Having sent his wife Helen and son Ricky to Maine to avoid the scorching July Manhattan summer, Richard Sherman, "keymaster" of a pocket edition publisher, stays behind to work, promising his wife to abstain from drinking and smoking. "Some husbands think just because their wives are away for the summer, they can run wild." However, the appearance of a young blonde renting his upstairs neighbours' apartment turns his life topsy-turvy, turning him into a bundle of nerves.
Sherman approves the covers of the pulp books: "Soup up the title a little, get yourself a cheerful and interesting cover. It's a question of imagination, and Mr. Sherman has a lot of it," says the narrator. To quote his wife and as a promoting film technology gag, "lately, you've been imagining in Cinemascope and Stereophonic sound." From his imagination, including a parody of the beach scene in From Here To Eternity, we learn that he doesn't feel he's good-looking or charismatic. It's his time with The Girl that changes him. His imagination ranges from the humorous, ridiculous, even paranoid. And he reveals his thoughts in soliloquys, which at times resemble trains-of-thought or even his subconscious.
The Girl turns out to be a typical blonde, but fun-loving, friendly, with simple tastes, understanding, trusting, and as it turns out, compassionate as seen from her sympathy for the creature of the black lagoon: "He wasn't really all bad. I think he just craved a little affection, you know. A sense of being wanted and needed." Oh, and she's definitely not a Rachmaninoff girl.
My take on the skirt scene?
Maybe I'd seen so many pictures of posters of it that it wasn't a big deal, and it's a bit overhyped. There's plenty of superlativememorable dialogue, much of it funny, that boosts this movie. However, the Girl has the best one. When Sherman tells her he imagines a girl to love someone like Gregory Peck, she tears into him. "You think every girl's a dope? You think a girl goes to a party and there's this one guy, a great big hunk in a fancy striped vest strutting around like a tiger, giving you that 'I'm so handsome you can't resist me look? And from this she's supposed to fall flat on her face? Well, she doesn't fall on her face. But there's another guy in the room, way over in the corner. Maybe he's kind of nervous and shy and perspiring a little. First you look past him, but then you sort of sense he's gentle and kind and worried, and he'll be tender with you. Nice and sweet. That's what's really exciting. If I were your wife, I'd be very very jealous of you." Those sentences cheered me up when I first heard them, and made me think, "Well, maybe I've got it made, even though I don't look like Tom Cruise or Patrick Swayze." After all, like Sherman, I thought, no pretty girl in her right mind wants me.
The key trends of vegetarian cuisine, the coaxial cable, 50,000,000 TV viewers, and Arthur Godfrey are time capsule elements exemplified in the America of 1955.
Tom Ewell, who reprised his role from the George Axelrod play of the same name, must be one lucky actor. After this movie, he played opposite another blonde, Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can't Help It.
Robert Strauss is funny as Kruhulik the lecherous greasy-looking janitor, who quotes from Porgy and Bess to describe the antics of summer bachelors: "Summertime, an' the livin' is easy, when the fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high." Doro Merande has a funny line as a waitress whose pro-naturalist camp stance extends to pacifist sentiments. And Carolyn Jones, best known as Morticia Addams, plays a red-haired nurse smitten by Sherman in an imagination sequence.
For me, this is Marilyn's best picture and best character. I fell in love with her upon first seeing this. Now, though, I consider her an old friend. So, calling all the lonely creatures of the lagoon like me out there with great imagination and no esteem. Don't give up hope--there's a Girl waiting out there for you.
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