by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran My Week with
Marilyn, the quite charming
quasi-biopic from the Weinstein Company and BBC Films last year which, as the
title suggests, deals not with Marilyn Monroe’s entire life but with the period
during which she was in Great Britain to film the first (and, as it turned out,
the only) movie her company Marilyn Monroe Productions ever made, The Prince
and the Showgirl. Marilyn’s business
partner was still photographer Milton Greene (played in this movie by Dominic
Cooper), who had shot some of the most haunting images of her ever created but
was a total neophyte in the business of moving pictures. He cut a distribution deal with Warner
Bros. (though Marilyn still owed three films to 20th Century-Fox as
a contract player) and for the company’s first project, he bought the movie
rights to a play called The Sleeping Prince (also the working title of the film and the name
we see on the slate cards when this film depicts the shoot) which Laurence
Olivier (Kenneth Branagh, who began his film career directing and starring in a
1996 remake of Shakespeare’s Henry V — the film that had launched Olivier’s career as an actor/director in
films in 1944) had performed on stage with his then-wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia
Ormond), who in real life took being aced out of her stage part by an American
with far less grace than is depicted in this script by Adrian Hodges, based on
a couple of memoirs by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who’s actually the male
lead in the film. Greene decided to hire Olivier not only to repeat his stage
role in the movie but to direct it as well — and Olivier, according to
biographer Donald Spoto, took the job mainly to prove to the world (and
especially to the rest of the movie business) that he could direct a film that wasn’t based on a Shakespeare play. My Week with
Marilyn is based on a couple of
books by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), an ambitious young man from a well-to-do
aristocratic family who was determined to break into movies and saw his chance
when he applied for a job as a “Third” (i.e., a third assistant director,
really a glorified go-fer) to the production of The Sleeping Prince — eventually released as The Prince and the
Showgirl to get Marilyn’s character
in the title — and he controversially claimed to have had a one-week affair
with La Monroe during the shoot,
following which Marilyn’s resistance and fear of the project evaporated and the
film moved swiftly to completion.
Clark’s reminiscences have been controversial
because he, shall we say, vastly inflated his importance to the production —
its other surviving participants almost universally said they couldn’t remember
him and they highly doubted that Marilyn ever had sex with him (and even the
film itself is pretty coy about the did-they-or-didn’t-they? question; they’re
shown swimming together, she in the nude and he in his underwear, and doing a
bit of necking but they don’t slobber all over each other blatantly in the
common modern movie manner when two characters are supposed to be in a sexual relationship) — and the
film is least credible in the scenes with Clark and Marilyn together. What it does show is what a handful Marilyn must have been to
work with; just about all the Monroe biographies and other histories of the
making of The Prince and the Showgirl describe it as a tense and troubled shoot, with Olivier appalled at the
presence of Paula Strasberg (Lee Strasberg’s wife and Susan Strasberg’s mother)
on the set as Marilyn’s private acting coach (“We can’t have two directors on one film!” Olivier thunders,
and Milton Greene and all Marilyn’s handlers inform him that they have to do whatever they can to make and keep Marilyn happy) and even
more appalled that the great sex goddess, who by 1957 had been cast mostly in
dumb-blonde sexpot roles but had occasionally got parts that showcased real
acting talent under the peroxide, the white makeup, the ass-wriggling and the
cutesy-poo intonations (The Asphalt Jungle, Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to
Knock, Niagara and, most importantly, Bus
Stop, in which despite the
woodenness of Don Murray as her leading man she turned in a sensitive,
beautifully calibrated performance as the untalented but sympathetic roadhouse
entertainer Cherie), had been studying the Method and started dropping Method
phrases about motivations and having to “find” the character. Olivier at one
point instructed Marilyn to “be sexy” — thinking that she could just turn the
sex machine on and have every (straight) guy in the audience creaming in his
pants at the sight of her — and she was trying to find her way to the inner
depths of a character that really didn’t have any.
The story they were making
was, as I noted when Charles and I watched The Prince and the Showgirl together, a “predictable and clichéd” rewrite of Cinderella in which “Grand Duke Charles [Olivier], regent of
Carpathia, is in London in 1911 to attend the coronation of King George V; to
amuse himself while he’s in town he picks showgirl Elsie Marina [Monroe] from
the chorus line of a musical called The Coconut Girl, and invites her to the palace for a midnight
supper — only to find that this Cinderella knows exactly what he wants and how to fend him off; eventually, however, she loosens
him up enough to permit democracy in Carpathia and show some affection to his
son, who’s going to become king when he turns 18 a year and a half from then,
and there’s a hint they will get together in that time once his regency ends.”
Much of the movie rings true to what we know about Monroe — how discombobulated
she was, how chancy her nerves were, how some days she would stumble and be
unable to remember the simplest lines while on others she’d be line-perfect
through whole pages of script and nail everything in one take or two (Billy
Wilder, who directed her in The Seven-Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, recalled how she was virtually impossible to work
with during the studio work in Hollywood on Some Like It Hot, but when the company went to Coronado for the
exteriors Monroe — perhaps because she was away from the city that was both the
epicenter of the movie business and her own home town — loosened up, needed
almost no retakes and was a joy to work with), and how sensitive she was to
signs of betrayal, real or imagined.
