Insignificance (1985), directed by Nicolas Roeg.
Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joe McCarthy check into a hotel...
That's the irresistible setup, although we call these characters the Professor, the Actress, the Ballplayer, and the Senator. What to do with them? That's a different problem. Roeg doesn't determine meanings for his audience, that's our job. So the film itself may seem erratic and diffuse in message. Often funny, sometimes not.
I suspect most viewers will ponder the meaning of celebrity: all of these people are famous and significant in certain ways, but insignificant in others.
Our cast:
Lovely Theresa Russell is the Actress, fed up after hours of having her skirt blown up while making a famous scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955). At first she stays in character from that film, with her breathy, dreamy delivery, but it fades out over the course of a long night. She shows up at Einstein's hotel room to demonstrate to him -- using toy trains, flashlights and balloons -- that she understands his Special Theory of Relativity. Which, to his delight, she does! Her flashbacks: torment by the other girls at the orphanage, getting into modeling more or less by sex work, and an acting career not far removed from sex work.
Michael Emil -- who I don't remember seeing before -- is the Professor, harassed by the Senator and haunted by Hiroshima and his part in creating the atomic bomb (which, historically, was only a small part, but one he regretted). He is so eccentric that he is hard to muscle politically. His flashbacks: thinking about watches and "time" as a child, fishing from his boat, later destroyed by nazis, and the horrible aftermath of the Bomb in Japan.
Gary Busey is the Ballplayer, jealous and hunting for his wife; they won't be married much longer. Of the four, these are the only two who actually met in history: they really were married. His flashback: his demanding father.
Tony Curtis is the sweaty, vulgar Senator, an unsympathetic role. A different sort of connection: Curtis worked with the real Marilyn Monroe, starring with her in Some Like It Hot (1959). His one brief flashback: something to do with a priest when he was a boy.
It ends with NYC blown up by the Bomb, and the Actress burning for what seems like an excessively long time. Then it is undone and all is well. Moral: don't start a nuclear war because that would mean killing Marilyn Monroe.
She reassures the Professor that the war won't happen because: "The guys with their finger on the button also own everything. Why would they blow it up? Unless someone invents a bomb that kills people without wrecking the stuff". This last is a glancing reference to the Neutron Bomb, a big deal at the time.
Theresa Russell gets the most screen time, which is fine. She and the director were married and he obviously likes photographing her.
Finally, we have Will Sampson -- last seen in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) -- as the mysterious Elevator Attendant, a uniformed Cherokee in the city. The Professor: "I heard that a Cherokee believe that wherever he is, that's the center of the universe." Elevator Attendant: "You're the Cherokee". Then up to the roof to greet the new day.
Criterion Blu-ray.