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Bus Stop, The Seven Year Itch, and Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days are part of Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection, a boxed set from 20th Century Fox that also includes How to Marry a Millionaire, There's No Business Like Show Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Bus Stop

Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray, Arthur O'Connell, Betty Field, Eileen Heckart, Hope Lange. Directed by Joshua Logan. Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic). Dolby Digital. 105 minutes. 1956. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 2001448. NR. $24.98.

When a gorgeous saloon entertainer who's had too many men but no anchor in her life clashes with an innocent cowboy who's the salt of the earth but has no sexual history, sparks fly. This is the core of Bus Stop, adapted from the play by the great William Inge (Picnic, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs). This vigorous duel of the sexes focuses on two individuals and the social conventions that shaped them.

Cherie (Marilyn Monroe) is a forlorn chanteuse who hustles patrons for drinks. Beau Decker (Don Murray) is a rambunctious rancher in town for a rodeo. When Beau identifies Cherie as his "angel," his instincts tell him that—like a bull—she must be captured by brute force. The lady doesn't take kindly to this approach; the cowboy ends up kidnapping her and bustling her aboard a bus headed for his Montana ranch.

During an overnight stay at a roadside diner, Beau is forced to shed his primitive macho stance when he's humiliated in a fight with the bus driver. That's when Cherie realizes that she loves Beau. When she tells him of her checkered past and he remains undeterred, he proves once and for all to be the right man for her.

Set in the 1950s and ably scripted by George Axelrod, the film treats the protagonists with equal doses of compassion and humor. It exposes the convention that sees macho behavior as a man's duty and privilege while judging a woman's sexual history as a blemish on her reputation. Here the floozy is an innocent with a bruised, gentle soul who yearns for tenderness. The tough cowboy is actually inexperienced with women, a man who hasn't learned that his real power isn't all in his muscles. This delicious twist is actually subversive, touching—as Inge's work often did—on real 1950s socio-sexual neuroses.

Contemporary viewers may be charmed by the "innocence" of the era just before the battle of the sexes got vicious. Indeed, much of Bus Stop's appeal is in its mixture of realistic background and fairytale romance. The rodeo competition is as gritty as they come, and so are the saloon sequences. In fact, so are the clashes between the two leads. But their few moments of tenderness are pure magic.

Monroe shines as the showgirl who craves respect and affection. She's alternately exuberant and morose, seductive and withdrawn. In his film debut, Murray makes a big splash as the uninhibited cowboy. His bully of a character is likable because he's so childlike, so sincere. His passionate performance made him a star.

Director Joshua Logan, known for giving serious literary sources (such as Marcel Pagnol's Fanny) exciting visual translations, delivers a sweeping spectacle brimming with intelligence. He uses the wide screen to good effect, obscuring the script's theatrical origin.

The transfer is superb, with razor-sharp images and dazzling natural colors—the result of painstaking restoration. The focus is consistent and the surround sound rich and robust. Not to be missed.

The Seven Year Itch

Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes. Directed by Billy Wilder. Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 (anamorphic). Dolby Digital. 110 minutes. 1955. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 2001421. NR. $24.98.

Billy Wilder is such a bold, irreverent filmmaker that his take on George Axelrod's stage play about the allure of infidelity should have yielded yet another bittersweet comedy classic. But the film version of The Seven Year Itch never transcends its premise: An ordinary man whose family is off on vacation during the hot and humid New York summer befriends an irresistibly beautiful neighbor. The movie is an elaborate sexual tease.

Our hero, Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell), is tempted all right, but he mightily fights his urges toward this stunning blonde, played by Marilyn Monroe at her most alluring. Hers is a childlike manner that makes no attempt to hide her ample charms or to resist plying them. She is a fantasy figure unaware of her appeal as she triggers an average joe's sexual fantasies and guilt trips in neurotic succession.

Despite a number of slapstick numbers (the pair falling off their seats before a kiss can take place), the movie is mostly talk, only occasionally interrupted by some delicious morsel. Among the latter is the heroine's penchant for storing her underwear in the icebox in hot weather, her expression of affection for the beastly protagonist of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the iconic moment in the subway-grille scene when Monroe thrills to a gust of air that sends her skirt flying—and jaws dropping among her fans, no less than among the 1950s censors.

