Don't Bother to Knock

A film that takes place over one night in a New York hotel. Jed is a pilot. His girlfriend has left him and he is sitting in the hotel bar. Lyn sings there. She states her reason plainly: she thinks he feels nothing for anyone. There is a family in the same hotel. They hire a girl to sit with their child. Nell is the lift operator's niece. Quiet, polite, and doing the work for the first time. When the family goes out she is left alone in the room. She puts on the woman's clothes, her jewellery, and looks at herself in the mirror. Jed sees her from the block opposite. He telephones and comes over. Nell begins to take him for someone else. She speaks of a fiancé who died in the war and her account comes apart by degrees. From there the film turns into a thriller. A child who wakes, a razor, a belt, a lift and a corridor that keeps narrowing. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but illness: the film does not draw Nell as wicked; it shows her as someone who does not know what she is doing and whom nobody has noticed. Jed's line ties into that. His accusation of coldness is tested across this night. The whole film takes place in the same hotel. A corridor, a lift, two rooms and a bar; there is no other setting. Marilyn Monroe's first major dramatic role came with this film, entirely different from the type she had been playing. Anne Bancroft appeared on screen for the first time here. Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Bancroft and Elisha Cook Jr are in the cast. Roy Ward Baker directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes short, confined thrillers and Hollywood of the 1950s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the depiction of illness carries the assumptions of its period and the resolution comes too fast.