Joshua Logan (1956)
The role of Cherie in Bus Stop meant a lot to Marilyn Monroe – how much is almost painfully clear from her performance. Monroe badly wanted to be recognised and admired as a serious actress (she’d worked at the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg held her in high regard): Bus Stop was her bid for this status. (She completed only four more films subsequently: The Prince and the Showgirl, Some Like It Hot, Let’s Make Love and The Misfits[1].) Cherie is a ‘chanteuse’ (she pronounces it ‘shan-tooze’) in the Blue Dragon Cafe, a crummy bar with a virtually men-only clientele in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s here that she meets a young cowboy, Beauregard (Bo) Decker, who’s come from rural Montana to compete in the rodeo championship hosted by Phoenix. Twenty-one-year-old Bo is not simply a virgin; he hardly knows what a woman is. His father-figure companion Virgil, with whom he’s travelled on the bus from Montana, thinks it’s time for Bo to take an interest in girls. Bo promptly announces that the one he’s looking for will be an ‘angel’ and decides that he’s found her the moment he claps eyes on Cherie performing ‘That Old Black Magic’ in the Blue Dragon. (She has ambitions to be a singing star although she’s not any good.) While Bo is a sexual novice, Cherie has slept around, yet she’s not just a tart with a heart of gold: she’s essentially a pure soul – the angel Bo’s on the lookout for. In retrospect, at least, it’s hard not to make a connection between the character’s predicament and the distance between the screen persona and private personality of Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps she was attracted to this aspect of the role as well as to its dramatic opportunities but she makes Cherie’s sweetness and fragility too clear too soon: the characterisation would be more effective if Cherie were carelessly flirty at the start, before her underlying sensitivity and sadness is revealed. As it is, she is immediately incongruous in a dive like the Blue Dragon, and fearfully vulnerable; in other words, Monroe can’t wait to start mining Cherie for depth, to start being moving. She’s almost unfailingly effective when she delivers a line comically but Cherie has been miserable for ages by the time Bus Stop reaches its climax in a snowbound diner on the road back from Phoenix to Montana: good and affecting as Marilyn Monroe is in these final scenes of the film, she would have more impact if Cherie’s suffering had been more rationed in the earlier stages.
William Inge’s stage play Bus Stop is set entirely in Grace’s Diner: the eight dramatis personae are stranded there during a freak snowstorm and the play, a big hit on Broadway in 1955 and into early 1956, explores the characters and various relationships within the group. Inge’s previous play was Picnic and Joshua Logan made the screen version of that immediately before he made Bus Stop. Logan realised the titular picnic with flair, balancing this dramatic centrepiece with fine description of social ritual; he tries to do something similar for the rodeo in Bus Stop but the effect is to underline the bizarreness of the material: the crowd scenes, the scale of the production as a whole – these are out of kilter with the slender eccentricity of the story being told. (And today, elements of the treatment of animals in the rodeo make rather shocking viewing.) The brash young cowboy grown-up enough to own a herd but who’s never kissed a girl is, in any context, a surprising concept: in the opened-out, Technicolor-bright world of the film of Bus Stop (George Axelrod did the screenplay and Milton R Krasner the cinematography), it’s baffling. It probably doesn’t pay to inquire too closely about the relationship between Bo and Virgil, who ‘looks after’ him. In the opening scenes of the pair’s journey to and arrival in Phoenix, Bo seems not so much naive as subnormal; when he decides to marry Cherie and expects her simply to agree and come back to Montana with him, Bo certainly comes across as startlingly benighted – but as a dimwit rather than a chauvinist. Still, Don Murray is sometimes amusing (especially when Bo starts reciting the Gettysburg Address to Cherie) and physically very right. (The shape of his face, as well as his manic quality, also brings to mind Jim Carrey occasionally.) And his cartoonish exaggeration does leave Murray, unlike Marilyn Monroe, with somewhere to go with the role in the diner sequences, where he gets to show more range.
Most of the characterisations of the expert supporting cast are enjoyably broad: this includes Arthur O’Connell as Virgil; Eileen Heckart as Vera, a kindly, straight-talking waitress at the Blue Dragon Cafe; Betty Field as Grace, the diner owner; and Robert Bray as her suitor, the bus driver Carl. Hope Lange is appealing as Elma, who works at the diner and is also a passenger on the bus. It may be that Joshua Logan (who didn’t direct Bus Stop in the theatre, as he had Picnic) encouraged this broad playing the better to highlight Marilyn Monroe’s performance. Anyway, the actors in the smaller roles are fun to watch largely because they’re light-hearted compared with the star – and seem to treat the material with the limited respect it deserves. It may not have been true of Inge’s stage play but there’s a flavour of writer’s condescension towards the characters in Bus Stop, especially the two principals. This makes Monroe’s approach to what she saw as a key to her future career all the more upsetting, especially in the light of her disintegration and death a few years later. In the short term, she famously didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Bus Stop (Don Murray did, as Supporting Actor). I wouldn’t have thought she deserved one in a normal year but, since the Best Actress award for 1956 went to Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia, perhaps Monroe was right to feel hard done by.
14 November 2014
[1] Something’s Got to Give was uncompleted.
