The Seven Year Itch |  | Director: Billy Wilder
Actors: Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Robert Strauss
Studio: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $6.04
as of 3/19/2010 03:34 EDT details
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Seller: astro_video
Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 60997
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.55:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 105 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
UPC: 024543014225
EAN: 0024543014218
ASIN: B000059GEF
Theatrical Release Date: June 3, 1955
Release Date: May 29, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com essential video
A married man, left alone during a hot summer, fantasizes madly about the impossibly gorgeous woman living in the upstairs apartment. When the woman is Marilyn Monroe, such fantasies are the stuff of epics, and The Seven Year Itch is a memorable laugh machine. Tom Ewell, repeating his role from George Axelrod's Broadway hit, plays the itchy protagonist, whose vivid imagination gets the better of him. When Monroe finally comes downstairs and becomes friends (confiding, among other things, that she keeps her undies in the icebox in this hot weather), imagination meets reality in a merciless attack on the male libido. Ewell's crack timing is matched by Monroe's zesty comic flair, and the scene in which her white dress is blown skyward by a passing subway train has entered the encyclopedia of great movie images. Director Billy Wilder adapted the play with Axelrod; if the film is not one of Wilder's signature works (Some Like It Hot and The Apartment would soon follow), it is nevertheless a smoothly crafted comedy. --Robert Horton
Description
It's a steamy summer in New York City and this scandalous, sexy comedy heats things up even more! A married man (Tom Ewell), whose wife and son are away for the summer, has his fidelity put to the test when a seductive starlet (Marilyn Monroe) moves in u
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
 Marilyn Forever November 1, 2009
Reader (U.S.A.)
Yes it's Marilyn in full swing. She and Tom Ewell really hit a home run!
Not Just a Candle in the Wind ... A Connection. August 19, 2009
Yasha Banana
Either you understand what Marilyn Monroe "had" or you don't.
It wasn't just her beauty or her talent. Marilyn Monroe had a vulnerability, a *tragic fragility* spoke directly to the human condition. Because you can't understand tragedy unless you also understand Marilyn Monroe. ...
In his biography, Arthur Miller tells us that Marilyn was able to pick out the orphans in a crowd, she being an orphan herself. And one believes this, almost as an act of faith. Whern she's onscreen, regardless of the role, regardless of the quality of the picture: vulnerable and insecure, she has the ability to touch, to pick out in you, in you *your* vulnerabilities, *your* insecurities.
In a Nietzchean sense, when you see her onscreen and are, in turn, reminded of her tragic life, you fear for your own tragedy! Her unbearable defenselessness triggers a thought -- "Wouldn't it be tragic if *I* was that defenseless!"
What other actress was or is capable of doing that?
There were and are many, many actresses, especially in Marilyn's day, who tried to "get across" on screen what Marilyn got across. And none of them even came close.
When Marilyn speaks to the Tom Ewell character, the Everyman of the movie, she's speaking to every male in the audience - handsome or homely; smart or dumb; single or married; rich, poor or somewhere in the middle. ... Jayne Mansfield couldn't do that. Marlene Dietrich couldn't do that. Rita Hayworth couldn't do that. Angelina Jolie can't do that. Cameron Diaz can't do that. ... Not-even-close.
When daVinci painted a gloved hand, even though he didn't paint the hand in the glove, he wanted to know about the hand: its structure, its anatomy. In other words, he wanted to know what *moved* the glove. ... Knowing her life, knowing her tragedy, as just about everyone does, this is always in the audiences' mind when they see Marilyn Monroe onscreen -- what *moved* her, what was just below the surface. Ultimately, it's impossible to know that in a person, especially a complex, talented, sensitive person. But Marilyn gives us so many tantalizing clues! So many theories, so many ... possibilities.
And they all go back, I believe, to her "orphan roots." ... How does an orphan deal with the adult world? ... How do we all deal with an adult world? ... What makes us so unfit for living?
We are all, at heart, orphans. And Marilyn is there (put there by God or fate or random nature) to remind us of that.
Here's a question for you. Was that certain-something Marilyn Monroe "had" inescapably tied up with her physical beauty? Put another way: would she have lost what she had were she to have lived into her 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s? I could be wrong but I don't think so. As she grew older, her orphan-mentality would have been even more perceptive, more instinctive, more heartbreaking. Assuming she got to play serious roles, she could have been the greatest beauty + the greatest actress ever to appear in front of an audience.
You can't take your eyes off her! Men want to protect her, and rage against those who took advantage of her. And so do women.
If the studios who exploited Marilyn had given her half of what she earned for them, she could have bought every square inch of downtown Los Angeles.
