reviewed on this page:
As Young as You Feel (4/19/04)
Let's Make It Legal (4/26/04)
Love Nest (5/03/04)
We're Not Married! (5/10/04)

As Marilyn Monroe plays an ex-WAC in Love Nest, you can imagine the painful double-entendres that transpire, but a word of caution that Fox is once again overemphasizing the significance of her role within the film's DVD packaging to help foster consumer interest. Monroe's Roberta ("Bobby") is only one of the tenants residing in the New York apartment building purchased by Connie (June Haver, who left Hollywood soon after to become a nun) just before her serviceman husband, Jim (William Lundigan), returned home from overseas. Jim thinks the rent money will pay for the hours he wants to spend writing, unaware that his landlord duties will be time-consuming and that his wife's promising monthly income estimates refer to losses, not gains. Misadventures ensue. A watchable soufflé that falls in the inexplicable and weirdly sinister denouement, Love Nest debuted almost concurrently with "I Love Lucy"'s television bow and truly feels like a sitcom premise annexed by the big screen, although there is some cinematic intrigue in a con artist (unctuous Frank Fay) who charms rich widows out of their money. (Bafflingly, if not exactly subversively, the movie is on his side.) Fox presents Love Nest in a respectable fullscreen transfer of clear detail and contrast. The stereo and original mono mixes are shrill on the one hand and muffled on the other, but given this lose-lose proposition, I'd sooner choose the stereo option again. Extras include an unadvertised commentary intersplicing the recollections of director Joe Newman and Marilyn authority Jack Allen, both of whom are difficult to hear over the movie's blaring soundtrack. All the same, Newman's anecdotes are priceless, Allen's overfamiliar, and the subject of Love Nest is barely broached, with the exception of Newman's enduring affection for its cast. Trailers for As Young as You Feel, All About Eve, Bus Stop, Don't Bother to Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Let's Make It Legal, Let's Make Love, Love Nest, Monkey Business, Niagara, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, We're Not Married!, and the "Marilyn Monroe: Diamond Collection" round out the disc. Image: A-, Sound: B-, Commentary: A- English Stereo, English Mono CC English and Spanish Subtitles DVD-9 84 minutes -Bill Chambers

Macdonald Carey's nearly three-decade stint as lovable Tom Horton on "Days of Our Lives" vs. his wildly variegated and often unmemorable film appearances (one of those actors afflicted with looking old before his time, he was woefully miscast as Alan Ladd's contemporary in the 1949 The Great Gatsby) is pudding proof that while Carey's modest charisma seemed adrift on the vast silver screen, it fit the boob tube snugly. In Let's Make It Legal, Carey stars as a hotelier named Hugh Halsworth whose divorce to Claudette Colbert's Miriam will become final unless he can convince her that his last-minute pangs of regret are genuine and not some deep-seated jealousy that's resurfaced with the arrival of an old suitor, the wealthy playboy Victor Macfarland (Zachary Scott). This is a mostly worthless film notable for the early-career participations of Marilyn Monroe (using her natural voice as some kind of groupie for Hugh) and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, who would bring the strangely pat open-endedness of Let's Make It Legal's final scene to such collaborations with Billy Wilder as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. What holds the picture back from greatness or even adequacy is the never-properly-answered question of why Hugh and Miriam are divorcing in the first place--Miriam implies that he was a bad husband, so exactly why do the filmmakers hitch their wagon to his train and expect us to root for him to one-up the affectionate Victor? (To top it off, Hugh's redemptive gestures are more stalkerish than penitent.) Meanwhile, the performances of supporting players Barbara Bates and Robert Wagner (as his daughter and son-in-law) are simply ruinous, Bates' because her character is so hideously conceived (she whines about having to pay attention to her baby daughter), Wagner's because he displays all the charm of an ironing board. Like Carey, Wagner found his niche on TV, but unlike Carey, he was simply a vortex on the big screen. Fox's DVD release presents Let's Make It Legal in a fullscreen transfer of harsh contrast and dancing pinholes that sometimes makes it look as though they shot the picture on newsfilm. Completely indistinguishable mono and stereo remixes provide a jointly serviceable forum for a serviceable soundtrack. Wisely avoiding the subject of Let's Make It Legal inasmuch as he can, Wagner contributes a terrific feature-length yak-track (a first for a Marilyn DVD) in which he sheds light on the life a $125/week contract player during the waning days of the studio system and touches on the sad fate of co-star Bates, who killed herself not long after her husband's untimely death. (The empathy in his voice betrays his status as the widower of Natalie Wood.) In one amusing tangent, he's about to debunk the myth that Colbert only liked to be photographed from the left side when he notices that every shot of her in Let's Make It Legal is taken from that direction. The disc--which is rounded out with trailers for for As Young as You Feel, All About Eve, Bus Stop, Don't Bother to Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Let's Make It Legal, Let's Make Love, Love Nest, Monkey Business, Niagara, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, We're Not Married!, and the "Marilyn Monroe: Diamond Collection"--would have no purchase incentive without the commentary. Image: B-, Sound: B-, Commentary: A- English Stereo, English Mono CC English and Spanish Subtitles DVD-9 76 minutes -Bill Chambers

Based on a story by Paddy Chayefsky, As Young as You Feel intrigues as a thumbnail sketch of Chayefsky's Network. In so doing, it actually makes Network look less political and Chayefsky's work as a whole seem rooted in a kind of Rostand fantasy that a poetic individual can have an obscene amount of influence. Howard Beale changed the world with the ultimate suicide note, and twenty-five years earlier, John R. Hodges (Monty Woolley) speechified to save his job and ultimately became the conscience of corporate America: when Hodges is mandatorily retired from Acme Printing for turning the dreaded six-five, he successfully assumes the identity of Harold Cleveland, head of Acme's parent company Consolidated Motors, and changes company policy ever after with a "Mr. Smith"-ish monologue at an Acme luncheon. The film is an interesting time capsule for showing that takeovers are not a new thing while also reminding that, in a pre-MSNBC world, not everybody with power had a famous face. But if Acme's gullibility is palatable in a historical context, other contrivances take our suspension of disbelief--hell, our very sentience--for granted, specifically Hodges' grandson-in-law-to-be (David Wayne) pointlessly alerting an established nemesis to John's ruse. (I can't think of a lazier inciting incident in even Ed Wood's oeuvre.) The directorial debut of editor Harmon Jones, As Young as You Feel has one or two notable push-ins but looks mostly like episodic television and peters out towards the finale (another way in which it presages Network); Marilyn fans should steel themselves for disappointment in her underrealized role as a secretary. Fox releases As Young as You Feel on DVD in its original fullscreen aspect ratio, and the b&w image, clean and of wide greyscale latitude, is far more radiant than this film deserves. Audio is tolerable in both mono and reprocessed stereo configurations, the latter adding a bit of fullness to the opening orchestra sequence. Trailers for As Young as You Feel, All About Eve, Bus Stop, Don't Bother to Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Let's Make It Legal, Let's Make Love, Love Nest, Monkey Business, Niagara, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, We're Not Married!, and the "Marilyn Monroe: Diamond Collection" round out the disc. Image: A, Sound: B- English Stereo, English Mono CC English and Spanish Subtitles DVD-9 76 minutes -Bill Chambers