Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 98

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Popular Culture Review

Niagara^
Is it a coincidence or part of a plan, or simply my imagination at work in
anticipation of the near future? Whatever the case, it seems as if the American
cinema, before it dies in its present condition, wants to demonstrate by its choice
of subjects and locales the superiority of CinemaScope. One can’t help thinking
this when one sees Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1952), in which the two protagonists
are the famous falls and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, it’s much too obvious that at
least one of the two would benefit enormously from an enlargement of our field of
vision (the other would benefit from the use of 3-D, but that’s another story).
It is so easy to treat with ironic contempt Hollywood endeavors such as
Niagara that one is rather tempted to detect in them whatever positive things they
have to offer. Besides, the contemptuous viewer could perchance be taken in by a
film in which self-awareness and humor play a significant part. However, it is
quite possible that Hathaway originally took this rather conventional script seriously,
because he hoped he could renew interest in it through his deployment of the wise
en scene. The story concerns two newlywed couples. One of these couples has
come to spend their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, where the other man and wife—
an oddly matched pair—are their bungalow neighbors. He (Joseph Gotten) is
closemouthed, short-tempered, and likes solitary walks. She (Marilyn Monroe) is
an extraordinary type of perverse ingenue who seems to have no other concern
than to provoke her husband’s jealousy with her indecent attire and outlook. We
soon understand that she wants people to think he is mad, so as to pass off as a
suicide the murder she is planning with the complicity of her lover. But the Niagara
does not return the body that she had hoped it would, and from then on she will
have to deal with the fear of a vengeance against which she can’t defend herself
without admitting her crime. The falls, for their part, will take care of the denouement
and the moral.
Obviously, there is nothing original in this trite version of thefemmefatale
story, in which the woman’s sensuality provokes the man’s destiny. There is one
element, however—clearly indicated in the script but absolutely not developed in
the film—that could have introduced a rather appealing secondary line of interest:
in fact, both couples are oddly matched, for the honeymooning young man is an
oblivious fool, a champion salesman of cornflakes, whose pretty and intelligent
wife (Jean Peters) would be far better matched with Joseph Gotten. Thus we would
have had two protagonists made for each other but kept apart by their senseless
love for someone who, for very different reasons in each case, does not deserve it.
But the salesman embodies an ideal of American social morality that could be
paired with Marilyn Monroe’s lust only through a most audacious operation. And
it is perhaps in the face of such an operation that the screenwriters retreated.
I think that the initial script was knocked off-center by the introduction of