Your Summer Of Sex Comedies Begins Here: ‘The Seven Year Itch’ and ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ Offer Up Two Blonde Bombshells

In recent years, social media has revealed a new prudery among younger movie watchers, too tiresome to describe in much detail, but kind of boiling down to a directive that sex scenes are only permissible in movies if they “advance the story.” Now, of course, in the genre of sex comedy, sex IS the story — whether there are scenes overtly depicting the sex act or not. Over the next several weeks in his new series The Summer Of Sex Comedies, Decider contributor Glenn Kenny will provide a guided tour of the permutations of the sex comedy (from innuendo to full frontal nudity) as well as its various luminaries (from Marilyn Monroe to Jennifer Lawrence). So even if no noteworthy new sex comedies come up in the next few months, you can still have a pretty hot cinematic summer.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hollywood could craft sex comedies that weren’t inordinately coy about it. And then, as all good TCM addicts know, along came the Breen Office and/or the Production Code, Hollywood self-censorship organs that kept married couples in separate beds and all feet on the floor if any couple sat on a single bed, or sofa. 

Eventually filmmakers began to balk, particularly as society itself started to become more permissive. The post WWII baby boom might have contributed to a loosening — everyone knew where the babies were coming from, after all — and movies started bringing what the great comedic writer-director Preston Sturges deemed “Topic A” to the fore. Director Otto Preminger defied the would-be censors by letting a character in his relatively tepid rom-com The Moon Is Blue utter the word “virgin.” Public morals were largely unaffected. 

And then along came Marilyn Monroe. A model who had to own up to having posed nude for a “men’s” calendar early in her career, her platinum hair, breathy voice, soft curves and “come hither” look (the last of which she could deliver with credible ingenuousness) combined to create an object of desire to shake the nation. By the mid-’50s she had played a babysitter off her nut in Don’t Bother To Knock, a femme fatale conspiring to off her husband in Niagara, a very cute gold digger in the musical Gentleman Prefer Blondes (the source of her immortal “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” performance), and a widescreen western heroine in Preminger’s River of No Return. 

In 1956’s The Seven Year Itch, her character is objectified to the extent that she’s known only as “The Girl.” Don’t blame director Billy Wilder for that; the movie is based on a play by George Axelrod, and Axelrod co-wrote the script. As a theater piece, Itch was huge, playing almost three years on Broadway, its popularity powered by Tom Ewell, the accomplished comic actor (whose more meaningful screen work had been in the 1949 Hepburn/Tracy classic Adam’s Rib, playing a seedy middle-class philanderer) who here plays a quasi-nebbish named Richard Sherman, editor of the cheap paperbacks that likely fuel his fantasy life, to which the movie gives a good amount of comedic play. When his wife (Evelyn Keyes, whose memoir was titled Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister, because, well, figure it out) takes the brat to summer camp, Richard finds intrigue in a new tenant, who’s awfully friendly and seemingly oblivious to the fact that she drives Sherman to distraction every time he sees her. When she shows up at his apartment with a champagne bucket and wearing a clingy patterned dress with undone shoulder straps (the picture takes place over an oppressively hot summer weekend; hence its immortal subway-grate upskirt bit), he’s giddy at the prospect of his most depraved dreams coming true. 

Said dreams are, of course, caused by two things — the title itch, a condition of marital weariness the movie’s preface avers has been identified as a real thing by psychologists, and the fact that The Girl is Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, the movie makes a self-reflexive joke near the end, when Sherman, put on the extreme defensive about his flirtation, responds to the question “What blonde in the kitchen” by huffing “Wouldn’t you like to know. Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe.”

As much of an icon as she had become, the talented and ambitious Monroe increasingly wiggled under the thumb of Daryl F. Zanuck, the 20^th Century Fox head who took an oppressively patriarchal interest in her career. She balked at roles she considered insulting. The alliance between actor and studio erupted in “you can’t fire me, I quit” style fireworks. Monroe was happy, at least at first, to take up with Wilder several years later for the immortal Some Like It Hot (despite the shoot being something of a nightmare for both Marilyn and Wilder). 

In the meantime, Zanuck was short a sex symbol, only not really. He had a few other potential stars reserved for such a breach. One was the even more platinum blonde Jayne Mansfield, promoted by Fox as the “king size” Monroe. Indeed.

Where Monroe’s curves were smooth, Mansfield cinched her waist and wore undergarments that made her capacious bust look like weaponry; an average fella may have gotten the impression that he could hurt himself in an amorous clinch with her. (I know, I know — “but what a way to go!”) Such exaggerated pulchritude called for a comedic approach even the adventurous Wilder couldn’t meet.

Enter Frank Tashlin, a former Warner Brothers animation guy who brought cartoon humor to live action movies. Combining Mansfield’s allure with the draw of the crazy new music sweeping the nation as of 1956 — rock and roll, that is — Tashlin cooked up The Girl Can’t Help It, its title tune specially composed by Bobby Troup and sung by the sui generis wild thing Little Richard. The iconic scene in which Jayne’s Jerri Jordan sashays the New York City streets, causing ice blocks to melt and men’s spectacles to shatter, is accompanied by the number. (French maestro Jean-Luc Godard, then a film critic, responded so strongly to Tashlin that he began a correspondence with the director; several scenes in JLG’s A Woman is A Woman, from 1961, are directly inspired by Girl.) The wafer-thin narrative sees Ewell’s Tom Miller, a washed-up singer’s agent, enlisted by gruff gangster “Fats” Murdock (Edmund O’Brien in a remarkably committed oversize performance) to make a singing star out of his girlfriend Jerri Jordan, who’s only interested in a life of wifely domesticity. In addition to her obvious charms, Mansfield shows exemplary vivacity and vulnerability in crafting a real character out of a cartoon. 

In addition to its lead, and the genuinely clever gags constructed around her, the movie teems with other delights: a remarkable dream interlude featuring Julie London, real-life torch singer who’s here supposedly the ex that Miller pines for; and remarkable song performances by the r&b singing combo the Treniers, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and the ravishing Abbey Lincoln in a gorgeous red-and-blue stage setting. Apparently whenever the Beatles were working Paul McCartney would call time whenever Girl was on the telly. You can see why. 

The Seven Year Itch was a sex comedy in which the itch could not be scratched. Girl lets the hero get the girl in the end (in part because he’s the only guy in the dramatis personae to see her as a person rather than an object), and their union proves fruitful in the movie’s chortle-inducing coda. So, yes, Tom and Jerri got it on. Because Girl was so manifestly a farce, this fact wasn’t taken for a breakthrough at the time. But as we’ll see, maybe it was. 

IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF “THE SUMMER OF SEX COMEDIES”: The winsome Natalie Wood, former child star, makes waves by starring in Bob And Ted And Carol And Alice, beginning a trend of mainstream Hollywood pictures introducing a notion of “free love” for the express purpose of insisting it doesn’t work.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.