The Seven Year Itch (1955)

After sending his wife and son to Maine to escape the sweltering summer, Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) meets a 22-year-old blonde television model (Marilyn Monroe), who is renting the apartment upstairs. Despite recent paranoia about being unfaithful (he is reading a book his company is going to publish about a "7-Year Itch" that claims a significant proportion of men have extra-marital affairs after seven years of marriage) Richard invites the girl downstairs for a drink. However, his over-active imagination works overtime to the point where he imagines his wife carrying on in Maine with their hunky neighbor, Tom McKenzie. He is torn between silly fantasies of seduction, and horrible thoughts of his wife catching (and, in one fantasy sequence, shooting) him. Hilarity ensues. The Oscar Winning Song

Trivia: The classic shot of Marilyn Monroe's dress blowing up around her legs as she stands over a subway grating was originally shot on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue at 52nd St. on Sept. 15, 1954 at 1 AM. 5000 onlookers whistled and cheered through take after take as Marilyn repeatedly missed her lines. This occurred in presence of an increasingly embarrassed and angry Joe DiMaggio, then Marilyn Monroe's husband. The original footage shot on that night in New York never made it to the screen; the noise of the crowd had made it unusable. Billy Wilder re-staged the scene on the 20th Century Fox lot, on a set replicating Lexington Avenue, and got a more satisfactory result. However, it took another 40 takes for Marilyn to achieve the famous scene. Amazingly, Marilyn Monroe's very narrow spike heels don't get stuck or break in the subway grating that she stands on it in the movie's most famous scene, although this was a universal problem, at the time, for the countless women wearing that very popular style heel in New York City in that era. The screenplay was adapted from the original Broadway show "The Seven Year Itch" which was written by George Axelrod. The original Broadway show starred Tom Ewell (who reprised his role as the imaginative Richard Sherman) and Vanessa Brown. When the project was moved from Paramount to 20th Century Fox, Brown was replaced by top sex symbol Marilyn Monroe for the film adaptation. Due to the Hays Office Production Code censorship rules, the racy dialogue and sexual innuendos were significantly toned down from the play. Marilyn Monroe's lifelong bouts with depression and self-destruction took their toll during filming; she frequently muffed scenes and forgot her lines, leading to sometimes as many as 40 takes of a scene before a satisfactory result was produced.

In the play, Richard and the girl had an affair, but the Hayes commission did not allow adultry to be the subject of anything that would garner a laugh and in this case I think it made the movie actually better. The whole thing is innocent (the most that happens is a small kiss) except in Richard's mind and imagination. Marilyn Monroe is at her most charming and most beautiful. There are also a lot of good lines in this movie. One of them is when Richard is talking to a man and mentions a blonde (monre) in the kitchen. The guy asks, "What blonde in the kitchen?" and Richard replies, "Wouldn't you like to know. Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe."