Released no doubt to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Monroe's death, this new Netflix documentary film relied largely on audio tapes made back in 1982 by British journalist Anthony Summers with several people who either were friends, associates or colleagues of the ill-fated actress. These tapes were made by him as the background to a high-profile L A. Court case of the time which sought, no doubt under public interest if not pressure, to ascertain once and for all, the reason or reasons for her death. That verdict was the same then as that reached twenty years previously, i.e. That Monroe had died of an accidental overdose, but just like the JFK assassination or even the death of Princess Diana, speculation and conjecture still surround her death today.

Naturally however, to pad out its running-time I suspect, we get a potted history of Marilyn's life and career up to the point of her passing. Although mostly known to me anyway, it was still interesting to see contemporary news footage of her and if you think that today's paparazzi are uncaring and invasive, just get a load of the press mobbing her and inconsiderately pressing her for a comment even as she's leaving an asylum where she'd just been treated for something of a breakdown.

We get the familiar story of her abandoned childhood and Hollywood breakthrough in John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" feature from 1950, the short-lived marriages to baseball star Joe De Maggio and playwright Arthur Miller, her aspirations to be a serious actress in attending the Strasberg method-acting school and finally her fateful, at least so it's argued here, entanglement with the Kennedy brothers, one the President and the other the Attorney General of America.

The film at least draws a very clear conclusion but of course it's both controversial and speculative. The director's technique of having the verite audio-tapes with long-dead interviewees like Huston and Billy Wilder amongst many others, lip-synced by actors in reenactments, I must admit I found strange and off-putting, especially when used with fuzzy out-of-focus shots of the actors themselves reciting their lines, There are surely more than enough images of Monroe to act as a backdrop to just playing the audio on its own.

Also interspersed throughout the movie were carefully selected tapes of the actress herself speaking in her own voice, some from the private collection of her last psychiatrist, but these are too often taken out of context just for effect. At one point we hear her talking about the pursuit of truth almost as if she's foreseen her own death which struck me as bizarre and certainly contrived. Strange and inconsistent too not to follow-through by having an actress lip-synch Monroe's own words as every other interviewee in the film was, even if I disagreed with this particular device. In the end, it was difficult not to come to the conclusion that the film merely served to feed the Marilyn-obsession of Summers himself and that the director should have exercised a lot more objectivity.

Me, I'm not convinced this film served its subject well. Yes, it put a different spin on her death of which I hadn't been aware and gave me some pause for thought, but overall I found this production to be rather slipshod, sensationalist and almost trashy at times in its execution.

Goodbye Norma Jean, but after this, I still don't think I knew you at all.

I enjoyed the whole documentary, until the very end. The journalist didn't complete his research by neglecting the autopsy. Autopsies tell the story that no one else will. He didn't interview the morgue staff, nor the hospital staff. That alone is a red flag for someone who researched for so long.

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."