A Film Canon

This is effectively a single interior monologue, in which Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) reflects on the minutiae of his surroundings, and his gradual entanglement with 'the girl' upstairs (Marilyn Monroe), over the course of his wife and son's annual summer holiday. On the one hand, this results in a stagy, occasionally hammy, monotony that betrays its origins in Georg Axelrod's three-act play, and could easily have been mitigated by the elaboration of some secondary characters. Yet the restriction of all introspection to Sherman simultaneously imbues the action that revolves around him, and the girl who prompts it, with a tipsy, hallucinatory quality that is only enhanced by the frequent recourse to imaginary interlocuturs and asides, which delighfully parody contemporary genres (noir, melodrama, the western), as well as by the dreamy score, extrapolated from a fantastic rendition of Rachmaninoff's second concerto. By the conclusion, the possibility remains that the girl has been a mere projection of his wandering, overheated mind, and his greatest crime has simply been drinking a little more than his wife prescribed. It's also worth mentioning Wilder's evocative portrait of the denuded metropolis, in which the sudden absence of wives and children brings a whole host of marginal eccentrics into relief, including vegetarians, nudists and the "two interior decorators" on the top floor, as well as suffusing the street with the hushed intimacy of the apartment complex within which most of the action takes place, its subway vents just a more effective source of air-conditioning.