Censorship is the film's main flaw. Wilder managed to get away with murder in many of his masterworks, but here he wasn't allowed by the studio to show a happily adulterous affair. Instead, the film revolves around an affair that almost happens, which takes away the satiric bite. Still, Wilder occasionally overcame censorship restrictions by expressing the hero's sexual desire through images—the eruption of a champagne bottle, the froth on the sea waves.

But there are fewer laughs than there should be. Much of the dialogue feels forced, staged. And since most of the movie takes place in an apartment, the theatrical feel of enclosure is intense, despite Wilder's use of CinemaScope and his insistence on cramming each frame with visual stimulation.

The widescreen transfer of The Seven Year Itch is excellent, with dazzling natural colors (the result of painstaking restoration), sharp images, and consistent focus. The Dolby stereo sound is powerful and unfailing. The DVD includes a background feature about the making of the film and deleted scenes.

But it's Marilyn Monroe's arresting presence that makes Itch worth more than a single viewing. She conquers the screen with her unique brand of sexy innocence and impeccable comic timing. Anyone interested in why—apart from her extraordinary life and death—she became such a legend can find the answers here.

Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days

Narrated by James Coburn. Directed by Patty Ivins. Aspect ratio: 4:3. Dolby Digital stereo. 117 minutes. 2001. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 2001402. NR. $99.98.

Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days is a fact-packed documentary about the star's untimely demise and her troubled personal and professional lives. The meticulous research and the many interviews with people who knew her firsthand and were directly involved with her work make this an invaluable companion to The Diamond Collection, a compilation of some of Monroe's best films.

The focus is on the problematic shoot of Monroe's last film, Something's Got to Give, a remake of My Favorite Wife that she was contractually forced to make by 20th Century Fox. The studio, on the verge of bankruptcy and beset by production problems on Cleopatra, expected Monroe to save the day. But the star—Fox's greatest box-office powerhouse since Shirley Temple—wasn't a mere asset, but a sensitive time bomb waiting to explode.

The studio execs paid no attention to how fragile Monroe was, how unable she was to control her manic depression, and how her legendary tardiness and no-shows on the set were symptoms of a real problem, not just a temperamental star's extravagant behavior.

When her absence caused more and more delays, inflating the budget and eliminating the hope of profit, the studio fired her—this atop frequent script re-writes by several writers and bitter rivalries between director George Cukor and associate producer Gene Allen on one hand, and Monroe and producer Henry Weinstein (who was brought in to replace David Brown, a Cukor ally) on the other.

Monroe was indeed difficult, but her fragile psyche and her deep need to be respected and retain creative control are factors that must be considered. Although Fox ended up rehiring her and designating Jean Negulesco as director, something had to give—and it was Marilyn.

When Monroe died on August 5, 1962, from an overdose of sleeping pills mixed with champagne, she might have been trying to kill herself. Still, her phone call at the last moment to Peter Lawford suggests that she also might have had second thoughts.

Although The Final Days glosses over the actress's connection with the Kennedys (it states the obvious), it does give a voice to her physician, Hyman Engelberg, as well as to screenwriter Walter Bernstein, producer Weinstein, and friend Susan Strasberg, among others. It supersedes another documentary about her last days, Marilyn: Something's Got to Give (1992), which includes some of the same material and a good amount of new information.

Perhaps the most impressive feat of this DVD is the restoration and inclusion of what was filmed of Something's Got to Give, which was shot in CinemaScope. It features the star, then 36, at her peak. It's unfair to judge an incomplete film for what it might have been, but there's a flatness about it, partly because of the casting of Dean Martin as the male lead.

Perhaps Monroe's sensuality simply didn't jibe with the slapstick nature of much of the comedy, and interfered with the mood of the piece. Perhaps she'd sensed that when she'd initially turned the part down. The script was finally remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner. The casting proved to be brilliant, and the film was a big hit.

The production values—sound, image, and color—are impeccable in both the documentary and the unfinished movie. Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days is an intriguing, informative documentary that offers valid insights about a unique talent and one of Hollywood's greatest stars. The disc is indispensable to anyone interested in Monroe.