The Seven Year Itch Review

Overall 4.00 of 5 (by 1 user)

LauraBelle
South Elgin, IL

Marilyn Monroe's Most Classic Scene

Movie Reviewer, a storyteller, A Big Giant Sap, a believer of fate, mother of 16 year old son

Pros

Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Campy, Classic Film

DEC

2008

The Seven Year Itch —

Watching The Seven Year Itch with me, my son confirmed what I'd always known – I was born in the wrong era. I have always loved these old movies from the 50s and 60s. I just don't get a chance to see them enough. Auntie Mame is still one of my all time favorites, although I can't remember the last time I saw it. I think I'm overdue. There's just something about the campiness oft he movies of this era, and watching The Seven Year Itch, I found more of the same.

Of course the big draw in this film is Marilyn Monroe. It even has what is perhaps her most famous scene ever, as she's standing above the subway grate letting her dress blow up in order to cool down in the hot summer weather. She plays such an innocent here, she doesn't even seem to realize that in letting her dress blow up like this, it's enticing every guy out there on the street, not to mention Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell).

It's qute interesting what passed for risque fifty years ago. Richard's wife and son take off for the entire summer, much like the rest of New York back in those days, because of the extreme heat. Richard stays on to work, and his vivid imagination immediately starts running wild, being that they have been married for seven years. Once he hears of his wife running into an old male friend of theirs, he begins to imagine them having an affair. This is interspersed with moments of him also imagining himself having an affair. Despite the fact she warned him no drinking and smoking while she was gone, he immediately starts smoking and having a drink.

While Richard is going over several different sordid scenarios, a plant drops onto his patio courtesy of the girl upstairs. She was watering it with the only thing she could find, a cocktail shaker. We don't find out her name, something of which I never even realized at the time. It's an intersting plot device, as it only serves to keep her more of an innocent fantasy and not real. He invites her down for a drink as he continues his fantasies. The next evening they got out to a movie, then ended up back at his place again, and he moves back and forth between wanting to make a pass at her and trying to avoid this horrible predicament he seems to have gotten himself into and the improprieties that might be assumed.

Like the narrator on Fox Movie Channel explained, The Seven Year Itch was unique in that it was all about having sex, yet there wasn't a moment spent actually having sex. We never saw a bed and and clothes were never being taken off, although Monroe does walk through in a nightgown, but I have dresses that show less than that nightgown showed. It all only served to make it even more campy, which of course I absolutely loved. And although I would have missed the computer era I am so enjoying now, I would have loved to have been around in that time, that innocent time of the 50s and 60s. And now I'm on a desperate search to find and watch Auntie Mame again.