Forever Marilyn Blu-ray Collection (Fox w/Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes, How To Marry A
Millionaire, River Of No Return,
There’s No Business Like Show Business,
Seven Year Itch, (plus MGM/UA) Some Like It Hot, The Misfits
Picture:
B (Hot and Misfits: B-) Sound: B- (Hot: C+, Misfits: C) Extras: B- (Misfits: C-) Films: B- (River: C+)
Marilyn
Monroe still manages to remain one of the biggest cultural, sexual and
cinematic icons of all time, only aided by endless imitators (Madonna
especially) and mysteries surrounding her life and death. However, many have not seen her films and
that includes some of her best work. She
actually was much more than just a pretty face and that is a real shame. Fortunately, Fox restored her films
photochemically many years ago for preservation purposes and had then soon
issued all of them on DVD. Now, the new Forever Marilyn Blu-ray set offers five
of her classics in further upgrades that totally annihilate their DVD
counterparts and they have thrown in two of her last films thanks to handling
MGM Home Entertainment distribution.
The
resulting seven-film set is one of the year’s strongest offerings and are all
really good films that hold up very well.
Howard
Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
was the second time Monroe worked with the legendary director (following the
mixed Monkey Business) with better
results as she teams with Jane Russell in a backstage musical where they are
sexy showgals looking for a good man, but even their feminine wiles will take a
backseat to the unexpected. This is a
really funny film with some campy moments, some great songs, solid comic
performances from all (it also stars Charles Colburn and Tommy Noonan) and Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend
(originally performed on stage by Carol Channing) was legendary before Madonna
ever sent it up (on a budget) with her Material
Girl video. Following Niagara, this film put Monroe over the
top as a major movie star and it is almost 60 years old, yet seems otherworldly
and not merely a musical set in the past.
Fox then
decided to put her in their second-ever CinemaScope film, Jean Negulesco’s much
beloved How To Marry A Millionaire (also
1953) having her in a triad with Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall as three gold
diggers who want a good-enough man and the good life, though Pola (Monroe) is a
sexy model who also happens to be near-sighted.
This has some still-really big laughs and the trio has some fine
chemistry together in a high-class sophisticated comedy that was not available
outside of film prints for years in a widescreen format of any kind. Now, you can see how great a production this
really is. Rory Calhoun, David Wayne,
Cameron Mitchell and William Powell deliver great supporting work and this is
one of Monroe’s
best films.
Having
done so much comedy, Fox next paired Monroe up with Otto Preminger and male
lead Robert Mitchum in River Of No
Return (1954), another big CinemaScope production that is enough of a
Western to qualify for the genre and had lounge singer Monroe meeting landowner
Mitchum when their raft falls apart.
However, that is just the beginning as she deals with her goofy gambler
boyfriend (Rory Calhoun again) and they all have “Indians” out to eventually
kill them. The film has very dated
stereotypes and some obvious visual effects, but it is a unique Monroe entry and the
pairing of her with Mitchum is still classic enough to get a good look at the
film. It is my least favorite here, but
I found new things to enjoy about it in this upgraded Blu-ray transfer.
Monroe was back to solid backstage
musical ground with Walter Lang’s big budget spectacular There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) built on music by the
legendary Irving Berlin. This time she
shares the screen with no less than Monroe involved with the singing/dancing/acting
Donahue family (played by Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, Dan Dailey, Johnnie
Ray and Mitzi Gaynor) in a film that tends to deconstruct the Film Musical
somewhat like the 1954 Cukor A Star Is
born with Judy Garland and Stanley Donen’s Singing In The Rain (1953) in the way it shows what it is playing
straight.
It is not
as dark a film, though it has a few dark moments for the sake of melodrama, but
it is also a salute to show business and that business’ past as new
entertainment media (film and the then-new TV medium) were arriving, so it goes
out of its way to celebrate many aspects of the traditional while still showing
it in a knowing way as something from the past that might not always be that of
the future.
The
result is a film with some corny moments, but some great dance and song moments
by some of the greatest such talents in the industry’s history and it meshes
very well thanks in part to Lang’s directing.
This is yet another film that further benefits form the upgrade to
Blu-ray.
Fox
followed that hit up with another great comedy by Billy Wilder, The Seven Year Itch (1955) which Wilder
made from his own hit stage play. Tom
Ewell played Richard Sherman on stage and does in this film which includes Monroe’s classic
wind-up-her-skirt moment and is the most challenging of her comedy works. Sherman
has sent his son and wife off on vacation, but a sexy woman (Monroe) lives up
stairs, causing him to have a major interest in her and revived interest in
seeing any other woman besides his wife.
The film
is then a series of incidents of her interrupting him and him spying on her,
which also leads to outdoor antics, but it has been argued that maybe he is
imagining her to some extent. Is she
really there at all? Is she there, but
he is imagining most of the encounters to satisfy his own needs and dreams
unfulfilled? There is much sexual
innuendo defying the last years of the Hays Code and Monroe is very effective as the mystery woman
and neighbor so many men wish would move into their building. It is also one of Wilder’s best comedies,
even rivaling Some Like It Hot (1959)
also included in this set.
Sonny
Tuffs, Evelyn Keyes, Oskar Homolka and Carolyn Jones are among the fine
supporting cast.
