Bus Stop (1956)

A naive but stubborn cowboy falls in love with a saloon singer and tries to take her away against her will to get married and live on his ranch in Montana.

Director:

Joshua Logan

Writers:

George Axelrod (screenplay), William Inge (based on the play by)

Stars:

Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray, Arthur O'Connell

Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 1 win & 6 nominations.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Marilyn Monroe	...	Chérie
Don Murray	...	Beauregard 'Bo' Decker
Arthur O'Connell	...	Virgil Blessing
Betty Field	...	Grace
Eileen Heckart	...	Vera
Robert Bray	...	Carl
Hope Lange	...	Elma Duckworth
Hans Conried	...	Life Magazine Photographer
Max Showalter	...	Life Magazine Reporter (as Casey Adams)
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Arizona State University Sun Devil Marching Band	...	Themselves

Storyline

Innocent rodeo cowboy Bo falls in love with cafe singer Cherie in Phoenix. She tries to run away to Los Angeles but he finds her and forces her to board the bus to his home in Montana. When the bus stops at Grace's Diner the passengers learn that the road ahead is blocked. By now everyone knows of the kidnapping, but Bo is determined to have Cherie.

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Plot Keywords:

1950s | arizona | cowboy | montana | rodeo | 

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Taglines:

Give this boy enough rope and he'll land Marilyn Monroe!

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Genres:

Comedy | Drama | Romance

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Certificate:

Approved

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

20 September 1956 (Argentina)

Also Known As:

The Wrong Kind of Girl

Filming Locations:

Arizona State Fairgrounds, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$2,200,000 (estimated)

Gross USA:

$7,270,000, 31 December 1956

Company Credits

Production Co:

Twentieth Century Fox, Marilyn Monroe Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

96 min

Sound Mix:

4-Track Stereo (Westrex Recording System)

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.55 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

According to George Axelrod, when going up in her lines, Marilyn Monroe wouldn't improvise her way around them but would become emotional and leave the set. "She had reached a point in her neurosis where if anybody said, 'Cut!' she took it as an affront, burst into tears and ran to her dressing room. So 'Joshua Logan' stopped using the word and simply let the cameras run while he talked her back into the scene, with dialogue director Joe Curtis feeding Monroe her lines. "He was a huge man, Josh," Axelrod recalled, "so most of the time the screen was filled with Josh's behind and Marilyn's face, with this voice coming from the sky reading the lines that Marilyn would parrot."

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Goofs

The bruises Bo gets on his face following his fight with Carl the bus driver disappear and reappear several times in the scenes that follow.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Beauregard 'Bo' Decker: Are you ready, Virge?
Virgil Blessing: Anytime.
Beauregard 'Bo' Decker: Turn him out!
[calf is released from chute]

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Crazy Credits

And Introducing / Don Murray

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Connections

Referenced in What's My Line?: Hope Lange & Don Murray (1958)

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Soundtracks

The Right Kind
(1948) (uncredited)
Music by Lionel Newman
Lyrics by Don George and Charles Henderson

User Reviews

Monroe At Her Best

Marilyn Monroe is so good here it's startling. Her Cherie (with the accent on the first syllable, remember) is one of the most lovable characters in the history of film. That the rest of the movie is rocky-going and her co-star is no match for her is unfortunate, but not fatal.

Apparently the director, Joshua Logan, was able to create a relatively peaceful environment where Monroe could completely "let go" and allow her natural fragility and sex appeal to take over. When she's on screen it's impossible to take your eyes off her, not just because she's beautiful (what starlet from the 1950's WASN'T beautiful?) but because she's laying bare her character's soul for the camera (and in the process much of her own soul as well). She isn't just reading lines with various inflections or doing bits of business like so many actors do, she's bringing the character to life.

Unforgettable is the moment where she finds herself perched on the shoulder of the crazy, lovestruck cowboy watching a parade and she's trying to pantomime to a friend in the crowd how she wound up up there. Or the way she keeps "shushing" the loud-talking bus driver so that he won't wake up the sleeping cowboy as she's planning her escape. Or the way she can't make eye contact or get her lazy backwoods accent (that is incredibly charming) to sound firm enough when she keeps trying to tell the cowboy to get lost. Her comic timing is just sublime and unteachable.

Don Murray's performance as the cowboy, criminally and inexplicably Oscar-nominated, is cloying, two-dimensional and geared for the stage, not the intimacy of film. He needs to provide some hint of vulnerabilty before he's humbled in the fist fight with the bus driver, but he is tragically not up to the task. His Beauregard is the kind of loud-mouthed, uncouth buffoon that only a greatly skilled comic actor can make sympathetic, and Murray simply doesn't know how to finesse the comic moments and make them work.

Monroe receives fine support from Arthur O'Connell as Beau's older, wiser friend Virgil Blessing, but this is her show all the way. She makes it a good movie, but one can't help imagining how much better it could have been had it been directed by someone like Kazan and co-starred possibly Rock Hudson.