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Niagara
And now for Something Completely different, someone at Fox must have said. They had a star who sold plenty of tickets, but there was the problem of how to showcase Marilyn when few had faith in her as an actress. The answer was glorified supporting roles. Niagara is structured like Don't Bother to Knock, with Fox starlet Jean Peters really playing the main part, and Marilyn relegated to marquee bait. Here she's a mysterious mankiller barely in control of her own sexuality, who 'drives' her equally disturbed husband to dire criminal acts. Dressed up in Technicolor, and sold with an embarassing ad campaign that compared MM's sexual capacity with Niagara Falls, this would-be disaster is a well-directed, moody Film Noir that shows plodding director Henry Hathaway in a very good light. It even gets away with devoting a good twenty minutes of its running time, to travelog material on the upstate New York honeymoon destination.
The dramatics at the Rainbow Cabins are on the heavy-handed side, with wayward wife Monroe strutting her stuff in a dress about which Jean Peters offers the famous double-entendre remark, 'For a dress like that you have to start laying plans when you're about thirteen." MM waxes emotional over the gloppy love song on the record player, but plays tough with chain-smoking, embittered Joe Cotten, doing a good job of playing yet another noir loser damaged by hard luck, with the implied complication of impotence. 2 As in countless Noirs, Monroe is party to a criminal doublecross that doesn't work out in her favor. It may be the result of good design or storyboarding, but there are several Hitchcock - like suspense scenes that are very arresting, at least on first view. When Cotten stalks Monroe in a clock tower, special effects and exaggerated lighting create a very strange atmosphere of heightened menace. The ending setpiece openly apes Hitchcock, with its unlikely action squeezed into the story to provide a spectacular (and effects-heavy) over-the-falls finale. It was needed to keep the audience happy, considering the fact that MM had departed the plot almost 30 minutes before.
Again, another very successful film that mined Monroe's sex appeal, in a story carried by others. No wonder she was never happy with her Hollywood work, and sought to expand her range as a serious actress.
Like the previous boxed-set Diamond Collection, each of these discs has been digitally remastered and cleaned up as if the lives of Fox executives were depending on it. Each comes with a short restoration demo that, if anything, is more detailed than necessary. The demos range from informative to puzzling. Comparing the new transfer to a flat old library copy doesn't seem very fair, and the split-screen comparison frames often show empty parts of the frame instead of the key actors. But the effort put into these DVDs is nothing to sniff at. Don't Bother to Knock apparently includes an entire replacement reel transferred from print, and the digital correction makes any mismatch with the rest of the film imperceptable.
For Audio, Niagara is listed as in 'English Stereo', which I think has to be a reprocessing trick.
Savant's comprehensive review of all 5 Diamond Collection 2 releases can be read at This URL.
Footnote:
2. The castration idea is also reflected in Cotten's line: "I suppose she sent you to find out if I cut it off!"
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