Marilyn

(1953) Marilyn/ Roadhouse Girl CRIME DRAMA

Written and directed by Wolf Rilla that has Tom Price (Maxwell Reed) looking for a job, and his boss, George Saunders (Leslie Dwyer) employs him as a mechanic. Meanwhile, George's trophy wife, Marilyn Saunders (Sandra Dorne) is dancing with Rosie inside the diner until her husband comes in and pulls the plug. It appears he not only owns the gas station but that he also the small diner that came along with it. George is also a penny pincher and controls even his own wife's finances, and during one of their arguments he even sends two two Quid to her dad each month. Blowing George's top is when Marilyn is seen dancing with George's new hire, Tom. And as a result he kicks everyone out of the cafe and closes it early before he scolds her some more. And when she expresses about traveling to London, he would either ignore and abandons her, leaving her and Tom to mingle some more. The situation becomes complicated is when Marilyn's husband, George comes home early, only catch his wife and Tom frolicking in his room, and he clocks him one as soon as her husband wants to put his hands on her.

If anyone were to watch this should be able to recognize the set up is almost identical to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" with the difference is that the older husband, George is kind of a control freak, extremely jealous and controlling of his own wife, Marilyn.

B-Movie maestro Wolf Rilla 'rilla' delivers some super-melodramatic Brit-Noir pizazz in the splendidly monikered 'Roadhouse Girl', a low-budget, high blood-pressured, doomily Dashiell Hammett-ed pot-boiler, wherein itinerant grease monkey, the tall drink of dish water Tom Price (Maxwell Reed) secures employment at an isolated, somewhat insalubrious roadside garage, owned by dour, hypertensive, oily misanthrope George Sanders (Leslie Dwyer), who is incongruously married to the breathtakingly beauteous, vastly frustrated, serially flirtatious Marilyn (Sandra Dorne), and before you can say 'lipstick on my crankshaft', the considerably 'handy' Tom enthusiastically provides some extracurricular lubrication service for this divine-looking, dingy dive-dancin' Roadhouse-rocking, B-Movie bombshell!

Wolf Rilla's black-seamed, steamy-windowed melodrama about the increasingly volatile ménage à trois between Brylcreemed, sleazy operator Nick (Ferdy Mayne), the wildly quixotic, weirdly petulant Marilyn, and big, greasy-fingered lug Tom sinfully simmers to a suitably fraught, deliciously dramatic, exciting B-Movie Noir conclusion! In this delightfully tawdry, tannin-stained, low rent gloomy thriller, overheated, highly revved, erotically charged emotions dangerously percolate to a perfectly hysterical, wonderfully camp, bathos-laden climax, while juicy bombshell Marilyn is initially one sticky sweet confection, said glossy veneer belies a poisonously malignant centre, 'Marilyn' is moody Brit-Noir at its finest/dingiest!

... And you shouldn't have bothered answering. Unoriginal and uninspired rip off of the John Garfield-Lana Turner classic.

I saw this today Monday 20/8/18 on "Talking Pictures" channel 81 for the first time.Elements of the captioned well known films were used in its plot line and.In place of John Garfield we have Maxwell Reed giving his eyebrowns another workout.In place of June Anderson (Mrs Danvers) from Rebecca we have the character of Rosie, with lesbian longings for Sandra Dorn which of course could not be shown on screen in 1953 only suggested.The points made by other reviewers were valid but the final scene of police cars drawing up to a stop at the petrol station indicated the producers were short of the funds to finish the film and /or didn't know how to give it a satisfactory ending.This may account for its mediocre rating by reviewers just over 5 whereas I awarded it 6.

This low budget British film is a version of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, about adultery, passion, a love triangle, and murder, all set around that most British of locations, an independent garage. An interesting cast go through the motions here although it's fair to say that the constraints of the budget mean that the film never really excites or innovates and instead sort of just plods along.

It doesn't help that we've seen this age-old story play out time and again. Maxwell Reed (BLACKOUT) is the heartthrob hero, a drifter who finds employment at the hands of a bad-tempered mechanic (Leslie Dwyer, great but underutilised in a character role). He soon falls for the comely charms of Dwyer's wife, Sandra Dorne, who is a Diana Dors-alike and not a bad actress at all. You can guess the rest of the story, but fun is added from Ferdy Mayne's stalwart suitor and the chance to see Kenneth Connor in a bit part. Although MARILYN is entirely devoid of originality, it's a relatively watchable little piece with plenty of character work going on.