Like the real Monroe, this version’s
arrival in London to make The Prince and the Showgirl is delayed by her new husband Arthur Miller and
the attempts by the anti-Communist inquisitors to get something on him that
would persuade the State Department to pull his passport and keep him from
leaving the U.S. (years later Miller claimed that the chair of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities, who was locked in a tight re-election
race, had offered to give him a clean bill of health if Miller could arrange
for the Congressmember to be photographed with Monroe) and delayed again when
Marilyn has a hissy-fit when she discovers Miller’s journal and reads a comment
she interprets as viciously derogative towards her. No one knows for sure at
this point just what Miller wrote that ticked her off so much, but Lee
Strasberg — whom Marilyn was calling at all hours long-distance from London
when his wife’s FTF advice and counsel wasn’t enough to reassure her — recalled
Marilyn telling him, “It was something about how disappointed he was in me. I
was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. His first wife had let
him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was
a troublesome bitch and that he [Miller] no longer had a decent answer to that
one.” In his controversial play After the Fall, written in 1964 (four years after their breakup
and two years after Monroe’s death), Miller reconstructed the episode and made
the text read, “The only one I will ever love is my daughter. If I could only
find an honorable way to die.”
In real life the incident, whatever the facts of
what Miller wrote and what on earth he could have meant by it, was a wrenching
emotional catastrophe far more intense than anything being dramatized in the
relatively silly movie Monroe and Olivier were making; in My Week with
Marilyn it’s simply an excuse for
screenwriter Hodges to get Miller (Dougray Scott) to leave England and clear
the field for Colin Clark and the Goddess to have their affair, or whatever it
was. My Week with Marilyn has its problems — we can believe Monroe as a Lilith-like temptress who
gets off on toying with men for a few days and then rejecting them if
screenwriter Jacobs and actress Williams weren’t so good at portraying Monroe
as a kind of sponge for human emotions, a creature so pathetically needy no amount of love — from husband, boyfriends,
colleagues or the movie-going public (one illusion Monroe entered the project
with that got cruelly shattered quickly was that she thought British people
would be more well-behaved and less demanding of a movie star in their midst;
instead, she’s surrounded and virtually attacked on the streets of London just
as nastily as she was at home — maybe it’s a cliché by now that fame is a
devil’s bargain that gives you money and popularity at the cost of anything
resembling a normal human life, but that bargain has rarely been dramatized as
well as it is here) — and it’s hard to believe the conceit of this movie that a
24-year-old third assistant director working for a salary for the first time in
his entire life could hold the key to making Marilyn behave on set that her
prestigious director/co-star, her private acting coach, her private acting
coach’s husband long-distance on the phone, her co-workers (including Dame
Sybil Thorndyke, played superbly by Judi Dench — the second night in a row we’d
seen a film with her in it — and portrayed as the character who probably
instinctively knew more about how to handle Marilyn as anyone else, managing to
treat her supportively without fawning over her), her business partner, her
staff (including Toby Jones as her P.R. man, Arthur Jacobs, who later went on
to be a producer himself, most known for the original 1968 version of Planet
of the Apes) or her own husband could
not.
Still, it’s a marvelous movie, well acted — even though one could make the
case that Branagh has been playing Olivier now for over 15 years — especially
by Michelle Williams. I’ve seen her described as the finest actress ever to
play Monroe, which quite frankly I rather doubt — I have great memories of the three-hour TV-movie from the
1970’s in which Catherine Hicks played Monroe and would love a chance to see it
again if only to see if Hicks’ performance was as incandescent and as
convincing as I remember it, and until I do see her Marilyn again I’m not about to acclaim
anyone else’s as the best ever — but she’s damned good, though for some reason
Williams is more convincing as the off-screen Marilyn than the on-screen one in
the film’s re-creations of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Still, if any project was going to get Michelle
Williams out of the shadow of Brokeback Mountain and her short-lived relationship with the late
Heath Ledger, whom she met and took up with when they were playing husband and
wife in that movie, this was it; she’s absolutely convincing as the vulnerable
private Marilyn, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of her career and
desperate enough to resort to alcohol and drugs (though when the production
hired a security guard to protect her and warned her of her drinking and pills,
I half expected him to say, “I worked security for Judy Garland at the
Palladium! I know all about booze and pills!”) as well as a determined neediness that sucked
emotions out of people the way Count Dracula sucked their blood. And the final
summation of the film is delivered by a speech given by Branagh as Olivier once
The Prince and the Showgirl is completed, when he sees it and realizes that however difficult she
was to work with, Monroe brought her character to life whereas he just looked
like the walking dead beside her.
Anyone who’s actually seen The Prince and
the Showgirl and judged it fairly will
know that that’s an exactly accurate assessment of it: as I wrote about it when
Charles and I screened it, “Olivier overacts his way through his own role;
instead of tapping the logical precedent from his own career (his marvelous
performance as Max de Winter under Alfred Hitchcock’s direction in Rebecca), he spends virtually the whole movie channeling
Erich von Stroheim: the monocle, the jerky movements, the air of imperturbable
condescension. What redeems The Prince and the Showgirl is Monroe, who not only out-acts her prestigious
co-star/director but actually takes Rattigan’s stick figure of a character and
creates her as a warm, richly defined human being. There are a few of the
Monroe mannerisms — the cutesy-poo vocal inflections and the ass-swinging — but
for the most part she keeps these under control and turns in a surprisingly
subtle performance that makes us believe in Elsie Marina as a person and not
just a Cinderella figure in a plot that stretches credibility to the breaking
point. She’s aided by the brilliant cinematography of Jack Cardiff and
production design of Robert Furse, who helped make this the best-looking color film in which Monroe appeared. Instead of
the garish, neon-bright lighting Monroe got at 20th Century-Fox, Cardiff lights
her in a warm, rich way that creates some startlingly painterly effects. Also,
either Cardiff put a lot of filters on her or she changed her hair color for
this film; instead of the usual eye-searing bottle-blonde Monroe looks
auburn-haired in this, which adds to her image here as sensual rather than sexual. … If Olivier the director had
been able to call Olivier the actor on his insufferable hamminess through much
of the film The Prince and the Showgirl would be even better than it is — but then we wouldn’t have had the
amazing spectacle of the showgirl so totally out-acting the prince!”
