If you call a movie “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes,” your job is to provide at least something worth listening to. This documentary, directed by Emma Cooper in the latest addition to Netflix’s catalog of true-crime (or crime-ish) stories, begins by teasing some sort of conspiracy surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 death from an overdose. But mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.
The tapes in question are the interviews that the Irish journalist Anthony Summers recorded while researching Monroe; he published his conclusions in the 1985 book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.” The movie version adds the ostensible perk of hearing the real voices of John Huston, Jane Russell and Billy Wilder, among others, as actors lip-sync to their remembrances — which, again, are mostly footnotes.
Summers apparently got more tantalizing intel from the family of Ralph Greenson, who was Monroe’s psychiatrist, and from Fred Otash, a private eye who in the tapes says that Jimmy Hoffa wanted him to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Throughout the film, Monroe is said to have been involved with both Kennedy brothers. Fears of Communism and loose talk of nuclear weapons may have had something to do with something. But the insinuations, a greatest-hits of Cold War paranoia, hardly amount to a dispositive case or even a coherent theory.
Finally, Summers, who appears continually, presents his ideas surrounding Monroe’s final hours and potential inconsistencies in the timeline. The claims are more of a “hmm” than a bombshell.
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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