| Notes : VERY Rare Italian landscape 4 foglio, art by MAYO, stunning image of the screen goddess Marilyn Monroe. Monroe did not want to make this film but agreed after Fox promised her the lead in Billy Wilder's screen version of the Broadway hit, The Seven Year Itch. The film's storyboard is neither a 'true comedy' nor a 'true melodrama'. The fictitious family-the five Donahues- is depicted in both good time and bad times, a bittersweet mode of musical instead of an old-fashioned one. Marilyn Monroe's fictitious character, as the sixth 'name principal' having a long role in the film, is given a variety of interactions with the fictitious Donahues. She originally attempts to compete with the Donahues as her character climbs the vaudeville ladder on which they have already perched at the top rung, but later makes a very sincere effort to become part of their close-knit, supportive family traditions. The musical seems ahead of its time (in the heyday of MGM musicals) in the sense of a contrasting very forward-looking story format with its old-fashioned musical numbers representing a pastiche of well-known Irving Berlin songs from different eras.
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