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The Seven Year Itch at 70: a comedy about infidelity ruined by the Hays code

Marilyn Monroe is incandescent in Billy Wilder’s comedy about a tempted married man, but it’s a film hampered by restrictions of the timeOne of the patterns that emerges in Conversations With Wilder, a delightfully candid 1999 interview book that the director Cameron Crowe did with his film-making hero, Billy Wilder, is that Wilder tends to look more fondly on his hits than his misses. To him, commercial flops were rarely the result of audiences misunderstanding his work, but a regrettable failure on his part to connect with them. So it’s notable that Wilder didn’t have kind things to say about the Marilyn Monroe comedy The Seven Year Itch, a box-office sensation that’s rightfully settled a few tiers below classics like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment and Some Like It Hot, his brilliant second go-around with Monroe.A work-for-hire job for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, The Seven Year Itch didn’t originate with Wilder, but George Axelrod’s 1952 Broadway comedy a...


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