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DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK
DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK is available individually on DVD for $19.98 or as part of the Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection Volume II for $79.98. |
This DVD review 
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DVD
reviews are Copyright © 2002 THE CINEMA LASER and may not be copied
or reprinted without the written consent of the publisher. |
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Before
she found her niche and became one of the biggest stars the studio had
ever known, 20th Century Fox featured a rising contract player
named Marilyn Monroe in a number of lightweight supporting roles. Of her
pre-superstardom roles, the one that really stands out was in a noir-ish
potboiler called DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK. This particular film afforded
Marilyn Monroe a chance to display a great deal of emotional depth and
take her performance to the dark side of human despair. In DON'T BOTHER
TO KNOCK, Monroe portrays Nell Forbes, the niece of a hotel elevator
operator, who offers her services as babysitter to a couple of hotel guests.
At
first, the audience is lead to believe that Nell is just a sad little
small town girl who is having difficulty adjusting to big city life. However,
as it turns out, Nell is emotionally disturbed and delusional, which allows
her to mistake another hotel guest named Jed Towers (Richard Widmark),
for a boyfriend that was killed in a plane crash several years earlier.
Loosing herself in an attempt "rekindle" her relationship, Nell
begins to go off the deep end when the little girl for whom she is babysitting
comes between her and the man she loves. DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK
proves to be a very entertaining melodrama that benefits from its solid
leading performances and tight, suspenseful direction from Roy Baker.
The supporting cast of DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK features Anne Bancroft,
Donna Corcoran, Jeanne Cagney, Lurene Tuttle, Elisha Cook Jr., Jim Backus
and Verna Felton.
20th
Century Fox Home Entertainment has made DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK available
on DVD in a fine looking full screen transfer that frames the movie in
its proper 1.37:1 aspect ratio. The black and white film element used
for the transfer has had some restoration work and appears to be in very
good shape, with only minor blemishes serving as reminders that this movie
is a half-century-old. Film grain is ever present in the image, but it
really suits the dark, noir-ish cinematography and really makes the DVD
experience like watching a movie and not just a video. The image is generally
crisp and provides a very nice level of detail throughout the course of
the film. Blacks are quite velvety and whites appear completely stable.
Contrast is very good, and the picture produces plenty of subtlety in
the grayscale. Although DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK runs a tight seventy-six
minutes, the film has been authored on a dual layer DVD with no signs
of digital compression artifacts.
DON'T
BOTHER TO KNOCK is offered on DVD
with a newly remixed Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack. As with other
vintage monaural tracks that have been redone in stereo, I can’t say that
end result is overly stereophonic. Again, the best description is to say
that the majority of DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK sounds like a thickened
version, with occasional stereo imaging. Still, there is a great deal
of music on the soundtrack, which does seem to benefit from the remix.
Of course, the fidelity is limited by half-century-old recording technology,
but the majority of background hiss and distortion have been cleaned from
the track, which sound rather nice with a modest amount of amplification.
Dialogue is reproduced cleanly, without any form of intelligibility problems.
A monaural English soundtrack is also present on the DVD, as are English
and Spanish subtitles.
The
basic interactive menus provide access to the standard scene selection
and set up features, as well as a few extras. Continuing as with the other
titles in Fox’s Marilyn Monroe series, DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK includes
a comparison of how the movie looked in previous video incarnations and
how it now looks now with both film and video restoration. Theatrical
trailers for DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK, MONKEY BUSINESS, NIAGRA,
RIVER OF NO RETURN and LET’S MAKE LOVE have also been provided
on the DVD. A still gallery closes out the DVD’s extras.
DON’T
BOTHER TO KNOCK certainly gave
Marilyn Monroe one of the most interesting roles of her career and it
is an entertaining little film noir to boot. If you are a Monroe fan,
or a movie buff in general, you are going to want to check out DON’T
BOTHER TO KNOCK on DVD.