As for "The Seven Year Itch," this movie is humorous in the truest sense of the word, because to be truly humorous, to have a sense of *humor,* one must also have a sense of *humanity,* and that equation, more than anything, is what Marilyn Monroe captured in her comedic performances.
She relates to the Tom Ewell character not simply as a sex object (as some reviewers here mistakenly think), but in a true and human way. Another less-talented actress could have easily turned Tom Ewell's "inner most thoughts" into something crude and dirty, but Marilyn never did that, not in any of her movies. Her natural, spontaneous *celebration* of sexuality is, at its heart, the celebration we feel when we "connect with others," when we discover someone doing exaclty what we're doing -- trying to figure out how, childlike, we can deal with the adult world.
That connection was Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe's most famous May 31, 2009
Timica (Crescent City, CA USA)
This is a very good movie. Tim and I both enjoyed it, and i collect MM movies so this is one you got to have!
-Member girlfriend Jessica
HILARIOUS!! March 19, 2009
Raonaid (NY)
Roaringly funny! I would give it ten stars if I could! I would recommend this to anyone and everyone. After watching, I have a new respect of Marilyn Monroe. Classic and ageless.
 MARILYN IS GORGEOUS! March 18, 2009
Noel Serrano (Tampa, Florida United States)
The 1955 film version was co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, and starred Marilyn Monroe and Ewell, reprising his Broadway role. It contains one of the most iconic images of the 20th century-Monroe standing on a subway grate as her dress is blown above her knees by a passing train.
Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) sends his wife Helen (Evelyn Keyes) and son Ricky (Butch Bernard) to Maine to escape the summer heat. When he returns home, he meets The Girl (Marilyn Monroe), a model who is renting the apartment upstairs while she is in town to make television spots for a toothpaste. That evening, while proofing a book by psychiatrist Dr. Brubaker (Oskar Homolka), claiming that a significant proportion of men have extra-marital affairs in the seventh year of marriage, he has an imaginary conversation with Helen, trying to "convince" her, in three fantasy sequences, that he is irresistible to women, but she laughs off his assertion. A tomato plant then crashes into his lounge chair; The Girl accidentally knocked it over, and apologizes. Richard invites her to come down for a drink.
As he waits for her to put on her underwear that she keeps cool in the refrigerator and gets dressed, Richard has a fantasy that The Girl is a femme fatale overcome by his playing of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. While playing Chopsticks (above), Richard, back in his fantasy, grabs The Girl in a bear hug, causing them to fall off the piano bench. She shrugs off it, but he is immediately contrite, and asks her to leave.
Over the next few days, they grow closer. His resolve to resist temptation in all of its many forms fuels his fear that he is succumbing to the 'Seven Year Itch'. He seeks out Dr. Brubaker for help, but to no avail. His imagination then kicks into overdrive: Helen and Ricky watch The Girl on TV as she warns the women of New York City about "this monster named Richard Sherman"; The Girl tells a plumber (Victor Moore) how Richard is "just like The Creature from the Black Lagoon"; the plumber repeats her story to the horrified patrons of the vegetarian restaurant Richard ate at; the Shermans' hunky neighbour, Tom McKenzie (Sonny Tufts), arranges for he and Helen to be alone on a hayride; a wronged Helen returns home to exact her revenge. The fantasies turn Richard into a paranoid wreck.
After a crazed confrontation with McKenzie, whom Helen has asked to drop by to pick up Ricky's canoe paddle, Richard comes to his senses. He tells The Girl she can stay at his apartment, then runs off to catch the next train to Maine.
The movie was filmed between September 1 and November 4, 1954, and was the only Wilder film released by 20th Century Fox.
The characters of Elaine (Dolores Rosedale}, Marie, and the inner-voices of Sherman and The Girl were dropped; the characters of the Plumber, Miss Finch (Carolyn Jones), the Waitress (Doro Merande), and Kruhulik the janitor (Robert Strauss) were added. Many lines and scenes from the play were cut or re-written because they were deemed indecent by the Hays office. Axelrod and Wilder complained that the film was being made under straitjacketed conditions. This led to a major plot change: in the play, Sherman and The Girl become intimate; in the movie, the romance is all in his head.
The footage of Monroe's dress billowing over a subway grate was shot twice: The first take was shot at Manhattan's Lexington Avenue at 52nd Street and the second on a sound stage. The sound stage footage is what made its way into the final film, as the original on-location footage's sound had been rendered useless by the over excited crowd present during filming.
Footage of Walter Matthau testing for Sherman is featured in the DVD of the film. Nicolas Roeg's film Insignificance features a character based on Monroe and a re-enactment of the subway/dress scene.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
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