Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 99

Three Reviews by Andre Bazin

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Marilyn Monroe as its star. This actress’s personality, her promotional importance
to Fox, necessarily made the film revolve around her. But it is obvious that this
latest Hollywood sex bomb couldn’t possibly pass herself off as a tragic figure.
One could even question just how seriously her robust eroticism should be taken.
The morphology of the vamp tends toward thinness: the kind you find in Marlene
Dietrich, Greta Garbo (although not a vamp, she is in all respects a tragic figure),
and Joan Crawford. It was actually Mae West who originally created the figure of
the comic vamp, by virtue of what I would call a sort of low-pressure pneumaticism.
In any event, even if one hesitates to generalize in these matters, it at least remains
obvious, in Marilyn Monroe’s case, that at such a hyperbolic level vampishness
has more in common with farce than with tragedy.
Howard Hawks, for one, understood this perfectly in Monkey Business
(1952),^ where, as rumor has it, he went so far a