Marilyn Monroe had odd choices in spouses, having been married to Arthur Miller and then Joe DiMaggio. Who knows what lovers she had outside of marriage (as if that’s any of our business), but I’m guessing there were more than a few curious choices among those as well. An even stranger pairing is her and Laurence Olivier in 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl.
I wonder what led Olivier to direct and star in this production alongside Marilyn Monroe. These two not only fail to have chemistry, but seem to actively dislike each other. This is even after their characters stop being at odds and supposedly fall madly in love. I didn’t buy their sudden passion, which happens with such extremity and without motivations as to seemingly occur at the flick of a switch. Then again, I didn’t believe their characters at any point in the runtime.
The story is set in 1911’s London and around the coronation of King George. There for the ceremony is Olivier as, if I recall correctly, the Grand Duke of Carpathia. Honestly, I was never entirely sure of his title and neither are most of the other characters. Richard Wattis, as the head of the foreign office, mulls at considerable length how Monroe should address this dignitary before it is decided it would be simpler if she only spoke to him when addressed.
Olivier and Monroe met backstage at a theatre where she had been in the chorus line of what I assume is the rather lowbrow production, The Coconut Girl. She apparently charmed him with her wardrobe malfunction while shaking his hand—not that we get to see anything.
He invites her to dinner at the embassy, and I like how she’s impressed by everything at first. She’s happy to set foot in an embassy for the first time. She’s impressed by the huge and vulgarly opulent foyer.
But she is less impressed with the dinner itself, especially when she discovers it will be in a private room and for only her and Olivier. She makes a hasty exit, as she has been in similarly compromising positions before. Wattis tries to appeal to her so as to prevent an international incident: “Do you want to get the foreign office in trouble?” She answers with an enthusiastic “yes”.
Not that she needed to worry. Once she’s back in the room, Olivier tells her to go ahead and eat while he tends to business. His tone is completely dismissive. She proceeds to down a great many glasses of champagne while he badmouths Americans to whomever he’s talking to on the phone. As he tells the person on the other end of the line, they can talk freely, as there isn’t anybody of importance in the room with him. When he finally starts paying attention to her, her tone is mocking. She even manages to walk backwards out of the room sarcastically.
And so it goes on for days like this. He’s interested, but she isn’t, and then they trade places. These abrupt changes in their personalities did not have sufficient motivation for me to find them believable. The strangest thing aspect of the entire enterprise is Monroe wearing the same dress for days on end. That thing had to be getting seriously skanky.
Even so, she wears it to such events as the coronation of the King. She had been invited by Sybil Thorndike, the lively Queen Dowager who is a minor character that is secretly the best thing in this production. Another interesting minor character is young Jeremy Spenser, playing Oliver’s son and next in line for the throne.
As for our leads, Olivier is terrible and I didn’t believe one second of his performance. Monroe’s is more difficult to assess, with her excelling in rare moments while largely looking a bit lost. The script is problematic, as it makes her ditzy when it needs her to be and then clever to an unbelievable extreme in other scenes. Then there is such unmotivated behavior as her crying in some sort of religious ecstasy during the coronation.
It is well-known this production was a mess behind-the-scenes, which may have contributed to her uneven performance. Oliver apparently hated Monroe in real-life and that may help to explain the complete absence of chemistry between them, even if it does not excuse it. And, once again, why did he do this film at all?
One aspect of the production which is baffling and inexcusable are the deeply horrible effects. That parade route to the coronation, and the crowning itself, are some sort of bluescreen and/or matting so ineptly executed as to make it actually difficult to determine what I was seeing on the screen at times. These were likely groundbreaking for their time; however, if they could only be executed this poorly, then they should have been done in a different way or not at all.
The Prince and the Showgirl is a curious mess which, true to its nature, manages to fail hard all the way to its baffling conclusion. The only audience I can imagine for this are Monroe completists and, even for them, this must be rough going.
Dir: Laurence Olivier
Starring Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Richard Wattis
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray