“Wash your face, brush your teeth, and say your Prayers.” Marilyn Monroe’s first plunge into a dramatic starring role casts her as a dangerously unstable babysitter in a hotel-set suspense thriller co-starring Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft. Ms. Monroe may not be Ethel Barrymore (thankfully) but the role suits her well — to play a woman unhinged by low self-esteem and melancholy romantic reveries, she may have tapped personal experience.
Don’t Bother to Knock
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1952 / B&W / 1.37 Academy / 76 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Bancroft, Donna Corcoran, Jeanne Cagney, Lurene Tuttle, Elisha Cook Jr., Jim Backus, Verna Felton, Willis Bouchey.
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Film Editor: George A. Gittens
Written by Daniel Taradash from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong
Produced by Julian Blaustein
Directed by Roy (Ward) Baker
Although she rates second billing below Richard Widmark,...
Don’t Bother to Knock
Blu-ray
Twilight Time
1952 / B&W / 1.37 Academy / 76 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95
Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Bancroft, Donna Corcoran, Jeanne Cagney, Lurene Tuttle, Elisha Cook Jr., Jim Backus, Verna Felton, Willis Bouchey.
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Film Editor: George A. Gittens
Written by Daniel Taradash from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong
Produced by Julian Blaustein
Directed by Roy (Ward) Baker
Although she rates second billing below Richard Widmark,...
- 4/7/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest pictures, or her final completed film, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.
But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on...
But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on...
- 4/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
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The Criterion Collection have revealed their February 2016 line-up (click titles for more information):
On The Cinephiliacs, Peter Labuza talks with Jonathan Rosenbaum about his career and Out 1.
Watch Roger Deakins talk Sicario and more in a recent talk, and read our interview with him:
David Bordwell discusses the women crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s:
You might say that Double Indemnity and Out of the Past are quintessentially 1940s-1950s films, and I’d agree. But so too are works based on women writers. The list of Highsmith adaptations, starting with Strangers on a Train (1951), is too long to recite here, but let’s remember that...
The Criterion Collection have revealed their February 2016 line-up (click titles for more information):
On The Cinephiliacs, Peter Labuza talks with Jonathan Rosenbaum about his career and Out 1.
Watch Roger Deakins talk Sicario and more in a recent talk, and read our interview with him:
David Bordwell discusses the women crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s:
You might say that Double Indemnity and Out of the Past are quintessentially 1940s-1950s films, and I’d agree. But so too are works based on women writers. The list of Highsmith adaptations, starting with Strangers on a Train (1951), is too long to recite here, but let’s remember that...
- 11/16/2015
- by TFS Staff
- The Film Stage
Coming to Blu-ray for the first time from the Cohen Media Group, Claude Chabrol’s late career thriller, Nightcap (better known by its French title, Merci Pour Le Chocolat) is often lumped into conversation as merely one of the seven films the director made with actress Isabelle Huppert. While it is certainly outshined by some of their finer achievements together (particularly The Story of Women and La Ceremonie), it stands firmly on its own as an odd exercise that’s more character study than murder mystery. Chabrol seems amused at the convention and convenience of the narrative, supplied by Charlotte Armstrong’s nonsensically titled 1948 novel The Chocolate Cobweb. Armstrong was in high regard in the 1950’s (her novel Don’t Bother to Knock was turned into a very strange Marilyn Monroe vehicle in 1952), and Chabrol seems keen on retaining the rather deliberate ambience from a tradition of genre gone by.
- 10/7/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
It is a tradition at Noir City, Eddie Muller reminded his audience, that they screen one film at each festival that is utterly incomprehensible. “Tonight,” Muller grinned, “is the night.” The Unsuspected claims the honor, which is not to say that the film isn’t fantastic, but no one will be asked to recapitulate the plot on their way home on Muni. To attempt so would mean possibly riding to the end of the line (“which ends up in, like, Hell”). The Unsuspected is based on the novel by Charlotte Armstrong. Armstrong is a terrific writer also responsible for the Marilyn Monroe noir Don’t Bother to Knock, based on Armstrong’s novel Mischief.
Muller conceded his program notes for The Unsuspected were slightly incorrect. He billed the film as “lustrous studio filmmaking at its finest”; but, the film is actually an independent Michael Curtiz production distributed by Warner Brothers.
Muller conceded his program notes for The Unsuspected were slightly incorrect. He billed the film as “lustrous studio filmmaking at its finest”; but, the film is actually an independent Michael Curtiz production distributed by Warner Brothers.
- 2/3/2009
- by Michael Guillen
- Screen Anarchy
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