America’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe is half a century old, for it was “The Seven Year Itch,” a 1955 comedy about a Big Apple summer full of heat and temptation, that made this insecure yet driven and dazzling model-actress a star – one that has still not been dimmed into obsolescence. For the next week, New Yorkers can escape summer doldrums by watching this comedy about the dangers that ensue when one New Yorker tries too hard to beat the heat – and pitches himself into a fantasy that combines his young, sexy neighbor, extramarital hanky-panky, and air-conditioning.

Many of us know the movie only from television or video viewings, but it simply must be seen in its lushly colored, CinemaScope glory. A new print makes this possible. Director Billy Wilder and cinematographer Milton R. Krasner photograph their mega-blond star in such saturated colors and angles you wonder if their images of Monroe inspired the term “eye candy.” This is not Wilder’s most distinguished-looking film (his was a black-and-white world, and color simply doesn’t allow him enough darkness), but it’s his best bat at Technicolor.

That the film was made at all was surprising. The play of the same title shocked and delighted Broadway when it opened in 1952. Here was a sexy comedy almost everyone could identify with (if not publicly): A nice guy (Tom Ewell, who created the role onstage) gets bored and lonely once his wife of seven years departs for a summer in Maine. His (unair-conditioned) office, in which he edits pulp paperbacks – some classics with lurid “improved” titles like “Secrets of a Girls’ Dormitory” for “Little Women” – has never seemed more arid.

Then a summer tenant arrives on the top floor of Ewell’s apartment building, a model and commercial actress too beautiful and friendly for our hero – or, at least, his imagination, to resist. “Seven Year Itch” is a sexed-up “Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” with fantasy and reality skirting and clashing. So cavalier an attitude toward extramarital sex was way beyond the prim parameters of Hollywood’s Production Code, and several studios’ attempts at adapting “The Seven Year Itch” wilted in the face of the Hayes Office’s insistence that such a movie would never be made in Hollywood.

Wilder and George Axelrod, who wrote the play, nonetheless set to work on a script. When they pointed out that adultery as such never actually happens in the movie, the censors’ approval was granted. Twentieth Century Fox took on the property, and added the key ingredient, a contract player they’d been perennially quarreling with: Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe had already made impressive appearances in earlier interesting-if-flawed works like “Niagara,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and “How To Marry a Millionaire” (all 1953, suggesting that one of Fox’s problems was that they simply kept her too busy). When principal photography began in New York in the summer of 1954, Marilyn’s presence got as much play as a papal visit. Shooting became a trial in the increasingly circuslike atmosphere, especially on the hot August night they filmed Monroe and her co-star Tom Ewell exiting an air-conditioned movie house.

When the actress stood wide-legged over a subway grating, and breezes from passing trains wafted her white silk dress well above her thighs, Lexington Avenue exploded. Hoots, whistles, and squeals forced the film crew to give up on recording the dialogue, shutterbugs flashing so many exposures the street was littered with burnt-out bulbs, and Monroe’s husband, Joe DiMaggio, stormed off in a fury. (He moved out the next day.) Thus was created the most iconic image of this star, perhaps of any star.

Monroe’s performance in the movie answers the question that has pestered her legacy since – well, since before she even had one: Could she act? Meaning, perhaps, “Can someone so beautiful have brains, talent, a soul?” She sure has them all in “The Seven Year Itch.” Monroe was aware of the public’s assumption that she iconicized the dumb blonde because she was one, and she (often fruitlessly) searched for parts that would show what she could do.

Although in “The Seven Year Itch” she plays a character so totally rooted in male fantasies that Axelrod and Wilder never even named her – “The Girl” appears in the closing credits beside “Marilyn Monroe” – the actress, in a gentle, witty, but completely determined fashion, turns the film’s blinkered vision of women to her advantage: Her improbable character is more solid and convincing than any other in the picture. This is not Monroe’s most captivating work – that’s in her second Wilder film, “Some Like It Hot” (1959), as well as “Bus Stop”(1956) and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”(1953) – but in “The Seven Year Itch,” the elements of the Monroe style click completely into place.

First, there are the guileless eyes and voice, which on second thought seem less than unclouded. She responds to Ewell’s admission of frustration and loneliness with sweet yet not stupid innocence. (“Gee. That never happens to me.”) Then there’s the crass costuming undone by her actress’s awareness of what her body could convey. The Girl’s clothes set off her assets with appropriate stridency – but notice how clumsily she enters the apartment building’s small vestibule and climbs the stairs, or how, when whispering a fantasy of her own, every step and gesture makes her float.

Monroe’s timing at times can seem daffily spaced-out (as it did in life, apparently – “You stick a pin in her,” a colleague complained, “and a minute later she says ‘Ouch'”) but can shift to laser-like swiftness a moment later. There’s the poignant sense, even in her funniest moments, of a person at home in herself and her body but confused by how the rest of the world wants only one part of her, with no regard for the rest. Monroe’s comedy always exists within a context of alienation – sometimes wistful, sometimes exasperated (“Hey, wait a minute!” she shouts when Ewell’s attempt to make beautiful music sends them both off the piano bench).

No other female star to emerge in the 1950s – or since then, for that matter – offers so complete and touching a combination of giddiness, sexiness, and somberness. No other star acts the truth of a woman’s life in so beautiful yet exasperating tandem with the unreality of the life women in a world they don’t control have to play along with. It is only the passing of so much time since the star’s death in 1962 that is beginning to make a distanced, truer view of the artist possible. That view is increasingly coming to be one of a surprisingly gifted if untutored woman who struggled in a tough profession (at the height of Hollywood sexism) and managed some lasting wins despite poor material, indifferent colleagues, and dubious choices in men. Looking at her now, you feel how strong a will to live and create must have existed in someone so beset by troubles.

That Girl at the end of “The Seven Year Itch,” waving ruefully from the apartment window of a man she could have had but was too good to take, was an artist first, and a victim last. Fifty years on, it’s possible to settle in and happily watch the actress Marilyn Monroe, setting aside, as she amuses and moves us, the backstory which too frequently overwhelms her artistry.