In How to Marry a Millionaire, Lauren Bacall's Schatze Page comes up with a great idea for her and her fashion-model friends to feel rich between husbands: lease a finished penthouse and pay the rent by selling off its furnishings. Blind-as-a-bat Pola (Monroe), who has too much vanity to wear glasses, and Loco (Betty Grable), who aptly (if groan-inducingly) describes everything as "crazy," move in and the trio swaps tips for snagging rich men. But the faster their well dries up, the more the three find themselves attracted to--gasp--common men. Slight and silly but not offensive, the film plays like a half-hearted apology for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (there's even a joke about diamonds being a girl's best friend), not that that film necessarily needed one. While Bacall is out-of-step with Monroe and Grable, the three waxy leads amuse, though the real star of the show is CinemaScope: the first-ever widescreen romantic comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire is also one of the least gimmicky, with director Jean Negulesco (Three Coins in a Fountain) avoiding the fifties tendency (read: crutch) to shoot from afar. I could've done without Alfred Newman's "Street Scene," however, a lengthy overture sequence that reeks of someone proving to someone else the possibility of shoehorning an entire orchestra into a frame of CinemaScope dimensions. The Fox DVD presentation of How to Marry a Millionaire is visually spectacular: letterboxed at 2.55:1 and enhanced for 16x9 displays, the remastered image has gritty optical transitions but few other caveats. The Dolby Digital 4.0 mix sounds smooth and very directional. Extras: an undistinguished restoration comparison; a Movietone newsreel covering the star-studded premiere; English, Italian, and German theatrical trailers ("CinemaScope, Das Moderne Wunder!"); and previews of the remaining titles in Fox's Marilyn Monroe "Diamond Collection". Image: A-, Sound: B+, Extras: C- English DD 4.0, English Stereo, English Mono, French Mono English CC English and Spanish Subtitles Dual layered 95 minutes (not 105 as listed) -Bill Chambers

Strong and stoopid: it's a deadly combination. In the quasi-road movie Bus Stop, based, however loosely, on a play by William Inge, a 22-year-old rancher (the singularly repellent Don Murray) named Bo arrives in Phoenix, AZ to be in the rodeo and departs both a champion and no longer a lonesome cowboy, having literally lassoed Cherie (pronounced "Shur-ee," not that it matters to Bo: "I can't say it fancy like that!"), a saloon showgirl (Marilyn), into returning to Montana with him. When their bus stops for a snowstorm, stranding its passengers at a roadside diner, Cherie angles to escape his clutches and gets a spanking out of it. I can't decide what's more upsetting about this romantic comedy by studio designation only: Bo, the obnoxious hick caricature (who doesn't know what "physical attraction" means), or Bus Stop's ending, which makes blind peace with his bullying. Monroe is devastatingly good as the damaged Cherie, and I suspect her tearful final scene cut close to the bone, but she's at the mercy of one of the most cynical films to come out of the Eisenhower era. Its mere DVD release sets women's lib back fifty years, though said disc looks swell (in remastered anamorphic widescreen that preserves CinemaScope dimensions of just over 2.35:1--disregard the cover art's 1.85:1 label, another Fox printing snafu) and sounds handsome, too (its 4.0 surround configuration actually manages some wrap-around, albeit of limited fidelity). A restoration comparison (film clean-up vs. film-plus-digital clean-up), four Bus Stop lobby cards and a postcard (displayed on-screen), and trailers for this and other 'Diamond' selections done round things off. Image: A-, Sound: B+, Extras: D+ English DD 4.0, English Stereo, French Mono English CC English and Spanish Subtitles Dual layered 105 minutes -Bill Chambers

Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days, available as part Fox's "Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection" VHS and DVD box sets exclusively, makes an excellent companion piece to Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood (itself included in the 3-disc "Five Star" edition of Cleopatra). Watching them in conjunction, Monroe and Elizabeth "Cleopatra" Taylor become mirror images, the victim who played the diva vs. the diva who played the victim. The Final Days explains that while Cleopatra burned 20^th's money on a Vatican City set, the studio, who could only afford to put one additional film into production, chose to cash in a star contract back home. Something's Got to Give would be Marilyn Monroe's comeback vehicle after two years away from the movies; the disintegration of the pic (never finished, and eventually reshot as Move Over, Darling with Doris Day and James Garner) and Monroe's sanity is recounted through interviews with surviving crew, outtakes, newsreels, and on-screen reproductions of scripts, memos, telegrams and the like, the most puzzling of which shows Billy Wilder's name among the list of Marilyn-approved directors for Something's Got to Give: by all accounts, the Some Like it Hot vets were no longer on speaking terms at that point. (George Cukor wound up at the helm.)

The Final Days, narrated by James Coburn, touches on the major events leading up to Monroe's death, including the President's Ball performance of "Happy Birthday" and the playful photo session she did for George Barris, but what affects us most are Something's Got to Give's bloopers, a rare glimpse of the girl behind the woman behind the myth behind the commodity. Marilyn Monroe had the confidence to refer to herself omnisciently (she once told screenwriter Walter Bernstein of his dialogue, "Monroe wouldn't say that!") yet sought security in sleeping pills, and The Final Days vividly paints both sides of that tragic contradiction. It also climaxes with thirty-five minutes of letterboxed Something's Got to Give footage presented in narrative form; co-starring Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse, Phil Silvers and more, the romantic comedy, about a castaway (Monroe) returning home after five years to find her husband (Martin) remarried, would not likely have won any Oscars, but it's pleasant enough, and the editing in this incarnation is quite peppy. Had it seen the light of day in 1962, I doubt that Monroe's nude scene would've squeaked by the censors. (In the interest of this review, I kept my eyes peeled.) The 1.33:1 videotape image on The Final Days DVD appears warm and wonderful; Something's Got to Give is presented at a ratio of 2.35:1 within the non-anamorphic frame, though it's been remastered to good effect. The stereo soundtrack is pretty plain, and the disc's sole extra is a Movietone short about the advent of CinemaScope. Image: B+, Sound: B+, Extras: D English Stereo English CC English Subtitles Dual layered 117 minutes -Bill Chambers