THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH IS OUT NOW ON DVD,
BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD.STORY
OF THE
SHOT
THE SEVEN
YEAR ITCH
WORDS IAN FREERMARILYN MONROE, STANDING
on a subway grate, cooing in delight as her
white, pleated skirt billows around her hips.
It’s an image so iconic that it’s been riffed
on by everything from Pulp Fiction to The
Tigger Movie. Other tributes have been more
elaborate. In 2011, artist Seward Johnson
created a eight-metre-tall, 15,000kg statue of
the moment which has been displayed in New
Jersey, Chicago and Bendigo. More bizarrely in
Japan, villagers from Inakadate, a prefecture of
Aomori, paid homage to it in 2013 with a
140-by-100m recreation in a rice ield made
from nine different types of rice.
Yet, when he captured the moment while
shooting The Seven Year Itch on 15 September,
1954, Billy Wilder took a while to realise just what
he had. “I was so stupid, because we were looking
for a representative ad,” he told interviewer and
superfan Cameron Crowe, “and it did not occur
to me that this thing, where she’s kind of trying
to keep the dress down, that this is it!”
The set-up: having just seen The Creature
From The Black Lagoon, married Richard
Sherman (Tom Ewell) and The Girl (Marilyn
Monroe, whose character is never named)
exit the Trans-Lux Theater in Manhattan on an
illicit date and, as a subway train passes below,
a breeze blooms her skirt. Yet, rather than
rushing to cover her modesty, she boldly revels in
the moment. “Isn’t it delicious?” she asks,
perhaps rhetorically. The result is multi-faceted: a
provocative encapsulation of Monroe’s appeal, a
totem for a 1950s Hollywood (male) fantasy, and
a leeting depiction of onscreen joy that belies the
pain coursing through Monroe’s offscreen life.
And, of course, it graces the ilm’s poster.
The shot was initially captured in the early-
morning hours on the corner of Lexington
and 52nd Street. Some 1,500 spectators and
photographers watched Wilder put Monroe
through 14 takes. “At irst it was all innocent
and fun,” recalled Monroe. “But when Billy kept
shooting the scene over and over, the crowd
of men kept on applauding and shouting, ‘More,
more Marilyn — let’s see more.’ What was
supposed to be a fun scene turned into a sex
scene.” Monroe took steps against inadvertent
exposure — she doubled up on two pairs of
white underwear — but all for naught: legend
has it the loud cat calls ruined the sound
recording and led to the scene being re-shot
under controllable conditions on the Fox lot.
The iconic white dress — actually ivory-
coloured rayon acetate crepe, because white
registered grey on ilm — was created by
Monroe’s go-to designer William Travilla, who
dismissed it as “that silly little dress”. In 1971,
the late Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds
bought the dress for $200. In 2011, when
Reynolds auctioned it off to stave off
bankruptcy, it went for a silly little $4.6 million.
Some itches, it seems, never go away.