"There isn't any other song": Niagara (1954)

To celebrate Marilyn's special day (yesterday but whose counting?) I want to celebrate NIAGARA all over again!

NIAGARA is my favorite Marilyn Monroe movie, with her performance fitting so elegantly against the location shoot backdrop that you just want to have this movie running in the background over and over during "stress" moments. DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK and THE MISFITS feature more nuanced MM characters, but neither quite captures the paradoxical cunning and sheer sexual potency MM is capable of, not like NIAGARA, in which she is a femme fatale par excellence named Rose. And Niagara Falls makes the perfect backdrop for her dangerous sexuality; the cascading water forms a chthonic curtain around her, she's empowered by it, and then...

The dysfunctional death drive underpinning Monroe's allure is elegantly tapped into via the iconography of the falls and realized brutally in the crushed soul of Joseph Cotten as her cuckolded older husband. Falling for Marilyn has always seemed to me like a bad idea, like Dracula in reverse: Dracula takes and takes, MM gives and gives until you just have to run and hide in a dark cool corner. Most protagonists in MM films are tempted but manage to escape before it's too late. Joseph Cotten's shell-shocked sheep rancher George Loomis on the other hand, starts out his tour of NIAGARA already totally worn to a nub. He's super-jealous of his young trophy wife, a fiery "tramp" on whom he's flitted away his ranch and life's savings to buy expensive gifts and trips to night clubs. Their stay at the falls is supposed to heal their rift, but Rose is actually luring him there to make him jealous and crazy in front of the other motel guests for purposes too shocking to reveal here. Suffice it to say, even though he's far from sympathetic, Loomis gets our sympathy, and when you sympathize with someone sleeping in the same cabin as Monroe, you know something's wrong, deadly wrong. 

Some claim Cotten is "miscast" in the role. I think miscast is the whole point: Cotten represents any man who gets sucked into the rushing flow of Marilyn's hot voodoo. He's every "human" male in the audience who longs for Monroe's quivering form but knows if he got her in real life he wouldn't keep her very long.  He knows she'll leave them broke, broken-down, and broken-hearted, much the worse for having ever gotten involved, since now he could never enjoy "mere life" without her awesome sexuality in his private constellation. And yet, knowing all that, if she cast her eye their way, they'd still jump into that lethal current like a lemming, tossing savings and sanity to the wind in her wake.

Contrasting this doomed tragicouple are NIAGARA'S "protagonists", clean-cut marrieds (Casey Adams and Jean Peters) on their belated honeymoon in the cabin next door. Producer-writer Charles Brackett gives sympathy to his characterization of Cotten's Loomis, while Adams' grinning all-American boy is lampooned ala Bracket's work with Billy Wilder, such as SUNSET BOULEVARD: Adams announces "We're the Cutlers!" from his convertible as they pull into the cabin grounds on this their "delayed honeymoon," as if he expects everyone to cheer and break out the sparklers. He brings his books to "catch up on his reading," to which the Canadian border guy shakes his head in sad disbelief. Sheer thickness of skull has shielded this dolt from the monstrous sublimation of sex that constitutes his plastic fantastic Madison Avenue scene. For him, Monroe's hussy walk is alluring--"Get out the fire hose!" he says when she saunters by--but he'd never dream of pursuing her. He doesn't even pursue his wife, except to take cheesecake shots of her sunbathing. He's the type who "by the numbers" was invented for. The production code never thought a guy like this would be the result of all their moral meddling. He's enough to make the pope send for Mae West.

His wife, Polly (Peters) is allowed to be much more restrained and human, and her big scene with Loomis in his trashed cabin offers a moment of genuine connection, probably the only one in the whole film. Monroe's blonde hussy-making and Adams' bland salaryman are "types," while the more restrained Polly and George linger in shadow as a gloomy contrast: real characters, with sorrow and quietude in their natures, trying to appear 'normal' and struggling with the shrill farce that passes for it. But opposites attract, and though these muted key types might find some weird bond, they are chained to their respective "phonies" like life support, like combination nurses and torturers.

Another reason I dig this film: the soothing quietude -- the rush of the falls-- is constant and reassuring. When George or his boss (Don Wilson, from the Jack Benny show) aren't bellowing and guffawing, it's totally serene. The score only bursts to life during key moments of danger or foreshadowing of danger. Otherwise there is only the ambient, soothing rush of the falls, both comforting and eerie, everything a film you watch over and over on DVD in an insomniac haze should be. The quiet emptiness of the town in contrast to the mad rush of the falls creates a sense of contemplation. You can imagine Siddhartha ending up working as a motel manager around here, attuned to the profound mystic frequencies, and perhaps he has, and is even there now... yet the environment functions also both as a classic "automotive tourist trap" and a perfect backdrop for Monroe's fatale Americain scheming. The result is a movie as durable as a life preserver, the perfect film to keep you cool during the hot summer city months, glad to have access to the beauty of Monroe and the falls but grateful in the end to be just where--and with whom--you are, and without Tom Ewell

(a different form of this article originally appeared in Bright Lights After Dark 08)