Even if you’ve never seen THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH - even if you’ve never heard of it - you know it’s most famous scene. Marilyn Monroe, in the most famous white dress in cinema history, stands over a subway grate and enjoys the cool breeze when the trains rush past. Her skirt flies into the air to the delight of men everywhere. As the story goes, the scene was originally shot in New York City and onlookers watched Monroe’s skirt fly up again and again. Her husband of less than a year, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, endured take after take from behind the cameras, while typically polite New Yorkers yelled all sorts of things at Monroe (who supposedly got a kick out of all the attention). DiMaggio was so incensed by her scandalous behavior that he left New York the next morning and within weeks, the pair’s marriage was over.

Just about fifty years later, the scene is still good, but not particularly revealing. There are two distinct subway passes but both of them don’t seem to disturb Monroe’s outfit in a significant way. Regardless, the camera angles are all very high, reminiscent of the way Elvis Presley was filled waist up on “The Ed Sullivan Show” to keep his hips from scandalizing the nation. Still photographs and promotional films shot on the set are a lot more explicit, which makes sense; THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH was sold, rightly so, on Monroe and her incredible sexual charisma. But because of the rigorous Production Code that remained in place throughout Hollywood through the middle of the 1960s, the film itself is tamer than its commercials. The moments of indecency are so brief it’s hard to believe they became so iconic.

The Production Code, which dictated that, among other things, no comedy could be derived from situations involving adultery, shredded most of the racy content from THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, a very popular Broadway play by George Axlerod. In the play a Manhattan book editor named Richard Sherman has an affair while his wife and son holiday away from New York City without him, and his eventual guilt causes a variety of comedic situation. But since Hollywood wasn’t allowed to make a comedy about an adulterer Billy Wilder’s big screen adaptation, starring Tom Ewell (from the original Broadway cast) as Sherman, is about a man who is merely tempted to have an affair while his wife and son are gone.

Mainly due to the incredibly strict content guidelines, the comedy isn’t particularly funny. There are few memorable lines, and fewer sexy ones. Ewell looks his part, but his theatrical performance doesn’t do the picture any favors; his hammy, bug-eyed delivery surely played great on the stage, but doesn’t translate well in the screen version. He’s made even weaker in the role when you learn that Wilder wanted to cast Walter Matthau in the part, and one can imagine how much better THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH would have been with him in the lead. The DVD even includes a brief excerpt from Matthau’s screen test; reportedly, the studio decided it did not want to take a chance on on an unknown stage actor (Ewell, a Hollywood novice, was at least a Broadway star).

But let’s be honest here, a better costar would help the film, but THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH would be worth watching if the male lead was played by a well-trained dog because the real star of the show is the incredible Marilyn Monroe in one of her best performances. As Sherman’s unnamed upstairs neighbor she is breezy, adorable, honest, smart, funny, and, of course, the sexiest thing on two legs. On one of ITCH’s DVD features, Hugh Hefner credits Monroe for helping to plant the seeds of the following decade’s sexual revolution and watching ITCH it’s easy to see why. The billowing white dress may be famous, but Monroe is sexy in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH in everything she wears. Even her ankles are sexy! There just wasn’t an unflattering angle on that woman. Though she was famously difficult to work with, sometimes requiring dozens of takes to remember and properly deliver a single line, it all seems so effortless on the screen. Ewell is a good, faithful husband, but because Monroe is so beautiful, we actively root for him to cheat on his wife!

And of course, the image of Monroe in that dress is timeless and unforgettable. It’s remarkable how potent that image was, and how firmly it remains entrenched in our culture as one of the signature movie images of the twentieth century. Even if the scene itself isn’t particularly tantalizing, the idea behind the scene is. For Monroe, it marked the beginning of the end for her marriage, her career, and her life. Surveying a huge image of herself in the dress towering over Times Square to promote the film, Monroe bitterly remarked, “This is all they see in me.” Ironically, this image ensured Monroe will outlive us all, and yet it helped destroyed her. The public became so transfixed by her image of innocent sexuality that no one, not even Moore herself, could see the genius behind the beauty. THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH is not a great movie, but Monroe’s is a great performance.

IF YOU LIKED THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, CHECK OUT: THE LOST WEEKEND (1945), one of the first significant films ever made about alcoholism, also directed by Billy Wilder. Somewhat outdated, but worth watching for an incredible lead performance by Ray Milland.

