711. The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes

Director: Billy Wilder

Running Time: 105 mins

The Seven Year Itch is an American film about a man who, after sending his wife and kids off on holiday for the summer, falls into an unexpected relationship with his beautiful neighbour.

Well, you’ve got to love this film for just how positive, fun and fluffy it is. It’s not a triumph in screenplay, acting, directing or anything, even though it’s got big names like Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder involved, but it’s just so enjoyable and simple to watch, requiring very little in the way of brain activity to get the full monty out of it.

One of the best things about this film is that, despite effectively being a rom-com, it’s not particularly romantic. Of course, sometimes it’s nice to see a good romance, but there were just so many deeply romantic comedies during the 1950s that this more light-hearted and friendly rom-com is a really refreshing change.

The story is therefore more about a friendship than a romance. While the love is a little bit heavy-weighted on one side of the relationship, the fact that it’s not the story of a deep romance means that it has a much more simplistic and easy-going nature to it, not having to delve into the conflicting emotions of the characters in love, and that’s one of the main reasons that it is so fluffy.

In terms of the comedy, it’s not necessarily a total farce, but the jokes do seem quite bizarre. The main character narrates the story by way of speaking to himself almost all of the time, which does feel a bit weird, but it adds a odd twist to the type of comedy that you get in this film, which does make it all the more entertaining to watch.

Finally, the story is simply a lot of fun. There’s very little in the way of high drama or, as I said, romance, and you just see the odd escapades of our two main characters as their friendship blossoms during the hot New York summer, and because of that, I’ll give this a 7.9.