Urban Myths: Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder - an opportunity missed, review
Urban Myths: Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder (Sky Arts) could have done better. I like this portfolio series which casts a comic eye over well-known, if mostly apocryphal, tales from the lives of the famous. That the casts feature an impressive number of well-known faces is a big plus. But they tend to be hit and miss.
This edition took on the hoary old tale that Marilyn Monroe was so off her face on pills and alcohol during the making of the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, that it took her 47 takes to nail a scene in which all she had to do was knock on a door and say: “It’s me, Sugar”. Much to the frustration of director Billy Wilder.
In the hands of Gemma Arterton playing Monroe and James Purefoy as Wilder, we might have hoped for subtlety and sophistication. But all we got was predictability and slapstick. And misogynistic slapstick at that. No attempt was made to depict Monroe as anything other than the dumb sex-bomb blonde of cinematic lore.
That the men in the piece were treated little better was no comfort. Wilder’s portrayal was a lazy caricature of the cigar-chewing European émigré director; Monroe’s playwright husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) a prickly stuffed shirt; Tony Curtis (Alex Pettyfer) a cardboard-quality cad. Some of the macho jousting – everyone ribbing the self-important Miller that his plays were good but “short on laughs” – hit the mark. But not often enough.
Overall the sense was of an opportunity missed. Might it not have been more amusing to see this fable through Monroe’s eyes, however bleary they were; or to wonder how she could have put in a performance of such scintillating comic precision despite being wasted all the time?
In the end the only bright light was Adam Brody, who caught perfectly Jack Lemmon’s contribution to the art of drag. Other than that, the best thing about this was that it gave Sky Arts an excuse to show the film Some Like It Hot afterwards. Now that’s what you call a great comedy.
