The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Billy Wilder's 1955 comedy arrives as a document of a vanished moral universe, and we approach it with a sommelier's obligation to taste what is actually in the glass. Richard Sherman, a publishing executive of comfortable means, ships his wife and child off to Maine and spends a sweltering New York summer negotiating with his own imagination. The heat is a running gag. The neighbor upstairs is a commercial actress with no name, credited only as The Girl, and she exists to be looked at. Monroe's white dress over the subway grate remains the century's most reproduced image of a woman being appraised by strangers, and the film knows it, courts it, and sells tickets on it. Nothing here interrogates the arrangement. The camera simply participates.

The picture's anxieties are entirely domestic and entirely male. Sherman's guilt is comic, his fantasies are vaudevillian, and the psychiatrist's bestseller about the seventh year of marriage functions as a punchline, not a thesis. The Hays Office stripped the adultery out of the plot, which left Wilder with a comedy about a transgression that never happens, a structural wound he complained about for the rest of his life. What remains is flirtation, champagne, a Chopsticks duet, and a screening of Creature from the Black Lagoon.

We searched for the markers of contemporary social consciousness and found the opposite of each. The cast is white by default. The gender politics are the era's own, unexamined and unapologetic. Race, class, climate, and the body as anything other than spectacle are absent. There is no sermon, no lesson, no cause. It is a light sex farce with the sex removed, and it is honest about being nothing more. Our ledger records zeros across the board, not as a verdict on quality but as a matter of fact. Wilder himself called it a nothing picture. We are inclined to agree, fondly.