Marilyn Monroe’s 5 Greatest Roles

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Here’s a Marilyn gallery we hope is of value to everyone — to those young enough not to have seen these films before (in which case we envy you!), or to those who’ve seen every one of them, since they’re all movies you can watch again and again. A crucial question: Are Marilyn’s five greatest roles also her five greatest movies? Mostly, but not always. “Clash by Night” is actually a better film than “Don’t Bother to Knock,” which came out the same year (1952) — but Monroe’s tough small turn in “Clash” can’t match her eerily accomplished performance as a babysitter with serious mental issues. And “All About Eve” (1950), which features a very young Marilyn for one blissful scene, might be the greatest film she was ever in — but it’s not a major performance. Those qualifications aside, yes, these are Marilyn’s greatest roles and her greatest movies. Taken together, they’re a showcase of her incandescence, her bedazzling beauty, her sly comic talent, and (when you watch “The Misfits”) the future she might have had as a dramatic actress. More than ever, she looks like a movie star out of a dream.  

• Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)

  Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection

  It’s a paradox, and a bit of a shock, when you first encounter early Marilyn. We think of her as an ingenue who gained in stature and confidence. But in 1952, when she was 25, Monroe made two movies and displayed a wily adventurous actor’s confidence in both of them. In the stormy “Clash by Night,” she plays a cannery worker who isn’t about to let any man tell her what to do, and in “Don’t Bother to Knock,” she gives an accomplished high-wire performance as a babysitter who’s gradually revealed to be a distraught head case. The entire film takes place in a hotel, where Richard Widmark, as a jilted lothario (it’s Anne Bancroft who’s doing the jilting!), tries to get a private party going with Nell (Monroe), who’s minding the child of two of the guests. Monroe didn’t start to study Method acting under Lee Strasberg until 1955, but her performance here feels like a minor Method wonder: She’s yearning and fierce and sensual and discombobulated, all at the same time. She’s better than the movie (which is all about Widmark’s loutish character learning empathy), but this is an eye-opening encapsulation of what a deadly serious actress Marilyn always was.