Rent The Seven Year Itch (1955)

The Subway Chaems Us So - The Seven Year Itch review by CH

Five years before Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) there was the apartment which is the main setting for his The Seven Year Itch. This film, however, is of course best known for that scene in which Marilyn’s white dress billows when caught by a gust through the sidewalk vent of a subway after she and Tom Ewell have been to a showing of The Creature from the Black Lagoon at a Manhattan cinema.

That had been released the year before, one of many details which locates the film in its time - an era when the Catholic church continued to hold sway over what could be depicted upon the screen, especially when it came to the subject of the footloose husbands taking advantage of their wives and children being absent from the fetid city for the summer.

And so what does do Tom when Marilyn rents the apartment above?

Well, he delivers many a monologue about his honourable intentions while giving way to fantasies which take a different tack - including one which parodies the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and another in which, hospitalised, he finds a nurse flinging herself upon his bed (a spirited turn by Carolyn Jones, who became Morticia in The Addams Family). He occupies more of the screen than his neighbour, but Marilyn brings to proceedings a wit and comedy which lift it almost to the level of Wilder’s most notable films.

Strange to say, censorship also lifts the film. George Axelrod’s Broadway play led to seduction forbidden on film, but the latter has all the more of a frisson for its being an unfulfilled possibility.

As with The Apartment, which was inspired by Brief Encounter, so The Seven Year Itch has a Coward connection. One of the fantasies has Ewell imagining himself wooing her by sitting in a cocktail jacket at a piano while playing Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

There are enough bravura moments to keep one happily diverted - a view of a sultry summer which eases a chill winter’s viewing, and leaves one also wondering whether it will be revived on stage in its original form - and, of course, eager to seek out The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As for the wisdom of keeping one’s underwear in the freezer, that is something for each viewer to decide for herself - or even himself.

Time Capsule. - The Seven Year Itch review by Steve

A sex comedy about infidelity was always likely to be a heroic failure in the era of Hollywood censorship, and so it proved. Now, the only aspect likely to offend is the sexism. When the wives and kids leave Manhattan every summer, the eyes of the men turn to available women. Nervy publisher Tom Ewell is distracted by the kooky blonde who takes the upstairs apartment.

Marilyn Monroe is ideal casting. She perfected the personality of the sexy, obliging innocent. In a film that survives mainly as a period piece, she is still as fresh as iced cucumber. There is that iconic moment when her dress flies up as the subway train passes beneath an air vent... and Ewell is excellent too!

Plenty of humour survives. Billy Wilder follows the method of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch in crediting the audience with the wit to complete the cryptic innuendo. In 1955, this film was audacious, and it was modern. And that zeitgeist has modified into a fifties time capsule of New York City with the brownstone flats and executive tower blocks.

This is not Wilder's best work, and he dismissed it, thinking the censorship restrictions were insurmountable. But it is a glossy, superficial, entertaining film, with one of Monroe's definitive performances. Tom Ewell's fantasy soliloquies were innovative and surely influenced Woody Allen. And there is still residual excitement in its once forbidden themes.