Don’t Bother to Knock

Before 1953, when Marilyn Monroe truly became a star with the one-three punch of Niagara (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), she was desperate to prove herself as a real actress—and, slowly but surely, she was getting there. Her bit part in All About Eve (1950) had earned her Bette Davis’s respect (the Hollywood grand dame had predicted that Monroe would be one of the industry’s “top stars” before too long) and, in 1951, she managed to score a lucrative, long-term contract with 20th Century Fox, her growing talents matched by the air of scandal around her name as a former pinup model turned cinematic sexpot.

Roy Baker’s pressure-cooker-of-a-psycho-thriller Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) was one of Fox’s earliest efforts to capitalise on her popularity, though the role of Nell—a recently institutionalised woman tasked with babysitting a child one night—stands apart for its darkness and perversity. Nell is no smouldering femme fatale or giggling naif, but the kind of woman you’d see in Hitchcock films (and perhaps even Polanski or De Palma ones) a decade-plus later. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wasn’t awfully impressed at the time—he wrote that despite her efforts, Monroe didn’t have the chops to pull off a psychopath—but I’d beg to differ. Her wispy voice and dissociated gaze create an undercurrent of innocence that works in intriguing tension with the weird villainy of her actions: in other words, she’s not just a madwoman, but a sick one, mired in the muck of her own mind, to both disturbing and melancholic results.

Which is not to downplay the film’s sensational fun. It begins by showing Monroe against-type: as the modest, mousy niece of a luxury hotel’s bellboy, Eddie, Nell’s good-natured guardian. Eddie has found Nell a gig babysitting the young daughter of two high-rolling guests, who will be attending a function in the hotel ballroom downstairs. The job is straightforward, but we know something is up by the impatience conveyed by Nell’s breath-held rigidity; her eyes, not exactly vacant, but telegraphing a mind that’s elsewhere. As soon as little Bunny’s parents are out the door, Nell gruffly puts the child to bed and ransacks her mother’s fine things, soon sauntering around the room in a borrowed nightgown and diamond earrings. Here is the Marilyn with whom we’re familiar—glamorous, sexy, and eager to seduce. But it’s just a disguise—or, rather, a delusion. Kind of like the dream of becoming a Hollywood star. A handsome pilot named Jed (Richard Widmark) doesn’t realise what he’s getting into when he phones the bombshell whose room is visible from his window, and accepts her invitation to come over and have a drink. No matter that the room isn’t actually hers. From here, Don’t Bother to Knock unfolds a pleasurably absurd and suspenseful series of events, all heightened by the fact that either Eddie or Bunny’s parents could come knocking on the door at any time.

By some measures, Nell can be seen as a mere catalyst for Jed’s transformation. Introduced as the protagonist at the very start of the film—his noncommittal ways causing his beau, a brunette lounge singer, to break things off with him—Jed not only realises, thanks to Nell, that he’s no longer into one-night stands, but that he has the capacity to genuinely care for women beyond what they have to offer him as sex objects. His concern for Bunny, which keeps him invested in the Nell debacle well after she reveals her cards, also proves he’s ready to be a father. But whatever comes through from this rather demeaning script is eclipsed, in my mind, by the alternative narrative summoned by Monroe’s own legend: from her brutal childhood living in foster homes and orphanages to her death in 1962 by what many consider suicide. Nell, too, grew up poor and abused, while one of the film’s biggest shocks concerns the scars on her wrists. Few of Monroe’s screen roles express this contradiction so central to the woman behind the image; even fewer treat her hunger for a better—more fabulous and romantic—life sympathetically. Wearing another woman’s clothes, endangering a child’s life just so she could have a few moments living out a fantasy is surely deranged; but it’s also, in Monroe’s hands, deeply sad. There’s a part of us that, in watching Don’t Bother to Knock, wants Nell’s dangerous games to be stopped. Then there’s the part that understands her frustration and dreads the titular knocks that threaten to undo her. When you’re a kid immersed in your imagination, there’s nothing more agonising than having your dreamworld collapsed by demanding adults. Nell yearns to be left alone in a false reality of her own making, where her dead lover is still alive, and her life, someone else’s.