Don’t Bother to Knock
Roy Ward Baker (1952)
If only you could watch Don’t Bother to Knock today without reading Marilyn Monroe’s unhappy biography onto the personality of Nell Forbes, whom she plays in the film. Nell is the niece of Eddie (Elisha Cook Jr), a long-serving lift operator at the McKinley Hotel in New York City. Eddie introduces his shy young relative as a babysitter for hotel guests Peter and Ruth Jones (Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle), who are about to attend a function in the banquet hall downstairs and need someone to mind their daughter Bunny (Donna Corcoran) in their suite on the eighth floor. Meanwhile, Lyn Lesley (Anne Bancroft), the resident singer in the hotel bar, is, between numbers, in the process of ending her relationship with airline pilot Jed Towers (Richard Widmark). Once Lyn has confirmed that she sees no future for them, because he’s cold and uncaring, Jed retires dejectedly to his hotel room, also on the eighth floor but at the opposite end of the building from room 809, where the Joneses are staying. Jed sees Nell through the windows of their respective rooms. He likes what he sees and calls her on the telephone.
It’s clear almost immediately that all is not well with Nell Forbes, and that whatever’s wrong has something to do with aeroplanes: she reacts with a kind of fascinated alarm to the sound of one passing over the hotel. It transpires that her boyfriend died, flying a plane to Hawaii during World War II – as a result of which Nell attempted suicide and has only recently emerged from a three-year spell in a mental hospital. An encounter with another pilot unsurprisingly makes matters worse – by the time Don’t Bother to Knock reaches its climax, the deluded Nell is confusing Jed with her dead boyfriend. The resonance between Marilyn Monroe and her character comes in the sequence of Jed’s reactions to Nell. At first, he finds her stunningly attractive; then an amusing puzzle; then disturbing enough to flee from; and finally someone who needs medical care. As usual with a dramatic role, Monroe sometimes tries too hard to be serious. The phrasing in her reading of a bedtime story to the child Bunny is too practised and sensitive (as if Nell were auditioning for a role). There are very effective things in Monroe’s performance, though. When she first meets the Jones family, Nell refuses Mrs Jones’s offer of a chocolate; once Nell is alone in the suite, after the parents have gone down to the banquet hall and Bunny’s light is out, she helps herself to two chocolates. Monroe takes them from the box with an expression that’s both amusing and unsettling, and foreshadows Nell’s trying on Mrs Jones’s negligee and jewellery, and using her perfume. I knew little beforehand about Don’t Bother to Knock. The combination of Monroe’s charm and her limitations as an actress (and the title, which suggests a sex comedy) fooled me into thinking Nell’s story was bound to lighten up. The reverse happens and, when Nell buys razor blades in the hotel lobby, Monroe’s rapt but calm contemplation of them is startling. Even more startling is Nell’s callous, careless treatment of the child she’s meant to be looking after – not least because, although Bunny is a spoiled and demanding little girl, Donna Corcoran isn’t, by Hollywood child actor standards of the time, that objectionable. Marilyn Monroe plays this aspect of Nell unselfconsciously and the result is powerful.
The eventual resolution of the tensions between Jed and Lyn is pat – Lyn realises, through the compassion he shows for Nell, that Jed has a heart after all – but the characterisations of Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft are strong. Widmark is particularly good when Jed becomes rattled by Nell’s behaviour. Bancroft, in her film debut, is a shade tight but there are nice details: in her opening scene, she shows Lyn’s feelings about Jed principally in the way she moves her hand around her glass, as she talks with Joe, the sympathetic ear of a bartender. The pleasant, impersonal professionalism of her singing makes it very believable, if unexciting. (Lyn’s songs from the bar are piped through to the hotel rooms. This may have been common practice at the time but it works well as a dramatic device.) There’s excellent support from Elisha Cook Jr as the unfortunate, anxiously ingratiating liftman-uncle and from Willis B Bouchey as Joe.
The screenplay by Daniel Taradash, adapted from a 1951 novel by Charlotte Armstrong, contains some sharp dialogue, particularly for Widmark and Bouchey. The disillusioned Jed asks Joe if he’s married and the latter asks, in response, ‘Sure, who’s not?’; when Jed then asks if Joe and his wife are always arguing, the bartender replies, ‘Some of the time she sleeps’. Later on, Jed starts his successful bid to win Lyn back by adapting Shakespeare: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of a man when he realises he’s had enough of them’. The action is concentrated into a single evening and entirely within the hotel. The camera moves round the place, selecting features of its layout and decor in ways that give the setting a real substance. Roy Ward Baker does a fine job of suggesting the McKinley Hotel’s routines, the better to emphasise their interruption by the events in room 809.
2 June 2015