brilliantly orchestrated chaos

Rating: 9/10 (11 October 2007)

The most astonishing thing about this movie is that it works at all. I love Billy Wilder but The Seven Year Itch drove me right up the fricking wall with its testocentric mugging, and why should this movie have been any different when it pulls the same trick? Well first off, the context has opened waaay up: it appropriates the St. Valentine's Day Massacre as its inciting incident, it sweeps from Chicago winter to Florida sunshine. And this time, the filmmakers figure out how to construct an interesting critique of masculinity through the medium of Marilyn. Give us TWO male protagonists, joined at the hip; give us some gangsters to put their hormonal aspirations into some critical context; and by the time you've thrown in Joe E. Brown's lovable goofball playboy, the layering is so intense that it almost begins to resemble depth, and the construction so disorienting that it constantly feeds the comic requirement of surprise. That Tony Curtis's impersonation of a British millionaire sounds more like John Clarke only adds to the fun. And while Marilyn is still Marilyn, she's also looking a little rough around the edges here and there - her on-set nervous breakdown seems to have been incorporated rather than papered over. Brilliantly orchestrated chaos, suggesting that Wilder is only really Wilder when he's also A. I. L. Diamond.