Niagara (20th Century-Fox, 1953)

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

Yesterday I turned on Turner Classic Movies at 5 p.m. yesterday for a Marilyn Monroe double bill featuring her films Niagara (1953) and Bus Stop (1956). Niagara was one of the movies Charles Brackett produced after he broke up his partnership with Billy Wilder following Sunset Boulevard (1950) and moved from Paramount to 20th Century-Fox. It was directed by Henry Hathaway – a competent if rarely inspired director who was next on the list if you had John Wayne attached to a project and neither John Ford nor Howard Hawks were available – from a script by Brackett, Walter Reisch and Robert Breen, and according to Ben Mankiewicz’s pre-film introduction on TCM it was originally planned as a low-budget exploitation film noir. With Marilyn Monroe’s popularity exploding, Brackett and the “suits” at Fox decided to up the budget, feature her and give her top billing. They also decided to make the film in color, which might have been a mistake; oddly, the original trailer available on the film’s imdb.com page is in black-and-white, and some of the noir compositions from Hathaway and his cinematographer, Joseph MacDonald, look more appropriate and more moving in the black-and-white trailer than they do in the actual movie. It was Monroe’s first color film, and from then on she would work in color exclusively except for two of her last three movies, Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Misfits (1960).

As it stands, Niagara is part travelogue about Niagara Falls (Brackett, Reisch and Breen carefully constructed their script around some of the most famous tourist attractions at the Falls, including the Maid of the Mist boat, the walk under Horseshoe Falls and the Cave of the Winds, along with the carillon bell tower that figures prominently in the plot), part sexploitation and part noir. Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten play Rose and George Loomis, a couple of psychologically damaged people that have come together in a relationship made in hell. George is a Korean War veteran suffering from what the script calls “battle fatigue” but would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Rose is a woman he picked up and impulsively married when he saw her working as a waitress at a bar in Chicago, only just because she’s married she doesn’t see any reason why she should limit herself sexually to her husband or any other guy. The film counterpoints the Loomises with a “normal” 1950’s couple, Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters, who gets third billing under Monroe and Cotten, and the unspeakably boring Max Showalter, using the name “Casey Adams”). Ray works for Nabisco – when he arrives at Niagara Falls he’s more interested in the view of the main Nabisco plant than the Falls themselves – and he’s there because he won a marketing contest and is supposed to collect the prize from the company’s principal vice president, J. C. Kettering (Don Wilson, Jack Benny’s long-time announcer). The Cutlers weren’t able to have their honeymoon when they actually got married two years earlier, so they’ve decided to combine it and a business trip – only they have to wait at the resort (called the “Rainbow Lodge”) because he’s out of town on a business trip. While on one of the sightseeing walks around the Falls, Polly Cutler spots Rose Loomis necking with another guy, Patrick (Richard Allan) while she’s supposedly on a shopping trip.

It turns out she’s doing more than just necking – or even having sex with – Patrick; the two of them are plotting to kill George and flee to Chicago to start a new life. Only George finds out about the plot and kills Patrick instead, then picks up Patrick’s shoes from the check-in where you were supposed to trade in your street shoes for galoshes on one of the wet walks around the Falls, and surprises Rose and kills her at the Falls’ bell tower – where you can deposit “musical requests” for the bells to play a particular song. The song Rose and Patrick have made “their song” is a ditty called “Kiss,” written for the film by Lionel Newman (music) and Haven Gillespie (lyrics), which Monroe recorded as a single for Columbia Records in 1954 (backed with “You’d Be Surprised” (by Irving Berlin, from her later film There’s No Business Like Show Business). In one scene she breaks in on a party being thrown by a bunch of teenagers at the resort, where they have a portable record player that’s giving forth with various swing standards, including the Count Basie-Lester Young classic “Lester Leaps In” (albeit in a faster, louder big-band version than the original Basie-Young version from 1939). Only Rose enters carrying a record of “Kiss,” asking the teenagers to play it for her, and she leans back and sings the words along with the vocal group on the record – and George spots her from the front window of their cabin, comes out in high dudgeon, pulls the record off the player and crushes it to bits, cutting his hand in the process.

Polly offers to minister to him with mercurochrome and later she ends up his hostage as he steals a boat and plans to flee from the Canadian to the American side of the Falls. She pleads with him to turn himself in, saying he could make a credible self-defense claim for killing Patrick, but he says, “It’s too late for that – I’ve killed Rose.” He is able to hot-wire his stolen boat and get it to start, but he runs out of gas and in his one noble gesture in the entire movie, he manages to get Polly onto a rock sticking out of the river just before the Falls while he dies when his boat gets caught in the current and goes over the Falls. The final scene is a big suspense set-piece in which the U.S. rescue service flies a helicopter with a basket chair to rescue her, and though at first she has trouble getting into the chair, she finally does so and her life is duly saved. A rather unctuous tour guide meets the Cutlers when they’ve been reunited and says he hopes this won’t sour them on a later visit to the Falls. The End.

Niagara is a schizoid movie, part travelogue, part sexploitation and part noir, and it was rather weirdly promoted as offering viewers two great wonders of nature: Niagara Falls and Marilyn Monroe. (One of the teen boys at the party sees her walk by and asks his girlfriend if she can’t get a dress like the red, clingy, ultra-revealing one Rose has on. “To wear a dress like that, you have to start laying plans at 13!” she replies.) Sol Kaplan’s musical score underlines just what Marilyn was doing in this movie with the slide whistles and trombone glissandi with which he heralds her entrance, and throughout the whole movie one senses Monroe fighting to establish a degree of humanity and sympathy for her character despite everything the studio is throwing at her, including that iconic red dress that literally marks her as a “scarlet woman.” One amazing thing about her performance is that she does not chew the scenery or act downright evil – frankly it’s hard to believe she’s plotting with her lover to murder her husband. She taunts him when he catches her all dressed up and admits she’s put on fancy clothes and cheap perfume “to meet a man – anybody at all, as long as he’s a man.” One doesn’t know what to think about her – is she a villainous home-wrecker or just a woman who happens to like a lot of sex and doesn’t much care where, or from whom, she gets it? Monroe fought throughout her career to put meat on the bones of the underwritten characters studios, producers and directors kept giving her, and while her main stock in trade was ribald sex comedies that played on her oddball combination of sexuality and innocence that made every woman in the audience want to protect her and every man in the audience want to fuck her, when she was given a dramatic role (as here) she was able to bring real dimension to a character written really only to flaunt the actress’s sex appeal.