THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH: Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox, 1955) Fox Home Video

Director, Billy Wilder was a true renaissance man. Reportedly, while immigrating to the United States, when questioned as to his profession by the officer in charge of validating his passport, Wilder ambitiously remarked, “film maker”, to which the officer replied, “Make some good ones.” For the next 40+ years, Billy Wilder would do just that – and go on to have a distinguished and enviable run of screen successes besides, plying his caustic wit as much to noir or darkly purposed dramas as to his most effervescent comedies. However, it behooves us to reconsider his pre-American tenure in the picture-making biz did not entirely validate his claim made to U.S. customs on that fateful afternoon. Billy Wilder began his professional life as a crime/sports stringer for a not-altogether reputable Berlin tabloid. While it is nevertheless true, he migrated over to the movie biz in Germany from 1929 to 1933, much of this tenure was spent producing, and only occasionally, writing screenplays.

With Hitler's rise to power, Wilder fled to Paris, where he made his directorial debut. After losing his entire family to the holocaust, Wilder then found his way to America without actually able to speak a stitch of English. Despite what might otherwise be considered a Herculean handicap to overcome, Wilder persisted, learnt the language, translating his Euro-centric glibness to tweak and unearth the oft grave humor in true-to-life situations on this side of the pond. Billy Wilder’s gifts for comedy is even more uniquely appreciated when one realizes the considerable chasm between that European sense of humor and its more crassly commercialized American derivative. Whether audiences at the time knew it or not, Billy Wilder was not about to sell his principles short. Rather, he embarked upon a calculated venture to elevate the stature of American comedy to its loftiest attributes while celebrating much of its homegrown screwball past.

American cinema had seen nothing like it since the erudite finesse of Ernst Lubtisch. Reportedly, after exiting Lubitsch’s funeral in 1947, Wilder mournfully muttered to fellow film-maker, William Wyler, “No more Lubitsch” to which Wyler added, “It’s worse that that…no more Lubitsch pictures!” While the latter was certainly true enough, Wilder’s emergence from under Lubitsch’s shadow at the end of the 1940’s was to ensure at least the essence of Euro-centric sophistication did not perish with his mentor. Indeed, under Wilder’s auspices it would remain and, in fact, ripen on American screens for 3 more decades yet to follow. And Wilder, unlike Lubitsch, implicitly understood where the subtler nuances of this Euro-waggishness could be reworked – even remade – to find broader appeal with an international audience. While much of Lubitsch’s sublime humor has ostensibly dated since his passing, Wilder’s ability to morph and mature his own firebrand with the times has since made his movies perennially revivable. More than that, they appear ageless – even to the modern and post-modern sensibility.

Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) is, today, considered less of a feather in Wilder’s cap than a lightning rod in Marilyn Monroe’s movie career. For better or worse, it remains a picture synonymous with Monroe – even if its runaway success was – in hindsight – nominally responsible for ending Monroe’s brief marriage to baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio. George Axelrod’s Broadway play had been moderately successful in titillating live audiences with minor comedic fiascos of a harried/married businessman who finds himself utterly torn between fidelity to his commonplace wife (currently vacationing with their young son in the country) and his obvious sexual attraction toward the luscious new single renting the Manhattan apartment directly above his own. That the film ultimately evolved into a star vehicle for Monroe proved problematic, at least for Wilder; the comedy, becoming slightly unbalanced.

The play is all about a largely benign husband’s imaginary fantasies, his nocturnal and day-time dreams to woo and win ‘the girl’ chronically vetting his moral conscience with a cautionary voiceover narration, provided by the wife in absentia. The film, heavily rewritten by Axelrod and Wilder, drew its inspiration from Monroe’s sultry iconography – already galvanized in the pop culture as the fifties’ reigning movie goddess. Hence, the filmic Seven Year Itch became a tale of sweet naivety inadvertently taunted, rather than deliberately teased, a married man nearly driven to wild distraction. Wilder never considered the picture anything better than disposable fluff, deeply disconcerted that its original intent – to illustrate the downfall of a husband’s fidelity while his wife’s away – was not allowed, under Hollywood’s self-governing code of censorship – to become the main focus of the story. Wilder was also not keen on the casting of Monroe for the pivotal part of the never-to-be-named, upstairs ‘girl’. Indeed, on Broadway, the play had been a showcase for actor, Tom Ewell (invited to reprise his part herein). On stage, Ewell’s mugging was delightful pantomime as his character, Richard Sherman, fell from grace. For the camera, alas, it became grotesque parody at best.

The movie opens with publishing executive, Richard Sherman seeing his wife, Helen (Evelyn Keyes) and young son, Ricky (Butch Bernard) off for their summer respite in Maine from Grand Central Station. Much to everyone’s dismay, young Ricky has left his canoe paddle behind inside the couple’s cramped apartment. This becomes the catalyst for a running gag throughout the picture as Richard, suffering the slings and arrows of temptations in his newfound bachelorhood chronically forgets to FedEx the paddle so his son can enjoy the great outdoors.   Back at the apartment, Richard meets up with wily/womanizing, Mr. Kruhulik (Robert Strauss), his landlord who invites him to partake of some wild carousing while both their wives are away. Feeling secure – as Richard is certain he would never stoop to such disreputable and slovenly weaknesses – Richard cordially bows out of Kruhulik’s invitation. Instead, he retires to his apartment to proof read a copy of Dr. Brubaker’s (Oscar Homolka) latest book on psychoanalysis that his publishing firm is thinking of representing. Regrettably, Richard gets the surprise of his life when his new upstairs neighbor – the unnamed ‘girl’ (Marilyn Monroe) buzzes him to let her into the building, after forgetting her key. Our introduction to Monroe is delicious, getting the cord from her table fan caught in the door and slinking up the stairs after briefly flirting with Richard, poured into one of designer, Travilla’s form-fitting gowns. Alas, this dear/sweet innocent is oblivious to Richard’s immediate attraction.

She befriends him without reservations, tells Richard all about her modeling career and her inability to understand why men continue to chase after pretty women, simply because they can. As a pledge of good faith, Richard invites the girl down to his apartment after learning hers has no air conditioning. But almost immediately, he begins to question his motives. The girl arrives with potato chips and champagne. Richard plays Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, a mood piece he perceives as part of his grand seduction. However, with absolutely no head for classical music, the girl is instead stimulated by the more simplistic Chopsticks. She takes her place next to Richard on the piano bench and proceeds to match him note for note. Still unaware of his wild-eyed attraction, the girl becomes bemused when Richard stops playing in mid-tempo the piano. Overcome, Richard lunges for the girl, causing both to lose their footing and wind up on the floor. Stirred to respectability, Richard sheepishly declares, “This never happened to me before,” to which the girl astutely replies, “Really?” Happens to me all the time.”

Feeling incredibly foolish, Richard escorts the girl out of his apartment with a sincere apology. But he lies awake all night imagining scenarios, some involving a passionate flagrante delicto, and others more disconcerting, as he perceives she will expose his advances publicly as TV’s ‘Dazzle-Dent’ toothpaste spokeswoman. To diffuse his anxieties, Richard makes several sincere inquiries to Dr. Brubaker before reluctantly agreeing to see the girl again, only this time in a public place. The two attend a screening of Creature From The Black Lagoon. Afterward, the girl hypothesizes the monster in that film is severely misunderstood and just wants to be loved like everyone else. Richard finds her empathy refreshingly sweet, and is even more amused a few moments later when a strong updraft from the subway grate causes her billowy white skirt to dramatically rise above her knees. Richard returns home to take a phone call from Helen who implores him to mail Ricky’s paddle to Maine. Richard agrees, but is somewhat put off to discover Helen has been spending quite a bit of her free time with beefy Tom McKenzie (Sunny Tufts), their next-door neighbor who just happens to be vacationing in Maine too. Imagining a lusty affair between Helen and Tom, Richard vengefully pursues ‘the girl’ – encouraging her to stay in his air-conditioned apartment during the interminable heat wave.

Kruhulik returns from a night’s boozing and accidentally catches a glimpse of the girl, bare-legged and cooling herself in front of the window unit. Concerned Kruhulik might misconstrue the moment as salacious, Richard attempts to diffuse his landlord’s curiosity. The girl, who unlike in the Broadway show, never really desires to have an affair with Richard, suggests he go to his wife and inform her how lucky she is to have a husband so passionate and loyal he can resist her charms. Afterward, feeling more guilty than ever, Richard decides he must put an end to their largely imagined affair. The next day, Tom McKenzie arrives to collect Ricky’s paddle. Having overblown Tom’s influence with Helen in his own mind, Richard needlessly assaults Tom in his living room before seizing the paddle and dashing down the street – presumably en route to save his marriage by spending the rest of the summer with Helen and Ricky in Maine. The girl, still in her terrycloth bathrobe and curlers, leans out of the Sherman’s front window, clutching Richard’s shoes and waving seductively goodbye.

