Marilyn Monroe & Film Noir Pt. II: “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952)

Hollywood is full of wrecked souls and broken dreams and the immortality made from some of them. The pressures of stardom and being in the public eye at an intensity of a sunburst have indeed weighed hard on many a Hollywood and music luminary, with the end result often being a nasty drug and/or alcohol addiction or even worse.

In the motion picture realm, we have seen Robin Williams, who hung himself with his belt in 2014, arguably after he found out he had a form of dementia. Heath Ledger, who died in 2008 of a drug overdose: some say his state of mind was made much worse by his extreme method acting and perhaps at least partial decent into psychosis in his genre-rocking and bone-chilling portrayal of The Joker in the second installment of Christopher Nolan’s darkly noir take on the Batman saga, 2008’s The Dark Knight.

These two are just notable cases among many others, like the director of Top Gun (1986), Tony Scott, who jumped off a bridge in LA in 2012, after leaving a suicide note. In the realm of Old Hollywood, we have Chester Morris, Boston Blackie in the eponymous crime flicks of the 1940’s, and also nominated for best actor at the 2nd Oscars in 1929 for his performance in Alibi but lost to Warren Baxter…