Review of The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes

Irish author Tony Summers, having accumulated over 600 hours of taped telephone interviews with various associates, friends and witnesses of the the late Marilyn Monroe, has compiled the most vital bits of information into this documentary for Netflix. There's also bits and pieces of the actual Monroe talking, though we're not sure of the source for these conversations (she mostly sounds tired, fed up, and dryly pithy). Actors lip-synch to the tapes to give us a visual perspective, and there are many clips of Marilyn's movies and newsreel footage of her in and out of hospitals and courtrooms, but what do we learn about her demise? Not much. Marilyn was being bugged--as was friend Peter Lawford at his beach house in Malibu--by the FBI after Monroe had gotten herself involved with both President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Marilyn had extra-marital affairs with both--and was mostly smitten with Bobby--before realizing they were using her "like a piece of meat". When the police were called early in the am on August 5, 1962, Marilyn was found dead in her bedroom, the phone in her hand, surrounded by pill bottles. However, Summers shows that she was actually found "comatose" around 11pm the previous night, and that her psychiatrist had her transferred by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Unfortunately, Monroe didn't make it, dying in the ambulance of a drug overdose (either intentional or accidental). The decision was made to turn the ambulance around and return her to her bed. Meanwhile, "someone higher up than Hoover" demanded that her bedroom be searched and stripped of any evidence connecting Marilyn with the Kennedys (this is presumed to be Bobby's doing, as he was in Los Angeles at this time before quickly beating it out of town). I always felt sorry for Monroe's elderly housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who never seemed to get her story right (and for good reason!). Is this a great document of Monroe's life and final days? No, but it has been put together in a fairly concise manner so as to be easily understood by viewers who may not know much about the star. Director Emma Cooper gets a little arty with her fill-in footage of street scenes at night (taken mostly around 1985, when Monroe's death was reopened by the courts), including inscrutable black-and-white footage of train yards and old houses. Still, for those who are curious, this delivers a timeline of events told by voices on a cassette player that helps us to digest what happened that fateful night, concluding with a quote from Marilyn herself: "I just want to be a good actress."