MARILYN MONROE: THE FINAL DAYS (2001) C 117m
From AMC: American Movie Classics Magazine: "This eye-opening documentary takes a look at the tragic last days of the screen icon and includes the world broadcast premiere of a lushly restored and carefully edited 37-minute version of the unfinished 1962 project Something's Got to Give, the film she was working on before she died."
Julie Kirgo in the same magazine chronicles the restoration of Monroe's last film in greater detail: "[Executive producer Kevin] Burns and his team have labored meticulously to shape the surviving footage. Culled from [20th Century] Fox vaults, all elements were digitally transferred to video and restored to their original lush color. Animated titles from Move Over, Darling, the subsequent Doris Day version of the film, were adapted, and the Frank Sinatra version of the title song added. It's a superb effort, and all the more fascinating because, in Burns's own words, 'It was not going to be a good movie.'
"Monroe looks lovely, but fragile: still voluptuous, but thinner than the double-dip Marilyn who filled out the Fifties. Her pale skin is incandescent, her eyes luminous and vulnerable; but her hair is a stiff white cotton-candy helmet that looks as if it might break at a touch. And Monroe herself looks breakable: edgy and uncertain.
"She was right to be. There is something off-putting about seeing this supremely sexual actress play a young mother whose primary characteristic must be innocence; Irene Dunne [star of the original version of the story, MY FAVORITE WIFE] and Doris Day could pull it off with ease, but Monroe was way beyond innocence. She frolics with her two on-screen children by the pool; moments later, she's in the water, nude, revealing a bit of behind here, a glimpse of breast there.
"This handsomely mounted documentary makes it clear that Monroe was searching, with considerable desperation, for a way to deepen the role of hot-little-girl-lost to which she had been consigned. Her talent and allure remained powerful, but breaking the mold would have been a monumental task. Whether she could have managed it is now, sadly, anyone's guess."