The Seven Year Itch

The Seven Year Itch (1955) is a Billy Wilder comedy you can watch online on iFILM, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. New York book editor Richard Sherman ships his wife and son off to the country for the summer — and promptly begins imagining every conceivable way to betray them, without actually doing any of it.

The upstairs neighbor helps. She's a blonde advertising model played by Monroe with effortless charm, and she shows up at his door with champagne and no agenda. Richard's imagination, however, has plenty. Wilder builds the comedy entirely from the gap between what the man fantasizes and what he manages: the humiliations he pre-lives, the scandal he choreographs in his head, the seduction that exists mostly as projection.

Ewell gives an underrated physical performance as a man undone by his own brain. Monroe, meanwhile, is exactly as funny as she is magnetic — and the film knows it. The subway grate scene filmed on Lexington Avenue became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. Stream The Seven Year Itch (1955) online on iFILM.