The Seven Year Itch (Charles K. Feldman Group, 20th Century-Fox, 1955)

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

Last night (Tuesday, December 12) I put on Turner Classic Movies for two of my all-time favorite films (though one of them hasn’t aged that well while the other one remains a masterpiece): The Seven Year Itch (1955 – incidentally the title does not contain a hyphen between “year” and “itch”) and She Done Him Wrong (1933). The Seven Year Itch began life as a play on Broadway in 1952 by George Axelrod, with Tom Ewell as pulp-paperback editor Richard Sherman and Vanessa Brown as “The Girl,” the mysterious woman he gets the hots for while his wife and son are out of town for the summer. The movie rights were purchased by agent Charles K. Feldman, who insisted that Ewell repeat his role on film. Feldman also hired Billy Wilder, who’d just walked out on his contract with Paramount, to direct, and Wilder intriguingly wanted the young Walter Matthau to play Richard, but Feldman and the studio, 20th Century-Fox, insisted that Ewell repeat the role. (Wilder wouldn’t get to work with Matthau until he cast him in The Fortune Cookie over a decade later.) Fox also insisted on using their contract player, Marilyn Monroe, to play “The Girl” – and it became one of Monroe’s iconic roles. Though George Axelrod co-wrote the script with Wilder, he had to make one major change in the material to satisfy the Production Code. In Axelrod’s play, Sherman actually has extra-relational activities with “The Girl,” but Code enforcer Geoffrey Shurlock vetoed that and said Sherman could only fantasize about having sex with either “The Girl” or any of the other unattached women in his life. Frankly, this was one rare instance in which Production Code intervention actually helped a movie; the contrast between Sherman’s lascivious fantasies and his inept reality works beautifully and makes the film far funnier than it would have been if Ewell’s and Monroe’s characters had actually made it to the bedroom.

The Seven Year Itch is most famous for the sequence in which Sherman and “The Girl” are walking down a street in New York City after having gone on a (platonic) date to see the film The Creature from the Black Lagoon. “The Girl” is recounting how she felt sorry for the Creature, since all he wanted was to be loved, when she steps over a grate above a subway tunnel and it blows her white skirt above her waist. In fact that happens twice, and the second time “The Girl” actually invites it and tells Sherman she enjoys the feel of the cool air against her crotch. This sequence was filmed in New York City (though TCM host Alicia Malone said it had to redone at the 20th Century-Fox studio in Hollywood because of problems with the soundtrack) and there’s a report that Monroe’s then-husband, former baseball star Joe DiMaggio, watched it and was not happy with the way the scene exhibited his wife. The Seven Year Itch also contains a lot of Wilder’s trademarks, even though it wasn’t a personal project. Among the great scenes are one in which Sherman endures a dinner at a local health-food restaurant serving what would now be called “vegan” food, including a “cocktail” made of sauerkraut juice (yuck) and another in which he interviews a psychiatrist, Dr. Brubaker (Oscar Homolka), who’s submitted a manuscript about sexual repression in the married human male. Sherman has commissioned a lurid cover for Brubaker’s book in which a shadowy male figure is shown about to ravish a voluptuous woman dressed in red. Dr. Brubaker explains that no such sequence appears in his book – though the cover painting is loosely based on a case history from 1912, the man was really middle-aged and he targeted women who were even older – but the scene quickly turns into a spoof of psychoanalysis and, despite Brubaker’s insistence that he doesn’t do freebies, he and Sherman launch into a great sequence until Brubaker suddenly declares that Sherman’s time is up.

According to Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow, Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna until he started working as a film writer, and at one point in his career he was asked by an editor to do an interview with Sigmund Freud. Unfortunately, Freud did not believe in cooperating with the media in any way, and when Wilder showed up at his office he got a not-so-polite turn-down – though he said later he did get to see the famous couch on which Freud’s patients had lain when telling him their innermost secrets. Wilder hated Freud for turning him down so much that when he became a famous film director and writer, he inserted jibes against psychiatry in every movie he made where he could fit one in. Another Wilder trademark is Sherman’s use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as his seduction record; that’s a reference to one of Wilder’s favorite films by another director, David Lean’s Brief Encounter. It’s also welcome to see Sonny Tufts, whom Johnny Carson regularly jokingly referred to as the worst actor of all time, actually appearing in a quite good film; he’s billed fourth (after Monroe, Ewell and Evelyn Keyes, who plays Ewell’s wife) even though he has only one scene, and it’s one of Sherman’s fantasies about his wife going extra-relational on him. TCM’s showing of The Seven Year Itch ended surprisingly abruptly – on occasion they accidentally truncate the films they show (I remember one time they did that to the movie I’ll Cry Tomorrow), and I suspect that happened here. It’s still a nice movie and great fun, but frankly it doesn’t date very well; it’s the sort of movie in which Marilyn Monroe is called upon to play the “dumb blonde” to the level of imbecility, and in a book on movie censorship Alexander Walker argued that George Axelrod’s misogyny came through in script after script, reaching its apex in the 1965 film How to Murder Your Wife.