Don't Bother to Knock (1952)

Two years after appearing in The Asphalt Jungle for two minutes, Marilyn Monroe earned top billing in the psychological drama Don’t Bother to Knock. It’s an excellent film and one of Monroe’s very best performances, unhinged and melancholic. She plays Nell, a newcomer to New York hired as a babysitter one evening for a couple staying in a hotel. Meanwhile, Jed (Richard Widmark) is dumped by his girlfriend Lyn (Anne Bancroft, preposterously good in her film debut), the lounge singer for the hotel. Feeling dejected, Jed strikes up a romance with Nell after he sees her through the window — until he recognizes her unstable psychological state.

Monroe must be many things as Nell: A believably endearing romantic interest; a distraught victim deserving of our sympathy; and a dangerous villain who might do terrible things. She pulls off all three and combines these facets in a beguiling showcase. Early in the film she withdraws into herself, meek and slender, malleable enough for someone like to Jed to think they can bend her to his own will. But as the interaction between Jed and Nell unfolds and we learn more about her past, Nell paradoxically becomes more and more of a mystery. It’s a shame we never got to see Monroe in a twisty Hitchcock thriller.

Monroe creates Nell as someone trying to make those around her happy despite a deep internal sadness, alternating between total distraction and intense focus. Nell seems unable to connect with Jed despite so desperately trying to reach him, as if she is trapped in some subterranean space he cannot see. When she retreats to the bedroom and examines herself in the mirror she is radiant but in an empty way, a walking ghost on screen, as if Nell knows her time has already passed but is trying to grasp onto life regardless.

In the film’s third act Monroe takes it up a level, and Nell’s disturbed condition transitions into outright violence. Yet even as her actions become more reprehensible Monroe never nosedives Nell into caricature. She is always someone who earns our sympathy, a complicated figure whom we want to understand and help as much as we want to abhor. It is a remarkably captivating debut lead performance, and set Monroe up for her explosion into stardom the following year.

Rating: 4/5