"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." ~ Marilyn Monroe

This little Noir gem gets overlooked unfairly it seems, probably due to the fact that it’s a rare chance to see a young Marilyn Monroe in a dramatic role that played against the glamourous and light image that 20^th Century Fox had settled on to build her into a superstar. Another factor may be it was directed by Roy Ward Baker, a British director who caught the attention of Daryl F. Zanuck, who then hired him for a Tyrone Power film shot in London before Baker relocated to Hollywood to direct 3 more Fox films there. Fox teamed her with relatively new and dynamic star Richard Widmark and a young and luminous Anne Bancroft who began her cinema journey here on the way to becoming a screen acting great.

Lyn (Anne Bancroft) is a lounge singer at a middling Manhattan hotel, waiting to see if her pilot boyfriend Jed (Richard Widmark) will show up as usual given she’s written him a Dear John letter. Entrepreneurial elevator operator Eddie (Elisha Cook Jnr) offers his niece to an older couple who need a babysitter for their child while hubby (Jim Backus) gets a business award at a grand dinner function nearby. Nell (Marilyn Monroe) shows up to look after the child and promptly makes herself at home, trying on the wife’s expensive clothes and perfume after she’s put the child to bed. Jed shows up at the lounge then goes up to his room after an altercation with Lyn, only to spy Nell in the room across the courtyard. They hook up and Jed arrives in Nell’s room but before long he discovers everything is not as it seems.

Marilyn had a couple of meaty support roles in the lead up to what amounts to her first starring role in films – in the previous couple of years she’d made a splash in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, in Joe Mankiewicz’s All About Eve and in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night, acquitting herself well in support roles in those dramas. She’d dutifully made the gossip sheets by dating baseball star Joe DiMaggio but 4 months before the release of Don’t Bother To Knock some old nude photos of her caused a scandal when Hugh Hefner published them in the first edition of Playboy and Monroe gained a more widespread notoriety. Fox capitalised on the publicity and produced posters with Monroe in a figure hugging red lingerie that never appears in the film. It was ever thus. 

The modestly produced film has quality at every level with the Daniel Taradash script hitting the mark and Lucien Ballad’s stark cinematography equally fine. Ballad had shot Jacques Tourneur’s Berlin Express for RKO (starring his then wife Merle Oberon) and for Fox, Robert Wise’s The House on Telegraph Hill and Henry Hathaway’s Diplomatic Courier starring Fox heavyweight Tyrone Power, so his Noir credentials were solid and here he makes the most of the cramped spaces. Baker keeps the suspense and tension in balance as we get a slow reveal of Marilyn’s real mental condition as she moves from sweet girl-next-door energy to sad-eyed and deluded. The scene where we are uncertain if she’d push a child out of a many-floors-up hotel window is a testament to his pacing and to Marilyn’s characterisation – modern audiences may be unsure and on edge, but that event was never going to happen in a Hollywood film from 1952! Baker and Monroe manage to keep the piece unpredictable and disconcerting for the viewer and Marilyn’s take on Nell will be better accepted by modern viewers now more conversant with the dimensions of mental illness than contemporary audiences who were mostly ignorant of a condition that was stigmatised, hidden and under diagnosed.

Richard Widmark provided his usual edgy presence where you are never sure if a sneer or a smile is coming. He continued his rise as a star of the first rank at Fox and his scenes with Anne Bancroft are a lesson in a loaded back and forth between two lovers still dancing around each other, one wanting in and the other wanting out. Bancroft is wonderful in her film debut, a fine talent who was simply an asset to any production she subsequently signed on to, which included various and sundry in the 1950s - westerns, swords and sandals, Film Noir – until she took a Broadway break for 5 years in 1957 before returning to Hollywood where she became a bona-fide star with her Academy Award winning role in The Miracle Worker.

It's Marilyn who leaves the lasting impression though, one that wrong footed both studio and audience expectations. Fox promoted the pic with cheesecake shots of Marilyn in sexy red underwear - of course shots that appear nowhere in the film, cashing in on her sudden Playboy notoriety  - but what they didn’t know was that the stunning blonde had ambitions to be a serious actor, which became plain when she later went East to the Actors Studio to study The Method under Lee and Paula Strasberg. She plays the vulnerable and deluded Nell in a series of escalating modes, causing Jed to remark, ‘I can’t figure you out, you’re silk on one side and sandpaper on the other.’ It sums up Marilyn’s performance, which is aided and abetted by the always angular Elisha Cook Jnr. who always could be relied upon to create maximumly memorable characters with a minimum of screen time. It’s also a rare pleasure to see Jim Backus (Thurston Howell III!!) in a dramatic film – and to be reminded that he worked with both Monroe and James Dean. The child actor Donna Corcoran does well in the role of Bunny and has some nice scenes with Monroe, some tender, some tense.

Don’t Bother To Knock is a solid Film Noir with most interest centred around Monroe understandably, but that would be to ignore what is a well-rounded, professional studio production. A solid director working a fine script constructing a well-paced and photographed piece is no small feat – that it is acted solidly at every level is the cherry on top that makes it well worth revisiting.