This is the fun story of how Tom Ewell tries to resist the temptation of Marilyn Monroe, and struggles with himself. It is set on very unfavorable conditions for the male lead, even if he tries to appear very decent and married. He’s alone in his New York apartment after sending off his wife and son on vacations. It’s hotter than hell. Marilyn baldly comes down from the upper floor to cool down with the air conditioning she doesn’t have in her apartment. The fatal embrace is about to happen, pushed by a large Martini, a champagne bottle, and Rachmaninoff’s second concerto. Billy Wilder added some brilliant ideas to the Broadway show, made when Marilyn was still resistible. Somewhere along the dialogue, she accuses Tom Ewell of dreaming “on CinemaScope and stereophonic sound”, and the film features some imagination scenes that prompt laughter, born out of the fact that Wilder mocks a famous scene (the one on the beach from From Here to Eternity) and every convention about on-screen love in general. HAT
D: Billy Wilder
G: Billy Wilder, George Axelrod
F: Milton Krasner
E: Hugh S. Fowler
DA: George W. Davis, Lyle Wheeler
S: Harry M. Leonard, E. Clayton Ward
M: Alfred Newman
P: Billy Wilder, Charles K. Feldman
CP: Chas K. Feldman Group Productions, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Marilyn Monroe, Tommy Ewell, Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Robert Strauss
Hollywood Classics. Julia Kelly T +44 20 7517 7530
E julia@hollywoodclassics.com W hollywoodclassics.com
He was born in 1906 in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died in 2002. He arrived in Hollywood in 1933 and directed, among other films for which he was nominated 21 times and won six Academy Awards, The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sabrina (1954), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960). Fedora (1978) was screened i...
