Here’s a 1950 screen test of Marilyn for a movie that apparently was never made called ‘Cold Shoulder’. The actor she’s testing with appears to be Richard Conte which leads me to believe the film was a Fox production. When I hear ‘screen test’ I usually think of a one-take shot of the actor reading their side of the scene with offscreen delivery from either another actor or a script girl. This is a little more than that. The scene is well staged and accomplished in about four angles. The fact that they bothered pairing her with a contract star and go through the trouble of editing the footage suggests they were ambivalent about her–both serious enough to do a more elaborate test than usual and yet still oddly worried that she might not possibly be up to it. I think she’s terrific in the scene and that her early performances are unfairly thought less of than her later quasi-method performances. I’m sorry the film was never made. It looks like it had the makings of a good second-tier noir, one that would wind up on Eddie Mueller’s TCM program with modest fanfare but with a surprising punch.