The casting is crucial to the success of Don’t Bother to Knock as a taut psychological drama. On one side two actors – Richard Widmark and Elisha Cook Jr – known for playing weirdos, psychos, oddballs or generally damaged individuals. And on the other is Marilyn Monroe.
In her first lead role, after a series of minor cheesecake roles and light comedies, it’s actually Monroe who’s the proper whacko in this strange story centred on Nell Forbes (Monroe), a disturbed young woman who is babysitting a little girl for one night when by rights Nell should probably be in an asylum.
As for Cook and Widmark, the former plays Nell’s decent uncle Eddie, the liftman in a swish hotel who got Nell the babysitting gig in the first place, while the latter is Jed, a raffish airline pilot at the hotel to persuade Lyn (Anne Bancroft in her first role), the singer who dumped him, to take him back.
First some scenes getting this dark and noirish thriller underway – Nell arriving and meeting the parents, who are going to a reception downstairs in the hotel function room, then Nell reading a bedtime story to the young kid, Bunny, after the parents depart. So far, so good.
Downstairs, meanwhile, when not crooning Cole Porter songs, Lyn is listening increasingly testily to Jed’s pleading as he tries to persuade her to reverse her decision to dump him. What she’s holding out for is commitment. He eventually offers it, but by that point she thinks this is just the latest of his ruses to keep her available when he’s in town. She tells him to sling his hook.
Characters and positions established, things really get going after, licking his wounds, Jed retires to his hotel room and spots Nell in the room on the other side of the courtyard. Clearly taken by an attractive young woman who appears to be engaging in medium-distance flirting with him (she’s fiddling with the venetian blinds), he’s soon joined her in what he takes to be her room, unaware that the negligee she’s half wearing, the diamond drops in her ears and the perfume she’s drenched in actually belong to the mother of the kid Nell is babysitting.
From here a drama in which Nell reveals herself increasingly as seriously disturbed, but also as a woman who could easily be taken advantage of. Is Jed the sort of guy who’d do that sort of thing? And what about Bunny in the next door room – how is Nell going to prevent her from revealing that she’s just the babysitter? And what’s with the negligee etc?
Eddie arrives, then the girl’s mother (Lurene Tuttle), and other hotel guests come and go while doors open and close as people hide from each other. Many of the elements of a farce are here. But it isn’t that sort of film, and in a performance that wanders from being inspired to a bit of a mad caricature, Monroe holds it together and keeps the anxiety levels high as the woman who should not under any circumstances be left in charge of a child.
Monroe appears to be wearing the sort of perky nipple thimbles Jennifer Aniston would wear in the first couple of seasons of Friends. There’s a suggestion that nymphomania may be part of this disturbed woman’s bag of psychosis, so there is some point to them, distracting though they might be.
This is the sort of film whose reputation has been revised upwards steadily since it was released, partly on the back of the Monroe legacy, but also on account of some lovely writing – side characters sketched in very neatly, odd touches of smart humour – and there’s a briskness to the acting all round that’s very appealing. In a film that’s only 76 minutes long no one can afford to hang about.
The director is Roy Ward Baker, best known for his horror work in the UK, and he’s admirably discreet and self-effacing here in the middle of a three year stint in Hollywood. Similarly, DP Lucien Ballard keeps things low-key with his lighting, which goes all gooily soft in close-ups of Monroe (who’s only 26 – all that gauze is a bit unnecessary).
The ending is just a bit pat, particularly the way Lyn is re-introduced to top and tail everything, but at least it adds a little light to what has on the whole been rather a dark journey. There are moments in this movie when you might well find your fingernails digging very hard into your palm.
Don’t Bother to Knock – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