We have
previously reviewed the last two films, the only black and white entries and
the only titles from MGM, as singles.
Here is that text repeated:
“Some Like It Hot is a funny film,
though I never thought it was the laugh riot some people did, it is a classic
because of its daring dealings with sexual identity and beyond the comedy we
see the clashings of various worlds (the arts versus criminals, rich versus
poor, male versus female, serious versus funny, progressive versus dead-end,
young versus old, happy versus miserable) that find interplay in ways only
Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond could. Monroe gives one of the best performances of
her career, Tony Curtis gets one of his most challenging and Jack Lemmon shows
what a comic genius he could be. George Raft, Pat O’Brien and Joe E, Brown
also star. Extras include an Original Theatrical Trailer, Virtual Hall Of
Memories, Nostalgic Look Back documentary, two featurettes (The Legacy Of Some Like It Hot, Memories From The Sweet Sues) and
feature length audio commentary track including a Curtis interview, archival
Lemmon interview, Paul Diamond (I.A.L. Diamonds’ son), Lowell Ganz and Babaloo
Mandel.
The Misfits (1961) was the last film of Clark
Gable and Monroe, both of whom were not in their best of health and are joined
by Montgomery Cliff, Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter in this Arthur Miller (who
was married to Monroe at the time) in this contemporary Western about the lives
of a group of friends (or something like that) whom all think in the short term
and are not as happy as they could be. It has a narrative, but also wants
to be profound, so Miller and Huston are trying to be writerly and readerly at
the same time, resulting in a film that can be interesting, but also uneven at
times. After Monroe and Gable were gone, it became a surreal curio as a
result, sometimes losing its content for viewers, but it is interesting in the
way Hud, Last Picture Show and Brokeback
Mountain are, all visiting the West (or the South) now and seeing the tail
end of was is promise lost. A trailer is the only extra.”
The 1080p
1.33 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on Gentlemen is a major upgrade from the DVD version with Fox further
restoring the original photochemical upgrade.
Though there is some minor noise issues (you can see this on larger
screens), the color along with depth and some detail is a giant improvement
over the DVD upgraded. You can see how
fine the dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor was really intended to be.
The 1080p 2.55 X 1 (the original wider CinemaScope frame) digital High
Definition image transfers on Marry,
Return, Business and Itch also
roundly surpass their older DVD counterparts with far superior color, plus new
detail and depth points you could never imagine seeing on DVD but would see on
the best prints of these films. Fox has
gone back to the photochemical restorations and come up with solid HD
presentations that will challenge the best HDTVs and HD projectors around with
their superior color range and rich color.
Return is a mix of vibrant and dull colors, so it only benefits so much,
but it was a dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor release like Gentlemen and Marry, which are demo quality.
By Business and Itch, Fox started their DeLuxe color
labs and to be honest, the color is very impressive throughout both of those
Blu-rays.
As noted
before, “the AVC @ 38 MBPS black and white 1.66 X 1 on Misfits and AVC @
32 MBPS black and white 1.66 X 1 on Hot are in the same boat, with older
HD masters that look good and better than DVD versions, but not as good as 35mm
would.”
All the
Fox films have been upgraded to DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mixes,
even though Gentlemen was originally
an optical monophonic release and the four CinemaScope films originally offered
4-track magnetic stereo sound. You can tell
Gentlemen was monophonic, but Fox
has upgraded it as well as can be expected.
The rest of the films have been further cleaned up and refined,
resulting in sound performance that is far ahead of the lossy Dolby Digital DVD
mixes (included here) with traveling dialogue and sound effects where
possible. Otherwise, you’ll find sound
more in the center channel than you might expect, but all have the best
possible soundfields we can expect from films this age, especially where the
sound comes from four speakers originally all behind the screen. Hot
and Misfits were originally optical
mono theatrical releases, so their soundtracks upgrades are not as strong.
Extras on
Gentlemen, Marry, Return, Business and Itch include terrific isolated music scores in lossless DTS-MA that
are a pleasant surprise and trailers for this and other Fox Monroe films in
this set. Gentlemen adds a Movietone Newsreel on the film, Marry also adds a Movietone Newsreel on
the film, Return and Business have nothing else to add, and Itch adds Still Galleries, a publicity
section with a Fox Movietone Newsreel connected to the film, Deleted Scenes, Fox Legacy piece on the film from the
Fox Movie Channel, Hays Code Meter you can use watching the film to see what
Wilder and company did to challenge censorship, Monroe Interactive Timeline,
new Monroe & Wilder: An Intersection Of Genius featurette and feature
length audio commentary track with author and film scholar Kevin Tally.
As noted
before, extras on Hot “include an
Original Theatrical Trailer, Virtual Hall Of Memories, Nostalgic Look Back
documentary, two featurettes (The Legacy Of Some Like It Hot, Memories
From The Sweet Sues) and feature length audio commentary track including a
Curtis interview, archival Lemmon interview, Paul Diamond (I.A.L. Diamonds’
son), Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.” Misfits only has a trailer.
Forever Marilyn is a strong Blu-ray collection in
a suitable paperboard double case that does not scratch the discs and holds
them nicely. Any serious film fan or home
theater owner needs to consider the set as a must-own collection!
- Nicholas Sheffo
