In her new documentary, Romantic Comedy (which has its US premiere tomorrow at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas), Elizabeth Sankey argues that Marilyn and Doris Day – both blonde and funny, though otherwise very different – dominated the genre in the 1950s, and as she tells Danielle Solzman on the Solzy At The Movies site, Sankey also believes that if Marilyn had lived to complete Something’s Got to Give, she could have transformed the genre forever.
“I think the real ‘wow’ moment for me was that on Marilyn Monroe’s last film she had planned to do a nude scene – she was going to swim naked in a pool to try and entice her husband back into her arms. This would have been groundbreaking and I think potentially could have changed the world of romantic comedies – and their relationship to sex – in an indelible way. But the film was never finished and instead re-made a year later with Doris Day [Move Over Darling] who was not someone who was keen for romantic comedies to contain sex or female characters with sexual agency. And they’ve never really changed since then. It’s bizarre that even in 2019 romantic comedies so rarely have the two leads having sex – most of them end with heady declarations of love before they’ve even kissed! I do wonder if this has influenced the way women are encouraged in society to prioritize love and romance, with their sexual desire being something they’re not ‘supposed’ to be concerned with.”