Bus Stop (20th Century-Fox, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Niagara TCM continued its two-film salute to Marilyn Monroe with Bus Stop, a prestige production of sorts that marked Monroe’s return to the screen after a two-year absence. Monroe was understandably disenchanted with 20th Century-Fox not only because they kept giving her cookie-cutter sex-bomb roles – like the film they offered her in 1955, How to Be Very, Very Popular, which as critic Marjorie Rosen noted was “very, very unpopular” and destroyed the career of Sheree North, the actress who played the role originally written for Monroe, before it had a chance to get started. Monroe was also unhappy – understandably – that they were still paying her only $500 per week on a starlet’s contract when her movies were returning giant profits for the studio. While she was off the screen and fighting Fox in court, Monroe moved to New York and enrolled in Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actors’ Studio, home of the so-called “Method” school of acting, which had also trained people like John Garfield, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean. I’ve never been that big a fan of Method acting – though some of the actors Strasberg trained became powerful performers and major stars, I suspect it was more in spite of his training than because of it. Method actors were trained to dredge up the traumas of their past and use similar situations they’d been involved in for real to play scenes in their parts. Also the training relied on breaking up plays into different scenes, and while that was ironically a good skill for aspiring movie actors – since movie scenes are shot out of sequence and the actors must therefore turn in a performance that will not only convince in that one scene but fit seamlessly into a whole story, it also meant a tendency for the actors to go for “big moments” instead of shaping a coherent performance as they would in a continuous production of a play.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that, as much as Monroe’s involvement with the Actors’ Studio in geheran and Strasberg in particular (on Bus Stop and her subsequent films she brought in Strasberg’s wife Paula as her own private acting coach, which bedeviled directors who thought they, not an outsider, should be the one giving the actress notes) was ballyhooed, her acting in Bus Stop is not really that different from her playing in Niagara three years earlier without Method training. In fact, some of Monroe’s biographers have argued that the Method was destructive to her mental health because all that business of dredging up old memories to play your scenes more credibly just led her to relive the traumas of her childhood and made her even more screwed up. Seen today, Bus Stop – the work of playwright William Inge, a psychologically tortured Bisexual who committed suicide at age 60 from career declines and a personal life that had never brought him fulfillment – is itself a badly dated story, and it’s indicative of the conflicts surrounding Monroe’s life and career that she seized on this as a high-profile prestige production that would prove to the world once and for all that she was an actress and not just a buxom broad with big tits.

Bus Stop centers around Grace’s Diner, a roadhouse and (you guessed it) bus stop on the way to Phoenix, where passengers on a cross-country bus are stranded by a sudden snowstorm that makes the roads impassable. At least that’s what it was in the play: screenwriter George Axelrod “opened it up” considerably, as they say in the trade, having the characters actually get to Phoenix and then revisit Grace’s when the snowstorm happens on their way back. The plot deals with Beauregard “Bo” Carter (Don Murray), who’s grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana with apparently no human contacts at all, and certainly no unrelated female ones. He’s en route to Phoenix to compete in a big rodeo, and his companion and “keeper” is Virgil “Vergie” Blessing (Arthur O’Connell), who when he isn’t playing guitar and sort-of singing the film’s theme (a rather silly pseudo-folk song about all the things the singer will get the woman he’s proposing to if she’ll just marry him) is trying to shoehorn the rambunctious Bo a little closer towards normal human behavior. In a Phoenix saloon he meets entertainer Cherie (Marilyn Monroe), a girl from the Ozarks who escaped with dreams of fame and fortune in Hollywood, though her talent-less performance of the song “That Old Black Magic” lets us know she doesn’t stand a chance of becoming a high-level professional entertainer. Once again, as in La Signora Senza Camelie (a film whose central character seems to be living Monroe’s career – a woman makes it to movie stardom on sheer looks and tries to develop as an actress, including taking lessons from a prestigious teacher, before reluctantly resigning herself to sex roles that will do nore than show off her body – before the real Monroe did), we see a woman showing off her acting chops by playing a character considerably more inept at performing than she herself is. One sees Monroe’s pathetic rendition of “That Old Black Magic,” complete with torn and dowdy-looking costume and clothespins on the floor-mounted lighting switches so she can change the color of the stage lights herself – and one aches for the version she could have done if she were performing at the peak of her powers instead of playing a character with no talent.

Bo sees Cherie doing her wretched act and hears the customers at the club talking over her, and he instantly decides she’s the “angel” he’s been waiting for. He causes a ruckus by ordering everybody in the club to shut up while Cherie sings, and he launches a boorish pursuit of her in which he insists she’s going to marry him and literally will not take no for an answer. The film detours from the bus and the bus stop (its only settings on stage) to show Bo winning the Phoenix rodeo (ya remember the rodeo?) and Cherie and her friend Vera (Eileen Heckart) literally crash the rodeo, crossing over the ring in the middle of the proceedings and putting themselves at risk for being trampled or gored by the animals. It’s the sort of movie in which the supporting players – Heckart, Betty Field (as Grace, the owner of the bus stop) and O’Connell – often outshine the leads. Monroe’s performance is intriguing and quite sensitive, but despite all the Method studying her acting skills hadn’t really developed that much farther than they had in Niagara pre-Method. She does her best at an Ozark accent and she devised her own makeup, making her face look almost chalk-white on the ground that as an entertainer who worked at night, she would literally never see (or be out in) the sun.

