-voom sex symbol. A "dumb" blond anxious to be taken seriously. The archetypal exploited starlet, a shrewd showbiz negotiator, and an on-top-of-the-world performer with a personal life in shambles. A flame snuffed out too soon and a 20th century pop culture icon forever immortalized on the screen. Marilyn Monroe was and is a glorious contradiction, and the enigma of her life, career, and death has inspired an ongoing stream of biographies and photobooks, critical commentary and general interest. As this year is the 50th anniversary of Monroe's probable suicide, the tributes have been coming in at an even faster pace, from Vanity Fair covers to NBC's Smash to the recent My Week with Marilyn. 20th Century Fox is getting in on the action with the Forever Marilyn collection, a seven-disc set that features a selection of films made between 1952 and 1962, the decade that took Monroe from a pretty up-and-coming face to the most recognized and highly paid actress on the planet. The films are also available individually—Some Like It Hot and The Misfits came out last year, the rest arrive simultaneously this week —and since the set includes no exclusive special features, it's really up to fans if they want to go all in or pick and choose which titles they want. (Unsurprisingly, you save a bit of cash with the boxed set.) Instead of writing up a single, epically long review of the Forever Marilyn collection as a whole, we've put up a sort of overview here of the packaging and contents, with links to these individual reviews. The fifth film in the collection, 1954's The Seven Year Itch, is far and away one of the best, second perhaps only to Some Like It Hot. Both comedies were directed by Billy Wilder, who knew the power of the A-bomb sexuality he had at his disposal, and knew how to set it off on screen. The film's title is a reference to the "repressed urge in the middle-aged male" that occurs 'round about the seventh year of monogamy, an excitable itch to step out and sow some final wild oats. And who better to sow them with, of course, than Marilyn Monroe, by then the world's most recognizable objet du désir? She plays a nameless character known only as The Girl—straight away she's archetypal—and she's essentially an early version of the "manic pixie dream girl" character type, as coined by critic Nathan Rabin. That is, she exists solely to fulfill a fantasy for—or teach a life lesson to —her male counterpart. The Girl is temptation on legs that don't stop, sex in a skirt, and she drives Richard Sherman (Tom Ewall) crazy. Sherman is a thirty-seven-year-old executive who works at the kind of publishing house that churns out pulpy trash for supermarket checkout lines. It's summertime in Manhattan and he's just sent his wife and kid north to Maine for a few weeks to escape the heat. He's determined, at first, to live clean; he's got a doctor-imposed moratorium on smoking and drinking, and he considers himself too noble to cheat, though—he says with a certain pride—he's had his chances. We even see three fantasy sequences, in which he tries to show his wife—with whom he's having an imaginary conversation—that he's irresistible to women but always faithful. But then he meets The Girl, who's subletting the duplex's upstairs apartment for the summer. She nearly drops a potted tomato plant on his head from the balcony, and when he looks up to see her standing there, obscured by plants but clearly naked, he's instantly smitten. He invites her down for a drink, and she casually reveals that she has to go to the kitchen first to change because when it's hot out, she likes to keep her "undies in the icebox." You can practically hear Sherman gulp. For the mid-'50s, this was racy, censorship-baiting stuff, and Wilder was even reportedly forced to keep a Hays office representative on set to guard against "indecency." The relationship that develops between The Girl and Sherman is almost entirely physically chaste—they certainly don't make love, as they do in the hit Broadway play on which the film was based—but the flirty innuendoes and pent-up, hot-under-the-collar dialogue give the film a throbbing undercurrent of sex. The Girl, seemingly unaware of her intense magnetism, shows Sherman pictures from her skimpy swimsuit photo- shoot, innocently asks if she can spend the night downstairs with him—he's got air conditioning, see—and showers in his bathroom, making him simultaneously horny, mad at himelf, and paranoid with desire. Of course, the film is most famous for the iconic "subway breeze" scene, where Marilyn stands over the sidewalk vent and lets the wind blow up her white skirt. In the film, the dress isn't blown quite as high as it is in the publicity photos, but regardless, this is an image that's now forever stuck in our collective pop-culture consciousness. "Isn't it delicious?," Marilyn asks, and yes, I think we all can agree that it is. One interpretation of the film—and this is entirely possible, allowing for some psychological stretches—is that the whole affair takes place in Sherman's over-active imagination, that The Girl is simply a manifestation of his extramarital fantasies and subsequent guilt. This is certainly suggested by the presence of Austrian character actor Oskar Homolka, who plays the Freud-like Dr. Brubaker, a quack psychoanalyst whose manuscript on male desire Sherman is proofreading. It's also hinted at in the way that The Girl seems to be the perfect woman from a stereotypically male perspective— sexually available and tantalizingly within reach. Ewall, who starred in the Broadway production, brings his comedic expertise to the film, but no surprise here, it's Marilyn—at her drop-dead sexiest—who steals our attention in every scene. Billy Wilder's smart and sexy comedy The Seven Year Itch is home to what is arguably Marilyn Monroe's most memorable performance— innocently teasing, naively sexual, and utterly irresistible. It also gave us the subway breeze skirt-blowing scene, and for that, we're forever grateful. If you're only going to buy a few of the individually released titles from Fox's Forever Marilyn set, make sure this is one of them. It's a damn good film, the high definition transfer is excellent, and the disc comes with an assortment of worthwhile special features. Highly recommended! Cast Notes: Marilyn Monroe (The Girl), Tom Ewell (Richard Sherman [as Tommy Ewell]), Evelyn Keyes (Helen Sherman), Sonny Tufts (Tom MacKenzie), Robert Strauss (Mr. Kruhulik), Oskar Homolka (Dr. Brubaker [as Oscar Homolka]), Marguerite Chapman (Miss Morris), Victor Moore (Plumber), Dolores Rosedale (Elaine [as Roxanne]), Donald MacBride (Mr. Brady), Carolyn Jones (Miss Finch). IMDb Rating (07/25/14): 7.3/10 from 20,370 users IMDb Rating (08/05/12): 7.3/10 from 14,256 users
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