favorite movie #53: bell, book, and candle

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #53 - Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) - A middle-aged Jimmy Stewart may seem a strange choice for a romantic lead, but he was, like Cary Grant, still the go-to star for such films in the 1950s. For his two most romantic roles of this era his co-star and object of his affections was the lovely Kim Novak — in Vertigo and Bell, Book, and Candle, both released in 1958 — in May and November, respectively. While Vertigo is a mystery about obsessive, voyeuristic love told only the way Alfred Hitchcock could tell it,  Bell, Book, and Candle is a light-hearted comedic romance about a witch who falls for her upstairs neighbor — it was one of the inspirations for the long-running television show Bewitched. Stewart and Novak have great chemistry here, as they did in their previous film. Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and Ernie Kovacs are all fun in supporting roles. One wonders if Jack Lemmon's trick with the street lamps of Greenwich Village might have inspired author J.K. Rowling almost forty years later ...

Novak poses with her familiar, Pyewacket

It's also an Xmas movie!

Kim Novak wears bewitching costumes by Jean Louis

favorite movie #1: some like it hot

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #1 Some Like It Hot (1959): This movie never fails to make me laugh. The snappy dialogue, the cross-dressing, MM’s radiance, all mixed together in a period gangster farce that just won’t quit. Maybe nobody’s perfect, but this movie sure is.

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unfinished - now available in paperback!

favorite song friday : i wanna be loved by you

tony curtis and some like it hot

film classic: the great race

I'm not sure how old I was when I first saw the classic 1965 Blake Edwards comedy The Great Race on television. But I do remember loving the silliness, the epic pie fight, and the amazing (19) costumes (designed by Edith Head) worn by Natalie Wood. One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons when I was little was The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, a sort of feminist spin-off to The Wacky Racers. Penelope, getting into one dangerous situation after another, was far from a helpless female (despite her silent-movie cries of "Help! Help!" and always managed to triumph over her arch-enemy, The Hooded Claw (voiced by Paul Lynde), and look great while doing it. I may not have consciously made the connection until much later, with repeated viewings, but The Great Race was clearly an inspiration for both cartoons.

Professor Fate, "What's next?"
Max, "Car number five, the engine falls out!"
Professor Fate, "Car number five! Ha ha ha ha! ... Max ... we're number five."

Penelope Pitstop (top) and Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood)

Director Edwards has acknowledged that The Great Race was also inspired by silent comedies, especially the slapstick featured in Laurel and Hardy (to whom Edwards dedicated the film). Edwards was riding high on the successes of The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark, and The Great Race had a huge budget — it cost $12 million to make, the most expensive comedy film for its day. Much of the budget went to securing its star cast — Jack Lemmon in a dual role, as the scheming Professor Fate and Prince Friedrich; Tony Curtis as the spotless, ever-clad-in-white hero The Great Leslie; and Natalie Wood as suffragette Maggie DuBois, as loose and funny as we would ever see her in movies.

The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) and Maggie DuBois sip champagne while stranded on an iceberg.

On a more recent viewing of The Great Race it also became abundantly clear that it was a comic source for many subsequent movies — especially for some of Mel Brooks's comedies, like Blazing Saddles and Space Balls. Edwards pulled out all the stops. Just about every film genre is showcased: a western segment, complete with saloon singer Dorothy Provine and a barroom brawl brings Blazing Saddles to mind. Other mini-parodies within the film include a romantic desert tent, a la The Sheik, as well as a climactic sword fight, that wouldn't be out of place in any Errol Flynn or 1940s swashbuckler, between Curtis and Ross Martin as Baron Rolfe von Stuppe. The amazing pie fight sequence has been replicated but never equaled, although Lemmon didn't count it as his favorite time on the set, "A pie hitting you in the face feels like a ton of cement."

Jack Lemmon as Prince Friedrich ("Haw haw haw!")

Cinema's greatest pie fight — watch for Max's (Peter Falk) entrance about halfway through.

An interesting behind-the-scenes tidbit — Tony Curtis was not the original choice for The Great Leslie. Edwards wanted Robert Wagner, but he and Wood had recently divorced, and she was still reeling from the impact. Wood was distraught throughout the shoot, and reportedly took too many sleeping pills after filming wrapped (she was fortunately awake enough to call a friend for help, who got her to a hospital), but her personal distress never shows for an instant on film. Charlton Heston (!) is also rumored to have been offered the part.

