From “Sunset Boulevard” to “Double Indemnity” to “Ace in the Hole,” every time I see something written and directed by Billy Wilder, I feel like I have to clear off the top of my lists of favorite films for his movies. I haven’t even seen “The Long Weekend” or “Sabrina” yet! *Escándalo. *Speaking of scandal, let’s go back almost 60 years, to Hollywood’s dark ages, when a bunch of religious tight-asses decided to take all things naughty out of movies — inter-racial relationships, references to abortion as well as childbirth, skin and successful gangsters alike. The Hays Code was a celluloid embodiment of the Robert Heinlein comparison of censorship to “demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”

Considering that here in 2012, late-night adult shows have non-sexual idiomatic expressions containing the words “bullshit” and “fuck” bleeped out, because that’s clearly more sensible than expecting parents to turn the TV off at 10 p.m., we’re still drinking a whole lot of skim milk. As is Richard (Tom Ewell) the leading man in “The Seven Year Itch,” a pitiful creature sending off his clucking, “aging” wife (she’s supposed to be 31) and rambunctious son to Maine so they can become irritating summer people stuffing their faces with soggy lobster roll in Adirondack chairs.

I would want to ditch this family for the summer too.

What they don’t know is that, unlike the families leaving eager, wolfish husbands looking forward to a 1955 version of MTV spring break, Helen and the boy are leaving behind a man driven mad by a combination of a fan-cooled New York summer, his doctor’s ban on alcohol and cigarettes, an imagination his wife describes as “Cinemascope, with stereophonic sound,” and a comfortable domesticity, a settled career in a still-thriving industry (publishing 25-cent sexed-up paperbacks) and advanced age (38, for heaven’s sake). Richard’s looking at a few dreadful months drenched in sweaty lust and twitching for a Lucky Strike and a martini before dropping dead on Labor Day of stress, his arteries and lower digestive system as clogged as a rush-hour express train.

“Can we give Jo a plunging neckline and send Amy to a sexy reformatory school?”

Oh, but he’s going to try to be so good! He’s going to start out the summer at a health cafe that could have come straight out of the hipster-skewering brilliance of “Portlandia,” with 260 calories of soy burger, soy fries, soy ice cream and sauerkraut juice and his waitress putting his tips toward the nudist fund (“Can you imagine two armies on the battlefield — no uniforms, completely nude?” she asks, in a scene that would be a great modern shock in the world of “Mad Men” 10 years later). At home, he’s getting ready to settle in with a book about “the repressed urge in the middle-aged male” — his publisher is going to turn it into another racy paperback — when trouble walks in the door. It’s Marilyn Monroe, “the girl,” all platinum curls and dainty gloves and summery swaths of skin, clutching a tiny desk fan and a paper bag of groceries in such a way that millions suddenly became seized with the urge to become potato chips and white bread. She’s renting the place upstairs.

Marilyn arrives “Jersey Shore” style, with chips, bread, a fan and a tight, revealing dress.

We can see Richard cracking like a DDT eggshell. He’s been so good over the years, turning down his sultry secretary, a naughty night nurse and even his wife’s best friend, who have all — at least according to his Homer Simpson-accurate memory — flung themselves at him like madwomen from Grecian myths, string sections soaring as he turned his granite jaw away from their frantic kisses.

Two years after it came out, and “From Here To Eternity” was already an icon/punchline.

But this girl (she never does get a name) is different. She loses no dignity in his fantasy — and this is an important point. He turns on Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto No. 2. She is steely and dignified. Effortlessly, too, like she could have just decided to take on the ice queen persona instead of the free-wheeling, tiny-waisted, smiling bubble of pheremones we all know.

Serious, sleek, icy, dream Marilyn is summoned by Rachmaninoff.

Very smart people can play flakey bimbos. (When she says that “back home, they put sugar in martinis,” she really does look like someone should just hand her a Tahitian Tee Hee with a condescending smile.) But I don’t think genuinely dim people can fake what she does in most of the movie — that flash in the eyes, that rhythm in banter, that knowing how to spar with a few words and motions which, done well, inspires decades of Bugs Bunny cartoons while still seeming as nimble and adult as a Rogers and Astaire routine. Monroe’s real-life marriage to Joe DiMaggio was falling apart while “The Seven Year Itch” was being filmed, and she was described as always late and frequently distracted and unable to remember her lines. But you’d never be able to tell because she could pull it together — thanks in no small part to the people around her.

Marilyn orders the Big Gulp-sized martini.

What’s amazing is that, even though much of the erotic zing of George Axelrod’s original stage play was stripped from it, this is still one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen — with some of the funniest parts sliding just past the fear and anger of the Hays Code. We can’t have a scene of Richard and the girl waking up in a bed together, but it’s OK if Richard tells a doctor he basically failed at raping her. Oh, and if she tells anyone about it, he’ll kill her. Then, the doctor tells Richard that if he can’t even handle a simple low-level rape, he certainly shouldn’t attempt something as complex as murder. There’ll be no shot of the girl’s hairpin on Richard’s pillow, no sir. But the scene that basically became this country’s epitome of sexiness on screen — Monroe standing over a subway grate, ineffectually pushing down on her white, diaphanous gown as a barreling train’s displaced air blasts her panties — came out of this film. The film’s themes may be just as relevant, its writing just as worthy of spittake, its treatment of a powerful, sexy woman still comparatively ahead of the times in 2012, but it’s the way Monroe escapes being that woman while being so dirty that really seems so deliciously devious. While Richard murmurs lame lines, she dips a potato chip in his glass. If he has no clue, she might as well have fun, no?

Warning: The Big Gulp-sized martini leads to dipping chips in champagne.

She’s not failing to respond to Richard because she’s dumb; she does it because she knows she’s fantastic enough that she doesn’t even have to acknowledge any man’s silliness to keep him, well, rapt for hours. With or without a hairpin in a bed. And if the people behind the Hays Code really thought they could defuse Monroe’s bombshell, they were as delusional as Richard himself.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.