The Seven Year Itch is delightfully obtuse – a real fifties’ pastiche and time capsule reflecting the moral straitjacketing of the decade's social mores and manners where sex is concerned. Wilder’s attempts to freshen up this outlook, the flaws – as well as the virtues – between committed relationships, as opposed to one-night stands, gets blunted at every opportunity. Such revisions, made partly to accommodate Monroe, though largely to appease the production code, deprive the finished product of its ‘good time had by all’ status. The infamous skirt blowing/subway scene – perhaps the most iconic of any moment in a Monroe movie – is a real wet noodle in the picture. Indeed, the censors would not allow anything beyond Monroe’s naked knees to be visible, even as press and promotion for The Seven Year Itch featured a towering, full-figure image of Monroe, barely able to hold Travilla’s lithe, gossamer fabric just below her crotch. The scene was initially shot under a real subway grate in Manhattan, with a crowd gathered behind studio-sanctioned blockades to witness it. The gratuitous leering from ‘fans’ did much to enrage Monroe’s hubby, DiMaggio. And, unable to capture exactly what he wanted on film, Wilder later reshot the moment again, this time on a soundstage at Fox.

Monroe had been encouraged to wear two pairs of panties to shoot the sequence – and did. Alas, the powerful klieg lights used to flood the night-time shoot made the actress’s panties translucent, much to DiMaggio’s chagrin. Un-phased by her husband’s reaction, Monroe took it all in stride. But only the poster art and gigantic billboards for The Seven Year Itch ultimately featured images from that first-night’s shoot on the streets of Manhattan. The actual movie settled instead for the unreasonable and utterly tame studio-bound facsimile, to suffer even further cuts under the stringencies of the Hayes Office. Viewed today, The Seven Year Itch is an oddity in Wilder and Monroe’s respective bodies of work. Wilder shoots the picture fairly straight-forward. And while Monroe does her absolute best with the material – particularly to excel in a scene in which the girl contemplates an innocuous menu while utterly oblivious to Richard’s frenzied chagrin over their so-called affair - she never attains that elusive sparkle to truly shine on the screen. Every nuance in Monroe’s performance has been meticulously thought out, arguably, too much. While hardly mechanical, it is contrived. Does it work? Sort of. Monroe plays mostly to the audience, plying Richard as though she were the taut strings of a Stradivarius in desperate need of a very good pluck. That said, Monroe is this movie’s saving grace. Without her, there is very little here to appreciate. And perhaps, knowing this, Wilder seems bored with his own direction. Too much of the picture’s runtime is devoted to Tom Ewell whose sexual frustrations wear thin early on, especially once the audience realizes most of it will not be advancing beyond the hook-and-worm stage of seduction. Occasionally, Richard’s dalliances with ‘the girl’ do generate a flicker of friction to disturb the status quo. But ultimately, she convinces him, he is a happily married man who should go back to his wife – none the sadder, and definitely none the wiser!

Fox Home Video’s Blu-ray of The Seven Year Itch is all over the place and a huge disappointment. Evidently, archival elements have not withstood the ravages of time in the altogether. While much of the picture sports impressive color fidelity and saturation, there are a handful of scenes to suffer from some truly horrendous flicker and color degradation. The flicker is the more distracting. But it is also disconcerting to suddenly have the DeLuxe palette falter to the point where we get a careworn and grainy image that looks as though parts of it have been fed through a meat grinder. Add to this, Cinemascope’s inherent shortcomings, problematic dissolves, fades, some muddy monopack DeLuxe color, slight image instability and…well…you get the picture – widescreen, no less. The Seven Year Itch on Blu-ray is just sad.  In the late 1980s, Fox did perform a photochemical ‘restoration’. Alas, it appears very little has been done in the interim to advance from those decidedly primitive techniques. The Blu-ray is also strangely anemic and fuzzy. While Bausch and Lomb lenses left much to be desired, long shots here are an indistinguishable mess (decidedly, not in keeping with vintage ‘scope’).  Medium shots fair only slightly better. As 90% of the movie is made up of either one or the other (‘scope’ movies rarely engaged in close-ups), most of what is here looks soft, soft, soft and lightyears older than it ought – especially in hi-def. The 5.1 DTS audio sounds pretty spiffy with good spatial separation in its directionalized 6-track repurposing.

Fox adds an audio commentary by Arthur Kevin Lally as well as an isolated score. There’s also a Picture-in-Picture feature on the Hayes Code, nearly a half-hour on Monroe and Wilder, 17min. excised from Tom Rothmann’s Fox Movie Channel, waxing affectionately, and a thoroughly ancient ‘Backstory’ episode, produced for the long-defunct AMC movie network that does little except  to gloss over the making of this film. Finally, we get vintage newsreels shot during the New York premiere. Bottom line: The Seven Year Itch is hardly Marilyn Monroe's or Billy Wilder’s finest hour on the screen. But it does deserve far more respect than it has been afforded here. As Disney Inc. is now in command of the vintage Fox catalog, and is more a company into hoarding, than sharing, its assets with the world, the likelihood of a complete home video restoration is minimal to nil. So, if you do not own The Seven Year Itch on home video already, but wish to, this will probably be your only opportunity to do so. Regrets!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

2.5

EXTRAS

3