The film’s director, Joshua Logan (who had his own share of mental issues: he was later diagnosed as bipolar and put on lithium), recalled in his memoir Movie Stars, Real People and Me that he had discussed the character with Monroe and they’d reached an understanding of what Cherie should be. Then the 20th Century-Fox costume department came up with this really hot-looking, impeccable costume for her to wear during the “Old Black Magic” number. Logan was upset with Monroe when she approved the costume, until she explained to him that she had to approve it because if she didn’t the costume department would just keep sending even flashier and less appropriate ones. Logan asked her if she actually liked that costume, and Monroe said, “I don’t! I hate it the way it is. But it’s not going to be the way it is.” Then, to Logan’s astonishment, she took the cigarette she was smoking and started burning holes in the costume. She also deliberately made small tears in it and then crudely tried to sew them up again, indicating that this was a costume Cherie had bought because she thought it made her look glamorous, but she’d worn it so long and abused it so extensively it was now literally a tattered remnant of what it had once been. Monroe’s performance in Bus Stop is a marvel of sensitivity – the stereotype of Monroe is that she was on so many prescription drugs she could barely even function, let alone think, but people who knew her recalled a high degree of intelligence and interest in intellectual things under that well-honed dumb-blonde exterior – but it also deserved a better story and a better leading man.

Inge’s tale of love and conquest really dates badly, even though we’re supposed to believe Bo gets his comeuppance when the bus driver challenges him to a fight and beats him up, leading him actually to court Cherie in a socially acceptable manner instead of just slinging her over his shoulder like a calf he’s just roped in a rodeo, but he’s still such a boor it’s hard to imagine her final acceptance of him and willingness to move to a quite different lifestyle (including getting up at 4 a.m.) on his ranch as a happy ending. (Like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this film ends just when the story is beginning to get interesting: a tale of this unlikely creature’s adjustment to a much harder and more physically demanding lifestyle than the one she’s used to would be far better drama than the slice of the story we actually get.) And Don Murray, who got an “Introducing … ” credit for a performance that fully shows off his inexperience, is totally wrong for this role: physically he’s robust enough (though I suspect most of the scenes showing him win the rodeo, if not all of them, were done with stunt doubles) but he comes off as a boor and he’s not a good enough actor to suggest any vulnerability or weakness under the boorish exterior. It’s a pity that the actor who would have been utterly perfect for this role, James Dean, had died a year before it was made, and it also didn’t help that Bus Stop was one of the long list of roles Montgomery Clift was offered and turned down.

He’d passed on great films like Sunset Boulevard and East of Eden (though precisely because Clift was so much better an actor than William Holden, Sunset Boulevard wouldn’t have worked with him because he’d have been too good at making the audience feel sympathy towards his character, whereas with the more stolid and less self-aware Holden in the role our sympathies remained with Gloria Swanson, where they belonged), and he turned down Bus Stop because he thought Marilyn Monroe was just a studio-created sex commodity and he didn’t want to work with her. When the film came out Clift saw it and realized how wrong he’d been, and when he got another chance to work with Monroe – in her last completed film, The Misfits – he grabbed it. Clift’s star-making role in his first film, Red River, had certainly proved he could be credible as a cowboy and convincingly butch, and he might have made us able to understand Bo’s surface boorishness and see a softer side to him in ways that totally eluded Don Murray. According to imdb.com, another legendary star was considered for the role of Bo – Elvis Presley – but, as he would do with the Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg project A Face in the Crowd a year later, which was offered to Elvis before it was finally cast with Andy Griffith, Elvis’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, turned it down without telling Elvis it had been offered to him. It seems that Col. Parker didn’t want Elvis making films of real quality and power; he wanted him safely ensconced in vehicles of stupefying banality that would offer no artistic fulfillment, so Elvis wouldn’t get any ideas about being anything more than a money-making commodity for himself and especially his super-manager. It occurred to me this time around that there’s a striking similarity between the opening of this film and the opening of the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, made at MGM in 1954 and starring Howard Keel as a cowboy who, like Bo Carter, thinks he can acquire a wife the same way he would buy a horse and has to be taught a lesson in how to treat women as people – only in that film the woman who tames him was played by Jane Powell and was a much stronger character than the catalogue of vulnerabilities Marilyn is playing here. But because Seven Brides played this situation for comedy, and because Powell’s character fought back in ways Monroe’s character couldn’t, it holds up a lot better today than Bus Stop.