Picturesque Niagara Falls, the honeymoon capital of the world, comes in two pieces: The American and the Canadian. Recent but not fresh newlyweds Jean Peters and Max Showalter (here, as Casey Adams) cross the border into Niagara Falls, Ontario on a delayed trip he won from his job. His prize-winning promotion was a turkey stuffed with shredded wheat, so small wonder he's more enthralled by the sight of the cereal's flagship factory across the river back in the states than in the majesty of the great, roaring cataracts.
But the cabin the belated honeymooners had reserved hasn't yet been emptied of Marilyn Monroe and her "unwell," older husband Joseph Cotten. Obligingly, Peters and Showalter take another one, with a less spectacular view. But later that evening, Monroe and Cotten put on a spectacle of marital discord right in the middle of the motor court that trumps the sights of both the cereal plant and even of the falls. Unwillingly, Peters and Showalter become drawn into an eddy as lethal as any out in the whirling rapids themselves especially once Peters espies, in the Cave of the Winds, Monroe in a clinch with a hunk who decidedly is not Cotten. From then on, Niagara turns into cat-and-mouse game of adultery and murder....
Had Hathaway kept his arc of tension more taut, Niagara might have been extraordinary. But the buffoonish Showalter is miscast, lending an untoward antic note, one amplified by the quite unnecessary arrival of his boss, complete with wife in tow (Don Wilson and Lurene Tuttle). Documentary and promotional material intrudes as well. Barely a tourist-trap goes neglected, from the Maid of the Mist to the carillon in the bell tower to the Cave of the Winds. And so Niagara joins that subset of mid-1950s movies that, with the democratization of travel and the pervasiveness of Technicolor photography, were in part turned into big and glamorous postcards boosting tourism to the locales where they were filmed (Dangerous Mission and I Died A Thousand Times come to mind).
Deployed as a ditzy sexpot, in both walk-ons and starring roles, throughout most of her (brief) career, Monroe had another, possibly more powerful side. Though her husband (Joseph Cotten) is supposedly the mentally unbalanced half of the couple, Marilyn Monroe comes across as disturbingly dangerously unstable. It's the same kind of riveting unbalance that she projected the year before in Don't Bother To Knock, potent and unpredictable. And without her coloring outside the lines of how her character was sketched the conventionally duplicitous younger wife Henry Hathaway's Niagara wouldn't be half so absorbing. And in fact when she leaves the screen for good, and when the movie resorts to the high-adventure peril of approaching the brink of the falls, most of our interest has already left, as well.
But the cabin the belated honeymooners had reserved hasn't yet been emptied of Marilyn Monroe and her "unwell," older husband Joseph Cotten. Obligingly, Peters and Showalter take another one, with a less spectacular view. But later that evening, Monroe and Cotten put on a spectacle of marital discord right in the middle of the motor court that trumps the sights of both the cereal plant and even of the falls. Unwillingly, Peters and Showalter become drawn into an eddy as lethal as any out in the whirling rapids themselves especially once Peters espies, in the Cave of the Winds, Monroe in a clinch with a hunk who decidedly is not Cotten. From then on, Niagara turns into cat-and-mouse game of adultery and murder....
Had Hathaway kept his arc of tension more taut, Niagara might have been extraordinary. But the buffoonish Showalter is miscast, lending an untoward antic note, one amplified by the quite unnecessary arrival of his boss, complete with wife in tow (Don Wilson and Lurene Tuttle). Documentary and promotional material intrudes as well. Barely a tourist-trap goes neglected, from the Maid of the Mist to the carillon in the bell tower to the Cave of the Winds. And so Niagara joins that subset of mid-1950s movies that, with the democratization of travel and the pervasiveness of Technicolor photography, were in part turned into big and glamorous postcards boosting tourism to the locales where they were filmed (Dangerous Mission and I Died A Thousand Times come to mind).
Deployed as a ditzy sexpot, in both walk-ons and starring roles, throughout most of her (brief) career, Monroe had another, possibly more powerful side. Though her husband (Joseph Cotten) is supposedly the mentally unbalanced half of the couple, Marilyn Monroe comes across as disturbingly dangerously unstable. It's the same kind of riveting unbalance that she projected the year before in Don't Bother To Knock, potent and unpredictable. And without her coloring outside the lines of how her character was sketched the conventionally duplicitous younger wife Henry Hathaway's Niagara wouldn't be half so absorbing. And in fact when she leaves the screen for good, and when the movie resorts to the high-adventure peril of approaching the brink of the falls, most of our interest has already left, as well.