THE BAD

After an interminable 135 minutes, the final words of Roland Joffe’s THE SCARLET LETTER are uttered: “Who is to say what is a sin in God’s eyes?” A wise statement, and yet I can’t help but feel that if we cannot agree on such complex matters such as abortion, stem cell research, or who is going to win the American League West, we all certainly can agree that 1995’s filmic version of THE SCARLET LETTER is indeed a sin: against its source and good cinema. Another famous biblical teaching says “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’m not perfect, but I’ve never made a two hour movie about angsty Puritans and their wacko sexual peccadilloes. In this department, I’m sinless. Let’s start throwing some stones.

The film is ostensibly a vanity project for star Demi Moore. Extreme success in Hollywood can be a dangerous thing: a successful actor believes that two big hits makes him an artistic genius. Suddenly anyone will do anything to work with them, including giving them oodles of money and all sorts of control over the production. These projects almost never turn out well, and, in the past, we’ve looked at a bunch of them including Patrick Swayze’s ROAD HOUSE and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s LAST ACTION HERO. These are pompous movies stuffed with all manner of awareness-raising social commentary. Demi Moore, maybe the biggest female star in Hollywood after GHOST and A FEW GOOD MEN, choose to use her power to make a ponderous adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel. In the great tradition of such classic vanity projects as Steven Seagal’s ON DEADLY GROUND, Moore was thoroughly convinced that she was giving the world a huge statement about passion and feminism, when all she was really doing was making a two hour plus movie about stuffy old white people arguing while wearing white wigs and ruffled shirts. The only insight these bombs have are into the mindsets of stars (or directors or writers, though the phenomenon is more closely associated with actors and actresses) who grow so powerful that they come to a point where, literally, they refuse to hear the word “no.” So if Demi Moore wants to have sex with Gary Oldman in a big pile of grain while a slave simultaneously gives herself a sumptuous erotic massage as a red hummingbird flies about, no one can stop her.

It became vibrantly clear that Moore was steering THE SCARLET LETTER in the scenes where her character is banished during pregnancy to a solitary confinement prison where she must suffer and deliver the baby on her own. One would think being locked away, physically neglected, and emotionally tortured would take a toll on the character’s body. Instead, the longer she stays locked away, the hotter she gets! Her hair, previously in a dowdy Puritanical ‘do, goes into a very modern ponytail, with “sloppy” bangs “accidentally” falling into her face. No sores, or boils, or acne either - her skin practically glistens. Only an egotistical star would demand their long-suffering character actually look hotter at her lowest point. How will the audience sympathize with an ugly person?!?

(In fairness, it’s possible that Demi Moore was merely a poor, unwitting pawn in the plan of director Roland Jaffe and screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart, but we’ll never know. It’s unlikely anyone who ever come out and demand they receive credit for their artistic contribution to this movie, because that would imply they were responsible for the scene where a completely naked Robert Duvall shaves all his body hair on camera.)

The loose outline of the Hawthorne’s plot remains intact. Hester Prine (Moore) comes to the New World without her husband and settles into a new life and a new home. She has a secret affair with the town’s preacher, Reverend Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman), which results in Hester’s pregnancy. She refuses to reveal the child’s father’s identity, and accepts, as punishment, a scarlet “A” that she must wear on her clothing at all times. Eventually (and that’s putting it lightly), Hester’s husband, long thought dead, returns and decides to wreak havoc on his wife’s life as a revenge for what she has done to him.

At first, I was enjoying THE SCARLET LETTER and the extreme clash between its artsy fartsy aspirations and its weirdo sex scenes, the bulk of which could form an issue of Colonial Penthouse Forum (“I know it sounds impossible, but everything ye is about to read with thine eyes is absolutely the Lord’s truth.”). Instead of a meet cute, Prine and Dimmesdale have a meet nasty - while on an idyllic frolic in the unspoiled nature of New England, she comes upon him bathing totally naked in a small lake. How do I know he’s totally naked? Because while the camera is focused on his midsection in close-up, Oldman spins underwater, flashing all his junk at us, with only a thin later of glistening water barely protecting us from a full monty. Later, Hester recalls the incident while taking a steamy bath, though she doesn’t do much bathing; the scene consists of Moore posing erotically while she flashes back to the images of Dimmesdale in the lake. Then, because no good sex scene doesn’t involve at least one peeper, Hester’s sex-loving slave spies on her as she bathes, suggesting that she either desires women, or desires to be white, or just thinks Moore has really nice skin and bone structure.

So far, THE SCARLET LETTER more closely resembles any book with Fabio on the cover than the revered classic, and for ugly movie fans, all is right in the world. This is not a tragic, deeply-felt love affair, this is a sexual crush between two people who share a creepy water sports fetish. Unfortunately, soon after Hester and Dimmesdale consummate their passion -- in the scene with the grain silo and the slave’s simultaneous bath time masturbation involving the red bird -- the farcical “erotic” content is replaced by flat scenes starring uptight squares who will never understand how the greatest relationships are formed on voyeurism and the use of large damp rags. This allows Moore to spend an hour of my time sitting and weeping over and over, crying more tears than the contestants in an onion cutting contest.

