Marilyn Monroe had spent months waiting out her unprecedented studio battle with 20th Century Fox. After fleeing to New York from Los Angeles like some sort of blonde haloed fugitive, Marilyn refused to ever turn back. To ever succumb to any of the dumb sexpot roles Darryl Zanuck wanted her to make in perpetuity. Yet the choice of “Chérie”–ultimately pronounced Cherry by the one who “wrangles” her–in William Inge’s play, Bus Stop, didn’t seem to do much to distance herself from the image she so strongly claimed to detest. But maybe a part of her was terrified to shed it completely. For the thought of losing her adoring fans–the only source of true love in her life–was likely just as scary as forever being typecast. So it is that she went with the “just daring enough” role of Chérie, which, at the very least, would make her feel as though she was getting some mileage out of all her Actors Studio classes with Lee Strasberg. Yet the only thing daring about it was Marilyn trying her hand at an Ozark accent, which really doesn’t come across all that differently from her normal voice. Just makes her sound slightly more dosed with Seconal than usual.
But before we get introduced to her singer in a saloon character, we must contend with Beauregard “Beau” Decker (Don Murray). Having never left his ranch in Timber Hill, Montana (save for a trip to the dentist in Helena at age twelve), Beau’s comportment is, to use an understatement, that of an uncouth shitkicker’s. Loud, obnoxious and having no filter, Beau’s behavior is further sent into overdrive when his friend and, essentially, “handler,” Virgil (Arthur O’Connell), tells him he ought to start taking an interest in “gals.” Suddenly aware of how right Virgil is when they get to the “big city” of Phoenix for the rodeo and he sees the omnipresence of women reminding him that he’s a 21-year-old virgin, Beau insists he’s going to find himself an “angel.” And that he’ll simply know her when he sees her. That “lucky” lady, of course, turns out to be Chérie, who Virgil immediately spots across the way from his window as she sits melancholically in the window of her dressing room, praying the harassment of having a body like hers away.
Virgil, increasingly irritated with Beau’s brutish behavior (at that moment, kicking and whooping in the bathtub because it’s the first time he’s ever been able to take a bath and a shower), decides to go and see what kind of action he can find at The Blue Dragon, where Chérie’s friend and co-worker (in a waitress capacity), Vera (Eileen Heckart), is doing her best to encourage Chérie to get ready quickly (which isn’t anything Monroe herself didn’t constantly struggle with) after their boss barges in angrily and starts pawing at her to hurry up.
After this incident, there is a meta tongue-in-cheek moment in which Chérie talks about her big plan to make it to Hollywood where “you get treated with a little respect.” It’s an overt dig at Zanuck and 20th Century Fox (which Marilyn famously called 19th Century Fox for its backward treatment of female stars). And one imagines that’s what the ingenue version of Marilyn might have initially thought with her grand plans to become a star. Except, unlike Chérie, she already grew up right next to Hollywood, her own mother a film cutter at RKO Studios.
Yet like Chérie, she can’t help but look to men for salvation. The two prototypes that would be her most tumultuous romances (and marriages), Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, are both apparent in Beau. Outwardly, his rough-hewn tactlessness makes him a closer match to DiMaggio, who there was no denying Marilyn had a physical attraction to, but felt unstimulated by his mind. When Virgil tells Beau that physical attraction isn’t all a woman looks for, Beau seems genuinely surprised, especially when Virgil offers that some women enjoy a man who is “smart or reads poetry or somethin’.” Beau asks if being able to recite the Gettysburg Address counts (this, too, is referential to the Marilyn legend, as most were well-aware of her matinee idol crush on Abraham Lincoln, who she believed Miller looked like). Virgil reckons no, but it doesn’t stop him from bursting in on Chérie while she’s sleeping to announce to her, “You see, Cherry, the whole problem is that you just haven’t had time yet to get attracted to my mind.” “Cherry” tells him she knows all she ever needs or wants to about his “mind,” already having been left bewildered by his declaration that they’re getting married the night before, when he silenced the entire saloon so she could sing “That Old Black Magic” without being just white noise.
Of course, her singing isn’t all that magic at all, yet Beau has still fallen irreversibly head over heels for her. His Miller-like qualities become manifest toward the end of the film, when the bus ride back (involving the literal lassoing of Chérie away from her own bus to L.A., which she tried to sneak away from Beau on without being cornered again) forces him to be humbled by a beatdown from the bus driver himself. Along with Virgil, both men agree that Beau ought to stop “molesting” the girl and let her be. She’s not interested. Naturally, however, as most films of this era were wont to do, Bus Stop reiterates the notion that when a woman says no it really means yes, and that you’ve simply got to wear her down like a calf. Upon learning of her “sordid” past (a.k.a. that she’s been with a few men to further accent the fact that Beau hasn’t–Miller, too, was rather virginal, having only ever been with his first wife before Marilyn), Beau finds the key to unlocking her heart by telling her, “Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about them other fellas, Cherry, and, well, what I mean is, I like you the way you are, so what do I care how you got that way?” Miller told her pretty much the same thing, never chastising her the way DiMaggio did for parading her sexy persona, which is a primary reason why she fell in love with him (before he ultimately stabbed her in the back with a play like After the Fall). Once again in this film (as in life), Monroe is a little girl lost, who is put back on the right path by a male savior. This was not a departure by any means from what she had done in the past with the studio, and made one wonder how the accolades came in so readily for a movie such as this, when past roles in Clash By Night,Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara provided her far more opportunity for dramatic range.
Bus Stop is still billed as somewhere in between a comedy and drama, though it very much falls into an almost screwball comedy genre (for that’s kind of how one has to look at a movie so overtly dripping with misogyny and the suppression of the female will). Marilyn would only make four more movies after this, among them being one of the most praised of her career, Some Like It Hot (with another two, The Prince and the Showgirl and Let’s Make Love, being largely panned), a film in which, you guessed it, Marilyn relies on the comedic sex symbol shtick that launched her into the spotlight in the first place. For in the end, going to a New York acting school did about as much for her as any other actress with the time and the money to indulge in it.
