Don't Bother to Knock (20th Century-Fox, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I bypassed Reba McIntire’s The Hammer for the night before was Don’t Bother to Knock, a 1952 oddity directed by Roy Ward Baker (a native of Britain who came to work in Hollywood after building a reputation in British films, then returned to his homeland, signed with Hammer Studios and specialized in horror and science-fiction, Hammer’s two specialties) from a script by Daniel Taradash (in the eve of winning an Academy Award for his next film, From Here to Eternity) from a novel called Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong, a writer about whom I otherwise know nothing. Turner Classic Movies showed it as part of Eddie Muller’s “”Noir Alley” program, and it certainly has elements of film noir in the casting (Richard Widmark is the male lead and Elisha Cook, Jr. has an important supporting role) and the overall air of madness in the story. Don’t Bother to Knock was 20th Century-Fox’s attempt to build the credibility of their new star, Marilyn Monroe, as a serious actress and not just an animate sex doll. The story takes place in a New York hotel where Eddie Forbes (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is working as an elevator operator. A middle-aged couple from out of town, Peter and Ruth Jones (Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle, the latter of whom had co-starred in a radio adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit with noir icon Humphrey Bogart), are in town for a business convention and need a baby-sitter for their daughter Bunny (Donna Corcoran).Eddie recommends his niece, Nell Forbes (Marilyn Monroe), who’s just returned to New York City after a few years in Oregon. Unbeknownst to us (at least at first), Nell lost her husband, a civilian airline pilot, in a plane crash in 1946 (after the end of World War II, significantly), and the shock of losng him caused her to lose her sanity.

Meanwhile, Jed Towers (Richard Widmark, top-billed), who is also a civilian airline pilot, is staying in another hotel across the street and sees Nell through the bedroom window of the Jones’s room. Since he’s just received a dear-John letter from his girlfriend, Lyn Lessey (Anne Bancroft in her first film), Jed wants to see if he and Nell can get together for a hot romp under the sheets. Lyn works as a singer in the hotel where Nell is baby-sitting for the Joneses, and her program is piped into the rooms so anyone in the hotel can listen to it just by pressing a button on the wall. Eventually Jed gets into the Joneses’ room, only he’s seen by another couple, middle-aged busybodies Mr. and Mrs. Ballew (Don Beddoe and Verna Felton) who threaten to report Nell to the house detective if she has a man in her room. At times Don’t Bother to Knock has so many people going in and out of that hotel room it starts to seem like a French farce, only without the farce. We first get intimations that all os not well with Nell’s sanity when she shows a scar on her arm and says she inflicted it on herself in a suicide attempt. Later,when Bunny won’t stop crying or go to sleep, Nell literally ties her up in bed, then turns her so it looks like the girl is asleep normally. And, not surprisingly, Nell forms the delusion that Jed is actually her long-dead husband Peter, come back for her. Eventually the Joneses return to their room and rescue their daughter from the clutches of the madwoman, and Nell is taken away by New York police. She says she’s been in an asylum in Oregon for three years and it did nothing for her, despite Eddie’s disappointed whine – “When they let you out, they told me you were better!” – and the New York cops assure her that she’ll be taken to a place where they will indeed treat her and rehabilitate her. I joked that as she was being walked out of the hotel she’d say, in a Southern drawl, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – and Charles more bitterly joked, “:Yeah, they’ll be taking her to Bellevue, a well-known milestone in the treatment of the mentally ill.”

Don’t Bother to Knock is a confusing movie, and though I generally like dramatic ambiguity (one of the reasons Christine Conradt’s scripts are usually so much better than those of other Lifetime writers is that unlike her colleagues, she doesn’t over-explain exactly what makes her villains tick), we know too little about what drove Nell so crazy and I think Marilyn Monroe didn’t know, either. When I first saw Don’t Bother to Knock I thought it would have been a better movie if Marilyn Monroe and Anne Bancroft had switched roles, not only because Bancroft’s other work revealed her to be a far more subtle and rangy actress than Monroe but also because Marilyn could have done her own singing for the part whereas Bancroft needed a voice double (Eve Marley). Eddie Muller criticized the original reviewers of Don’t Bother to Knock for rather patronizingly dismissing Monroe’s performance and saying outright she needed more training – but it’s possible Monroe agreed with them because three years after she made this film, she walked out on her 20th Century-Fox contract, moved to New York and started studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio. Marilyn had already shown signs of acting ability in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and her immediately preceding film, Clash by Night (1952) – only those had had major directors (John Huston and Fritz Lang, respectively), and Roy Ward Baker was hardly in their league.

Incidentally, in his Monroe bipgrahy author Fred Lawrence Guiles said that making Don’t Bother to Knock was a traumatic experience for Monroe, not only because the director had the same last name as her original one (Norma Jeane Baker) but because her mother had gone insane and farmed her out to a series of foster parents. One wishes Monroe could have made Don’t Bother to Knock a few years later, when she’d been through the Strasberg training and might have better been able to deal with the ambiguities of her character and draw on the memories of her own childhood to add weight and depth. As it turned out, though, Don’t Bother to Knock is a pretty elusive movie, with Marilyn severely clad on an outfit that hides her breasts instead of gloriously revealing them and giving her all in a role for which she was clearly not ready under a director whose very name traumatized her.