Niagara (1953)

Niagara (Henry Hathaway,* 1953) An odd little film-noir (in daylight and in three-strip Technicolor yet!) filmed on location by one of Hollywood's adepts at maximizing the footage all done in a documentary style, Henry Hathaway. Hathaway was an early pioneer of both noir and cinema verité) Niagara is also the film that made Marilyn Monroe a star (followed quickly by Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire to complete her break-out troika of 1953).

And the curious thing is...it's Monroe's most atypical role. We're familiar with the Monroe persona as sexual force of nature in various stages of self-awareness, from naif all the way through to temptress. But, to my mind we'd never seen her as a "femme fatale", not even when she'd previously crossed over into shadowy noir territory (as in The Asphalt Jungle). But, then, there are a lot of peculiar things about Niagra.

But, first, a little context: before we get to the dark side of things, we follow a happily-married couple, Ray and Polly Cutler (Max Showalter—for some reason going under the name "Casey Adams"—and Jean Peters), who have come to Niagara Falls for a delayed by three years honeymoon. They're meeting Ray's boss (which in itself is peculiar), but he and the little woman have been delayed, leaving the Cutlers on their own, thankfully. But, there's a complication: their room isn't ready. 

Now, there's a whole other movie about how when one expects a room with a view, you should get a room with a view—and, I mean, how often do you get to Niagara Falls?—but, the couple who haven't vacated the Cutlers' room aren't ready to leave and according to "the wife" (Monroe), they don't expect to leave any time soon. It's only by the Cutlers' charity that she and her husband aren't evicted by the motel manager. Why they're not leaving the Cutlers have no idea...but they're not alone in that. The husband (Joseph Cotten) doesn't really know, either.

So, the room the Cutlers get doesn't have a view, but they'll have plenty of sights to see, thanks to the Loomises. For instance, you don't see much of him, but she gets out quite a lot. Shopping, she says. But, Polly sees her out by the falls making out with a man not her husband—"she sure got herself an armful of groceries" she tells Ray (the screenplay was co-written by Billy Wilder's sharp-tongued collaborator, Charles Brackett). Then, there's the night Rose Loomis got all slinked up and started crooning to a sultry love song, only to have her husband George make an appearance and smash the record in front of the crowd and everybody. The record leaves him a nasty cut and Polly, good-hearted soul that she is, gets out the mercurochrome to patch him up.

It's not just the shadows and venetian blinds that make this a noir!

Loomis is bitter. He started out as a rancher, met the much-younger Rose working as a barmaid, and married her just in time for the ranch to go bust. He's just gotten out of an Army hospital stay following his service in Korea. He knows he has his hands full with Rose, and that's why they're at the Falls, as an opportunity to patch things up, but it's not going well. He tells Polly: "Let me tell you something. You're young, you're in love. Well, I'll give you a warning. Don't let it get out of hand, like those falls out there. Up above... d'you ever see the river up above the falls? It's calm, and easy, and you throw in a log, it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and it gets going faster, hits some rocks, and... in a minute it's in the lower rapids, and... nothing in the world - including God himself, I suppose - can keep it from going over the edge. It just - goes!"

He doesn't realize how prescient he is. 

 

Because Rose has other plans and a trip to the Falls provides her another opportunity entirely. For one thing, they're right on the Canadian border for easy escape and those Falls have a convenient way of hiding motivations. Pretty soon, Rose is spending a lot of time looking around corners and becoming wary.

As well she should. This character is out-and-out bad with murder on her mind, manipulative, selectively heartless, and not afraid to give her target-husband a pity-boink to soften him up for the kill. Monroe's career is full of characters not afraid to use sex and sexuality as a motivator, but, here, they're used as a weapon. It's not unusual to find toxicity in the female characters in film-noir (which, despite the daylight and national park surroundings, this certainly is), but it's certainly unusual to base a movie around them. Here, Monroe isn't just naughty, she's just plain bad.

And yet. The way the screenplay is written and the way Monroe plays it, there's a perverse element of sympathy generated there. Partially, it's the dark noir form and that Rose Loomis isn't some criminal mastermind—and credit to Joseph Cotten playing his role without an ounce of mercy (you end of thinking worse of him...and he's the intended victim here!). Maybe it's the eternal American quandary: choosing the better of two sociopaths and anybody but Anita Loos would have a moral dilemma about that...unless, of course, you're of a similar mental state.

Some John Dunne might be appropriate here.

But, that's the sort of thing film-noir does, by challenging positivity and lightness with a shaft of dark. It was the 1950's and people were still recovering from World War II with a shaky sigh of relief, and in the midst of that re-building came film noir to act as a literary Civil Defense measure to unassure us that though the war was over and the enemy (Fascists, specifically Nazis, for any younger readers who might be only slightly familiar with the terms) was defeated...people could still be bad. Very bad. And this one is so dark that it threatens the conjugal bed and the unfissionable nuclear family.

Director Hathaway could make an innocent parking garage look like an inexorable path to doom.

It's amazing that they let this one escape. But, the 1950's was the perfect Petri dish to grow such a concoction. It is only the Cutlers, doing the typical American honeymooning thing of going to one of the continent's most dangerous natural wonders, who give us something to cling to, some sense of normalcy amidst such perfidy and despair.

Jean Peters, hanging on for dear life.

Ultimately, it boils down to a cautionary tale of a happily married honeymooning couple observing the consequences of another couple whose versions of their futures are quite different from one another's. And surviving it. Maybe even growing stronger because of it.

And at the black-hearted center of it all is Monroe, doing some of the most complex work of her career, right at the start, before she became America's Sex Symbol, and so could toy with the darker aspects of that role without it tarnishing her image. Monroe was always good. But, as the famous Mae West line goes, when she was bad, she was better.

Rose looks at her husband with contempt, wariness, and just a hint of vulnerability.

Be dismissive of Monroe's talent if you want, but this character is complex!

"I'm not bad. I'm just photographed that way."

* Did you know Hathaway was born the Marquis Henri Léopold de Fiennes?