I’m no fan of the source material, but you’d sooner get me to read it from cover to cover while suspended from a meat hook by my unmentionables before you could convince me to sit through THE SCARLET LETTER again. It is boring, pretentious, and not sexy even when it’s trying to be. Maybe we could rectify the abundance of these vanity pictures by taking a page from Hawthorne: stars who mess up this badly are forced to wear a big red “S” on their clothes for a year - the “S” referring to their “shitty movie.”

INSTEAD OF THE SCARLET LETTER, CHECK OUT: APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam era adaptation of Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS. One of the best movies ever made until the last twenty minutes.

THE UGLY

Sometimes all it takes to shove a movie off the rails is a single element. In the case of ANACONDA, that element is actor Jon Voight. Prior to his first appearance, ANACONDA is an earnest little horror film in the making. When Voight, as priest-turned-snake-expert Paul Sarone, leaps onto the heroes’ boat and into the movie he is already wearing a ridiculous, constipated grimace, a slicked-back ponytail, and an unplaceable accent. Suddenly there are giant snakes, there are little snakes, and there are terrible, awful, painful lines of dialogue, most from Voight himself. He doesn’t just hijack a boat; he hijacks a whole movie!

The rest of the characters are all in the Amazon, on that misbegotten ship, to film a documentary about the region. Jennifer Lopez is the director, Eric Stoltz is a scientist, Ice Cube the cameraman, and Owen Wilson, of all people, is the soundman. They pick up Sarone in a rainstorm, where his boat has broken down. “Thank you!” he cries gratefully. “Thank the Lord for you!” he cries again, just to make it clear that he is truly grateful. He claims he can act as a guide and tribal expert, but he quickly proves a poor boat guest, sticking wasps in his boat mates’ scuba gear and killing them one by one when they disagree with his ideas or try to disrupt his plans. Sarone takes them off in search of a gigantic anaconda snake in the hopes that he can capture a live one and sell it for a lot of money. If anything, the pocketbook and boot industry should be very interested.

An actor as accomplished Voight knew what he was doing when he created this character, he just didn’t let anyone else in on the plan. His performance is the kind you expect from Christopher Walken in a movie like THE COUNTRY BEARS: completely inscrutable. Where he found this voice is anybody’s guess. It seems equal parts Brando’s Don Corleone and Pacino’s Tony Montana. From the former comes a thin whisper that’s hard to understand, and from the latter, a borderline racist representation of a Paraguayan accent, where a word like “stupid” becomes “esstupid,” as in “You think I’m esstupid? I’M NOT ESSTUPID!” If you’re not offended by anti-Paraguayan bias, every single thing out of Boight’s mouth in this movie is funny. In my favorite speech, he speaks of the anaconda snake’s vice-like grip in an extremely sexual fashion. “It hold you ehtight,” he proclaims, “ehtighter than your true love.” For curious readers, ophidiophilia is the technical term for those who have a snake fetish.

Hey. I’m just saying.

Naturally the snake they are after has a mind of its own; like any evil movie monster worth his body count, this anaconda has the attitude of a frat boy. When the mood strikes him, he is even known to regurgitate his victims whole, just to kill them and eat him again, for no purpose other than to be an asshole. At one point, he spits out a monkey at Owen Wilson, sort of icing the kicker, if the kicker were a broken-nosed California surfer dude on a crummy boat in the middle of the Amazon. One by one, our dumb but perky cast become doggie bags for a gigantic snake that bounces back and forth between cartoonish computer effect and puppet with the expressiveness of a medium-sized block of cheese. There is one incredible shot: from inside the throat of the snake as it begins to devour one of the characters. Once again, that fetish is ophidiophilia.

Without Jon Voight, ANACONDA might have been scary, but it’s just as possible that it would have become a forgettable, straight-to-video gorefest, and it almost certainly would not have merited this summer’s sequel, ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID (a dumb title because the original has a couple of anacondas, not just one). With Voight’s incredible performance it’s guaranteed a long-shelf life as a one-of-a-kind original. You would be esstupid not to ehrent it.

IF YOU LIKED ANACONDA, CHECK OUT: JACK FROST (1997), another cherished piece of monster movie sleaze, about an improbably homicidal snowman. Not to be confused with the Michael Keaton film of the same name, unless you want to play a really cruel trick on an unsuspecting six-year-old.