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REVIEW: She was one of the silver screen’s greatest goddesses. The blonde bombshell who became a Hollywood superstar, before dying in tragic, some believe suspicious, circumstances.
At least, that’s how the traditional narrative on the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson goes.
But, as the four-part docu-series Reframed: Marilyn Monroe (now streaming on TVNZ+) reveals, there’s a lot about the Some Like It Hot star’s life and legacy that has been manipulated to suit the story those controlling America’s “dream factory” wanted to tell.
Featuring rich rivers of archival material (including stills, video and audio), as well as interviews with a host of women including film critics, academics, biographers and actors like Ellen Burstyn, Mira Sorvino, Joan Collins and Amber Tamblyn, Reframed aims to retell Monroe’s story from “her perspective”. As Jessica Chastain’s authoritative voiceover intones, she was hardly the vulnerable woman who Tinseltown destroyed, rather the architect of her own fame, someone ahead of her time – an artist who could deliver layered performances both funny and tender.
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While the later instalments look at how her career was nearly derailed by a calendar shoot, the carving out of a new identity in New York, contractual battles with Fox and how she became more well-known for who she associated with off-camera than her turns in front of one, the opening episode traces her journey from a succession of foster homes (her mother was admitted to a mental health facility when young Marilyn was aged eight) to her very brief scene-stealing turn in The Marx Brothers’ 1949 musical-comedy Love Happy.
While most of us know about her later high-profile marriages to baseballer Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, this sheds light at the stressful circumstances surrounding her first marriage – at age 16 –to 21-year-old neighbour James Dougherty. You’ll also learn about her time working in a munitions factory during World War II, where she met photographer David Conover, who immediately sensed how much the camera loved her.
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Via rich rivers of archival material and modern day interviews with expert women from a variety of backgrounds, we learn in Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, how the actor was the architect of her own fame, not simply a vulnerable woman Hollywood destroyed.
Perhaps more significantly though, this busts the myth peddled at the time by her initial Hollywood employers at Fox that she was a babysitter discovered by a talent agent, drawing on anecdotes and other evidence as to her persistence in attempting to persuade studios to give her a shot. But despite a memorable turn as Evie, a waitress with a sharp tongue in 1947’s Dangerous Years, her one-year contract was not renewed.
Devastated, but undeterred, she found a new home at Columbia Pictures, who reinvented her as a Jean Harlow-inspired platinum blonde. Playing burlesque dancer Peggy Martin in Ladies of the Chorus looked set to propel her to stardom, but the film didn’t exactly set the box-office alight, although as Reframed informs us, it was what was happening behind the scenes at Columbia that led to her contact being ripped up. Notoriously philandering studio president Harry Cohn apparently asked Monroe onto his yacht, to which she allegedly responded by asking if his wife was coming too.
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Provocatively titled Wolves I Have Known, Marilyn Monroe penned a revelatory article in the January 1953 edition of Motion Picture and Television Magazine.
While Monroe returned to modelling and found small roles in big movies like The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, her next bold move came in 1953 when she teamed up with veteran journalist Florabel Muir (a former police reporter for the New York Daily News no less) for a revelatory article in the January edition of Motion Picture and Television Magazine provocatively titled Wolves I Have Known.
A fascinating, enlightening watch, the use of Monroe’s immortal line as Gentleman Prefer Blonde’s Lorelei Lee – “I can be smart when it’s important – but most men don’t like it” – as an introduction becomes even more relevant and resonant as Reframed’s story unfurls.
Reframed: Marilyn Monroe is now streaming on TVNZ+.
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