Niagara (1953)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Powerful

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Henry Hathaway has directed a melodrama involving a perfectly normal honeymooning couple (Peters and Showalter) trying to help a troubled couple (Cotton and Monroe) of the kind that marriage counselors call unstable and unsatisfactory.Cotton has just been released from some kind of booby hatch and we take his obsessive paranoia about his wife's fidelity as symptomatic, but in fact he's quite right. Monroe has a lover. They plan to murder Cotton and take off for Chicago.Monroe and her paramour use a vapid pop song that they arrange to have played by the bells in the campanile as a signal for them to meet and fornicate like two aardvarks in heat. The insipid love song may have been meant for public release, maybe sung by Patti Page or someone, but it never leaves the ground. "It's the ONLY song," breathes Monroe. If that were the case the end of civilization would be at hand.But if the song flops, Monroe does not. Hathaway and the studio have lavished as much attention on her as her lover has. She's dressed in startling vermilion dresses, she's festooned with diamonds, and her lips are a glistening scarlet that might blind a companion in a dark room. When she delivers a line her upper lip droops for a second over her lower, as if getting ready to do something entirely on its own.She wears spaghetti shoes. She wears false eyelashes, make up, and that polished lipstick. She wears it in the shower. She wears it while lying unconscious on a hospital bed. And when she walks away from the camera, the shot lingers forever on her undulating rear.Peters and Showalter are anxious to help the tortured couple but Peters discovers some shadowy nooks in the others' marriage and when she tries to tell her husband she dissolves into hysterical gibberish so that an irritated Max tells her to "Stop it now; it was all just a bad dream!" The last third of the picture is more kinetic. There are lots of pursuits, always upward. Frightened people climb rickety wooden staircases that seem to meander through the dripping rocks. People are trapped in stone grottoes, left hanging to small rocks in the St. Lawrence River. And way high up in the campanile, the bells provide silent witness to murder.It's Marilyn Monroe's picture all the way.

Coming late to assessments of Niagara on IMDb I see most of the themes that impressed this reviewer have been well canvassed. A middling to good rating as an entry in the film noir/thriller genre. One of the first full blown depictions of the hyper-curvaceous, iridescent lipglossy and figure-huggingly clothed Marilyn Monroe persona that became standard. The expert use of the wonderful Niagara Falls backdrop to the story. The unsettling(poor) performances of Max Showalter and Don Wilson. But just like [email protected] , the thought that was most insistent to this elderly male reviewer throughout was – Boy, would I love to be on a honeymoon with this Jean Peters.

"Niagara" is truly problematic film, with many pros and cons.First the pros. The cinematography is truly spectacular. The falls themselves are really the star of the movie, which looks like it was subsidized by the Niagara Falls Chamber of Commerce. The plot is an intriguing one - wife and lover plot to kill wife's husband, who winds up killing the lover instead. Joseph Cotten's presence benefits any movie he stars in. Many of the scenes are shot with a compositional style reminiscent of Hitchcock.Then the cons. Max Showalter, as other users have said, has got to be one of the most irritating screen presences ever. He simply cannot act, and that phony plastic smile makes you grit your teeth. Monroe is nothing to write home about either; she was never a good actress, except in cartoonish farces like "Some Like it Hot." Then are the plot turns that defy believability. Toward the start Cotten's character barges into a noisy party, grabs a record off a phonograph, cuts his hand in breaking it, and then storms off. Jean Peter's character goes for a first aid kit and follows him into his room to tend to his hand. Would anyone in their right mind follow someone into his room after such a display of uncontrollable violence? So it's a mixed bag. Worth a see despite its shortcomings.

Like - WOW!!... Marilyn Monroe has never looked hotter than she does in Niagara. Man, Monroe just sizzles in this flick, especially in her hot-pink dress.This 1953 Thriller offers great fun for the viewer on a variety of levels.(1) Film Noir themes abound (albeit in Technicolor).(2) Oodles of location shooting around Niagara Falls.(3) And, best of all, Freudian Symbolism runs amok.Monroe plays Rose Loomis, an unbelievably ripe femme fatale.Niagara's twisted tale of greed and infidelity has the tantalizing Rose devilishly plotting (with her handsome toy-boy) the murder of her emotionally unstable husband, George. And, what better way to do him in, then a quick, hard push over, into the roaring Falls.Adding to Niagara's thrills - Director Henry Hathaway does an excellent job of squeezing the most out of the spectacular scenery around Niagara Falls.If you're a Marilyn Monroe fan, then you're sure to enjoy this seductively wicked flick.