That intro will haunt my nightmares.

A few facts Tom and Dominic skip over:
* Marilyn Monroe appeared in the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1950: All About Eve.
* That same year Marilyn Monroe was also in a film that got John Huston nominated for Best Director: The Asphalt Jungle.
* Both roles were minor parts because she wasn't a big star at the time, but both were well regarded as serious films.
* The big difference in public perception between Betty Grable's pinup career and Marilyn Monroe's is that Monroe posed nude.
* Hugh Hefner acquired the rights to Monroe's nude photos and published them in the inaugural edition of Playboy Magazine.
* Hefner later bought the crypt next to Monroe's. He's interred next to her. She never wanted anything to do with him.
* Part of the significance of Monroe posing with a bottle of Chanel No. 5 is when she was asked what she wore to bed, that perfume was her answer.
* Arthur Miller pawed all over Monroe in front of her professional colleagues while she was filming The Prince and the Showgirl.
* Olivier refused to accept any creative feedback from Monroe.
* When Billy Wilder asked her to be in Some Like it Hot, she was disappointed to be typecast as another dumb blonde, but the script was too good to pass up.
* Wilder was more receptive to Monroe's ideas. For instance in her first appearance where she walks down a train track, she needed something to react to. The scene is funnier for that change.
* In the year 2000, the American Film Institute rated Some Like it Hot the best American comedy of all time.
* Politically, Monroe was to the left of John F. Kennedy. Monroe supported racial integration and secured a booking for Ella Fitzgerald at LA's Mocambo Club.
* Marilyn Monroe's estate included more than 400 books. Most were on serious subjects and many were first editions.

My dog demanded to be let outside when that intro came on.

love Dominic’s donnish patience and gentle pushback against Tom’s ardour for Marilyn.

You guys need to put out an album of Tom Holland songs and imitations

That was a hard intro to get through... nightmare fuel, for sure :D

I find Marilyn memorable for her body of work & sticking up for Ella. "Don't Bother to Knock," & " misfits" both stellar performances.

Excellent podcast! MM’s intersectionality with so many famous people in mid-century America is just extraordinary.

Loved the intro😂 bravo 🎉

After studying method acting MM became very difficult to work with. On "Some Like it Hot" she'd arrive on set very late and incapable of remembering her lines. You can find dozens of out takes and her co-stars talking about what a trial it was working with her on that film.
I'm surprised you didn't mention her small, but memorable, role in "All About Eve" as Miss Casswell the ingenue trying to break into acting. I think that's the first time we see the iconic MM persona. The film swept the Academy Awards and is a classic of screenwriting and direction.
I agree with Dominic that the Blacklist was not an issue by the time Monroe married Miller and Miller never was a victim of it. Miller's former partner, Elia Kazan, after being excommunicated by the Hollywood communists had no compunction about naming them for HUAC.

I'm pretty sure Madonna watched and rewatched 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'. The video for 'Material Girl' is the evidence.

You are so wrong about her films no longer being watched. Turner Classic movies run them all the time. I'll return to Custer.

We watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Bus Stop and the Prince and the Showgirl a lot in our household, my kids love them....aged 10 and 13 😊

Film noir has seen a revival in recent years, so people do still see Marilyn Monroe being very effective in minor roles like in John Huston's 'The Asphalt Jungle' and Fritz Lang's 'Clash by Night', not to mention the classic (if not noir, close) 'All About Eve'. She was also excellent as the female lead in 'Don't Bother to Knock' and 'Niagara'. Maybe her comedy roles, where she definitely had a flair, eg 'Monkey Business' and the ones you mention, haven't survived so well and few melodramas have the momentum to last long beyond their immediate cultural moments, but that is generally true. The Queens of the WWII pin-ups that you mention, Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable, had far longer careers and made many more films than Monroe, but the vast majority have been forgotten. I doubt many people today even know who Betty Grable was, although they may have heard her name or seen the classic pin-up. Rita Hayworth, though, will always be 'Gilda' and, in a perverse way, 'The Lady from Shanghai'. The camera loved Rita and she was arguably more beautiful and sexy than Marilyn, and also outdid her with poor choices for husbands, notably Orson Wells and Aly Khan  ("Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me" was her succinct assessment of her love life). Also Rita could dance as well as any of Fred Astaire's other partners. Still, she is largely forgotten today. So, that is my long way of saying that I think you have given Marilyn's memory in film short shrift. She was an excellent actor in drama and comedy until drugs and delusions got the better of her.

Wow Dominic is so harsh on the older podcasts😂, he is much more light hearted and PC now.

Do an episode on Maria Callas. Bio. rehashed a million times . That would be a real hard nut to crack

That was a disturbing opening!

Heavens, Tom! Is there anything you can’t do? Loved your rendition of the iconic song!

Great podcast

Marylin Monroe was considerably more intelligent than her public image (or Dominic) suggest. The gap between Monroe the person and Monroe the persona is one of the more striking cases of a public figure being underestimated.

First off, she was a serious and dedicated reader. Her personal library, catalogued after her death, contained around 400 books - Joyce, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Freud, history, poetry, philosophy. This wasn't for show; her copies were annotated and dog-eared. She was photographed reading Ulysses in 1955, and when reporters assumed it was a publicity stunt, she reportedly said she'd been working through it for a long time.

She studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg in New York, which was the most intellectually demanding acting program in America at the time - Brando, Dean, Newman territory. Strasberg said she was one of the two or three most talented students he ever taught. She took it extremely seriously and was reportedly a rigorous, disciplined student of the Method.

Her third husband was Arthur Miller, arguably America's most important living playwright at the time. Their intellectual connection was real - Miller wrote The Misfits for her, and their correspondence shows genuine engagement with ideas. When they married, a newspaper headline reportedly read "Egghead Weds Hourglass," which tells you everything about how the public saw her.

She was also shrewd about the business side. In 1954, she broke with Fox, moved to New York, and formed her own production company (Marilyn Monroe Productions) - an extraordinary move for any actor at the time, let alone a woman in the 1950s studio system. She negotiated director and cinematographer approval rights. This was savvy, not ditzy.

The dumb blonde persona was partly calculated, partly imposed. She understood that it was what sold, and she performed it brilliantly. But she also resented it. There's a famous quote attributed to her: "I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful." And another: "People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person."

The intelligence was always there. The system just didn't have a use for it.