© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

The extraordinary value of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol’s artwork aside

Marilyn Monroe by Myron Ehrenberg
Myron Ehrenberg
/
Photoplay, January 1955/Wikimedia Commons
Marilyn Monroe, c. 1954

A few weeks ago, Andy Warhol’s portrait of screen legend Marilyn Monroe, called “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” was sold at Christie’s for $195 million.

The extraordinary value was on the side of Warhol, not Marilyn. Even Warhol’s series of portraits of a Campbell’s soup can brings huge amounts of money at auction. According to artsy.net, the auction record to date for the silk screen series of soup cans is $11.8 million.

But comparing the subjects of Marilyn Monroe and a Campbell’s soup can is ridiculous. Right? One pop culture icon is tasty but contains too much sodium. The other pop culture icon was a complex, troubled, gorgeous woman in her private life, and, onscreen, a talented and sexy actress in both comedy and dramatic films.

Countless books and articles have been written about Monroe’s life. No need to discuss biography in this brief piece. Instead, let’s look back at a few of her most entertaining performances in films that are readily available for home viewing.

Some Like It Hot was co-written and directed by the legendary Billy Wilder, released in 1959. The late fifties seem a time of social conservatism when compared with our current era – although, in some ways, we seem headed backwards. In this very funny comedy-romance, two unemployed musicians, played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, dress up as females and take a train to Florida to be part of an all-gal band. In the band is Monroe as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, vocalist and ukulele player. The comic action is quick-paced. The gender-bending storyline was silly to some, shocking to others in original audiences. That was then. From the start, however, it was a big hit. There are aspects of the plot twists that may seem dated, but the movie is a comic classic. You can show it to a lecture hall filled with doubting twenty-year-olds, and the laughs start coming early on and do not stop.

Almost a decade earlier, another award-winning classic feature, All About Eve, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, chronicles the life of illustrious but aging stage star Margo Channing, how Channing’s growing insecurities about aging cause the sufferings of those around her, and vice-versa. Monroe plays Miss Casswell, a secondary character who is a wannabee star. It cannot be said that All About Eve revolves around Monroe, not with Bette Davis as Channing and Anne Baxter as her ruthless would-be successor. No, but in the few scenes in which Monroe appears, she provides the needed comic relief. In those sequences there is only Monroe—and she was only 24 when she made this film.

Another highly entertaining Monroe feature is Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch from 1955, in which she places a character simply known as “The Girl,” a sex object who fills the imagination of her neighbor, played by sadly forgotten comic actor Tom Ewell, after his wife and children leave the city for the summer. Dated? Quite. It’s very much a sex romp of the fifties, but with a few very amusing and even iconic scenes.

Marilyn Monroe played effectively in dramatic roles, too. Bus Stop. Clash By Night. She played in musicals. There’s No Business Like Show Business, for instance. And Gentleman Prefer Blondes as Lorelei Lee, a creation of satirist Anita Loos, and one of Monroe’s most outstanding and iconic roles.

Some individual or some institution has paid a lot of money for Warhol’s portrait to hang on their wall. Granted, it is an artful piece. But everyone of us can afford to be entertained by the incomparable Marilyn Monroe onscreen at home.

Audrey Kupferberg is a retired film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

Related Content
  • High quality detective or crime dramas occasionally have enjoyed longer lives than my living room sofa and my large kitchen appliances. Midsomer Murders has aired for twenty-two seasons, 132 episodes, and Silent Witness chugs along with twenty-five seasons and 228 two-hour-long episodes. Law and Order, Criminal Minds, Foyles War and others have had healthy runs.
  • Not all comedies provide carefree entertainment. In the case of the Bill & Ted trio of features, there are strange threatening occurrences and paranormal death experiences. The franchise of sci fi comedies began in 1989 with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It stars Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and the late great George Carlin, and follows a couple of high school students, goofy California dudes, from their history class to adventures in time travel via a magical phone booth. They gather up a bevy of historical figures in hopes of passing their history course. If they fail, Ted’s father will send Ted to a military school, and Ted and Bill’s band, the Wyld Stallions, will itself become ancient history!