Bus Stop (1956)
Bus Stop was Marilyn Monroe’s first film back after her exodus from Hollywood, and a deliberate departure from the bubbly, sensuous roles she had been playing before she left. The story still turns on her allure as the ideal woman, but takes a sinister path — rather than having men fawn over her, she has one who outright kidnaps her. The film comes tantalizingly close to being a daring critique of the darkness and violence underlying toxic gender expectations before a baffling Stockholm Syndrome-Prince Charming ending wipes away this promise. For all its flaws, though, Bus Stop is an undeniably fascinating relic, and laudable for the space it gives to a brilliant Monroe performance.
Monroe plays Chérie, a singer at a saloon in Phoenix. In the first shot we see of Chérie she is fanning herself as she lounges on a window frame of the saloon, finding a brief respite from the demands of her shift. The quiet does not last — she is soon overtaken by a crowd of men. She gets no respect from the rough men that patronize the bar, and she dreams of finding it by one day going to Hollywood.
Monroe tries on a very different voice as Chérie and wears it quite comfortably. Gone is the seductive delivery, replaced with a southern drawl. Rather than the cheerful, luminous figures of her romantic comedies, Monroe plays Chérie as tough and unrefined.
Bo Decker (Don Murray), though, does not see her this way. “If I do find me a gal … I’m gonna get me an angel,” the young cowboy declares early in Bus Stop. And when he lays eyes on Chérie, his search goes no further: it his first time away from home and he is convinced he has found his angel. A cattle wrangler by trade, he treats Chérie just like he treats rodeo animals. “Anything I ever wanted in this life I just went out and got,” he exclaims, before literally lassoing Chérie. Murray’s performance is riveting, a baffling display until it materializes into form: He is not playing an innocent young love interest, as the film may initially suggest. He is appropriately playing Bo as a terrifying villain, a violent and obsessive Rupert Pupkin forebearer.
In most Monroe films she is younger than her counterpart, a vision of aspirational youth. In Bus Stop that dynamic is flipped: he is the young and naive figure while she is the older, experienced, and resistant counterpart. In her earlier films Monroe dances around men awestruck by her beauty, and the fragility of their psyches is played for laughs. In Bus Stop she is faced with a man with no self-restraint, and that same fragility is played for very real horror. Chérie is visibly uncomfortable around Bo, a condition often masked by a forced smile or a sway of the hips in other Monroe performances. As she seeks help from another woman on the bus on which she is being whisked back to Montana, she confides a wish that “Whoever I marry has some real regard for me, beside all that loving stuff.” It’s a profound articulation of the distinction between a surface-level gentlemanly performance of love and the respect and visibility that comes with the real thing. Chérie expresses the wish almost resigned to the belief that it won’t come true, perhaps because she is in the throes of a madman who cannot give her respect, let alone understand the concept.
When the bus is forced to stop at a diner Bo’s kidnapping plot crumbles, as does his previously unshakeable sense of manhood. He is beaten up and humiliated, and forced by the others stranded at the diner to let Chérie go. Unfortunately this turning point also humbles Bo, and in his contrition he wins over Chérie after all. “I like you for who you are, so what do I care how you got that way?” he tells her, and she is convinced that he means it.
It’s a doozy of an ending. I’m not opposed to the idea that Bo could change, but the shift is unearned, and too immediate — he just tried to kidnap her. If Bus Stop had followed through on the nastiness present in most of its runtime, it might have been a truly great film. But the bizarre ending, by rewarding Bo for his misdeeds, creates a tangled mess of compelling ingredients and troubling failures. Because one of those ingredients is a meticulously constructed Monroe performance, though, it is still worth a watch.
Rating: 3/5