The Seven-Year Itch (1955)

  I don't know what people are talking about when they call this a classic.  I thought it was awful.

Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) is an average businessman with an average life that he spices up with an overactive imagination.  Every summer, he sends his wife (Evelyn Keyes) and son up to the country on vacation, like every other Manhattan husband.  Most men view this as an opportunity to indulge in affairs but Sherman is above such petty nonsense.  At least, he thought he was until he met his upstairs neighbor (Marilyn Monroe).  Sherman is filled with grand ideas of seduction but is mostly inept while The Girl --she doesn't even get a name, for Christ's sake-- is really only interested in Sherman's air conditioning.

Let's be clear, here.  This movie's comedy comes from watching a sad sack with delusions of grandeur fail at having an extramarital affair with a woman so far out of his league she's not even in the same sport.  What the fuck, 1955?  Monroe is totally wasted here.  She might as well have been a cardboard cut-out, as flat as this character was written.  It exists purely as a fantasy tempered by schadenfreude.  That has never been funny to me.