Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When his family goes away for summer vacation, a hitherto faithful publishing executive with an overactive imagination is tempted by an attractive new neighbor.
The Seven Year Itch is remembered almost entirely for Marilyn Monroe's iconic subway grate scene and her luminous, comic performance rather than its plot mechanics. The story itself is thin and stagey — adapted from a Broadway play — with its temptation premise resolved in a rather anticlimactic, morally tidy fashion. Tom Ewell is solid as the neurotic fantasist protagonist, and Monroe is magnetic, elevating every scene she inhabits with effortless comic timing. Billy Wilder brings some visual panache but the theatrical origins constrain the cinematography. The film's novelty lies largely in Monroe's singular screen presence and Wilder's light touch with innuendo-laden comedy, though the premise isn't especially fresh even for 1955. The ending deflates rather than satisfies, with the protagonist simply retreating to conventional domesticity without much dramatic payoff.