Don't Bother to Knock (Baker, 1952): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm
This film is part of the Marilyn Monroe season at BFI Southbank and will feature an introduction. The movie also screens on July 18th. Details here.Chicago Reader review:
Unusually seedy and small-scale for a Fox picture of 1952, this
black-and-white thriller is set over one evening exclusively inside a
middle-class urban hotel and the adjoining bar. The bar’s singer (Anne
Bancroft in her screen debut) breaks up with her sour pilot boyfriend
(Richard Widmark), a hotel guest. He responds by flirting with a woman
(Marilyn Monroe) in another room who’s babysitting a little girl (Donna
Corcoran), but the babysitter turns out to be psychotic and potentially
dangerous. Daniel Taradash’s script is contrived in spots, and the main
virtue of Roy Ward Baker’s direction is its low-key plainness, yet
Monroe—appearing here just before she became typecast as a gold-plated
sex object—is frighteningly real as the confused babysitter, and the
deglamorized setting is no less persuasive. With Jim Backus as the
girl’s father and Elisha Cook Jr. as Monroe’s uncle, the hotel elevator
operator.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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