I keep my undies in the icebox!
No cinema visits this week. If we’re very lucky, I may make it to the cinema next week as a new Scorsese movie has arrived in the middle of the current drought, even if it is just a Rolling Stones concert movie.
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
In Cameron Crowe’s excellent series of interviews with Billy Wilder, Wilder remains completely indifferent on the subject of widescreen cinematography. He just didn’t care. It is extremely odd to see what is basically a filmed play contained within the most extreme of aspect ratios at 2.55:1, especially when there is only one person onscreen for great lengths of the running time. Marilyn Monroe appears essentially “playing herself” (whatever that was) as the archetypal embodiment of mainstream Hollywood 1950s femininity, blonde, overly made up, harmless (emotionally damaged, needy, desperate, addicted to booze and drugs). And in the 1950s, mainstream America had Marilyn, and Doris Day, and Jayne Mansfield, and at a stretch, Mamie Van Doren. And the rest of the country had…
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)
One of those roles that any actress worth her salt would kill for, and Gretchen Mol, infamously hyped with a gratuitous Vanity Fair cover some years earlier, finally proved herself as a real talent with her wonderfully game performance in a film that both reveals the essential harmlessness of extreme fetish pornography (though not to the BBFC, who rather ridiculously gave the film an 18 certificate) as well as provides more evidence, if evidence were needed, of the ludicrous hypocrisy of American culture in the 1950s. Bettie Page regarded even the most absurd of bondage photoshoots as nothing more than innocent playacting, and Mol puts over the impossible to fake joie de vivre aura of Page’s photographic poses with an equal measure of shamelessness. Page prospered in the years just before Playboy changed all of the rules; she was a very American pioneer, striking out into new territory and claiming it as her own.