The Great Leslie, Maggie DuBois, and Professor Fate with The Leslie Special in Paris.

Max, "Red sky. Gonna be a storm."
Professor Fate, "What are you babbling about?"
Max, "Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning."
Professor Fate, "Why, you simple-headed gherkin, do you know the chances of a storm in this part of the world at this time of the year?"
Max, "No, what?"
Professor Fate, "Hundred to one." 

[Thunderclap — it begins to pour rain]

Curtis and Wood are winning romantic leads, but as usual, Jack Lemmon walks away with the film. He is brilliant, whether he is scolding his sidekick Max (Peter Falk) on another evil plan gone awry, or as the foppish, perpetually drunk Prince Friedrich — no one in the film is having as good a time as he is, except possibly the audience. Let Lemmon, Curtis and Wood take you on a wacky, laugh-filled journey — The Great Race is still as funny today as when it first premiered in 1965.


Notes:

Zeitlin, David. "Greatest pie fight ever creates a horrendous SPLAAT!" LIFE Jul 9, 1965. pp. 84–88.

tony curtis and some like it hot

"Some people say that Some Like it Hot is the funniest movie ever made. I don't know. All I know is that it gave me a chance to work with four comic geniuses: I.A.L. Diamond, Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder, and Marilyn Monroe."

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon

In Tony Curtis's memoir, The Making of Some Like It Hot: My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie the well-known Hollywood actor tells his version of what went on behind-the-scenes of one of the funniest movies ever made. Written with the assistance of film historian Mark Vieira, the book is packed full of great color and black and white photos from the set.

Curtis, who died in 2010, had already written two memoirs, Tony Curtis: The Autobiography (1994) and American Prince: A Memoir (2008). So why write a third? Two reasons. Some Like it Hot's recent heralding as the #1 American comedy of all time by The American Film Institute (AFI).  And cashing in on the enduring popularity of Marilyn Monroe, which would certainly guarantee book sales.

While Curtis is always an entertaining read, his never-ending ego does grow tiresome after a while. He tries to sound humble, but can't help pondering that he was possibly "the handsomest" actor in Hollywood: "Some Like it Hot did a lot for my development as an actor. It was enough for me to be a handsome actor, maybe the handsomest in town. It wasn't enough to learn the lines and show up. Being around artists like Jack and Billy and Marilyn affected me. I wanted to know more. I wanted to get closer to the source of the art. I wanted to know how to create that magic, like stars did in the pictures I'd seen when I was a kid."

Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, and director Billy Wilder

He complains endlessly about the "special treatment" that Marilyn received. "I looked at the film and I thought that in the beginning of it I was weaker than I really was. Everything was done to keep Marilyn happy. She was chosen, favored over Jack and me. That's what colored my perception of the film for a long time. Too long. But I finally got past that." He may have gotten past those feelings, but that didn't stop him from writing about them, repeatedly. He clearly felt that Lemmon was director Billy Wilder's favorite and that Marilyn's difficult behavior earned her special privileges. But for all of the stories about Marilyn's reputation for keeping people waiting or blowing lines, Curtis has just as many instances where she was letter-perfect or got a scene in one take. The scene where Sugar meets Shell Oil, Jr. on the beach had to be filmed quickly, as noisy jets from a nearby naval base were taking off every ten minutes. Marilyn got everything right on the first take.

Marilyn seemed to flub her lines more often when the camera shot was a close-up, when the pressure was on her and her alone. There are numerous accounts of how well she did in group scenes, getting everything right, and right away. As Curtis recounts, "I had seen her last picture, The Prince and the Showgirl. She did long scenes where the camera kept moving and there were no cuts. She was excellent, holding her own against the great Laurence Olivier. We saw the same thing in our film. She did well in uninterrupted scenes, yet when it came to two-shots or close-ups, she suddenly lost confidence." Billy Wilder observed, "I've noticed that if she gets past the first two or three lines she sometimes can go on and on, even if it's a long speech. She doesn't seem to get tired. She'll do take after take. She poops out the other actors, but she blooms as the day goes on. She's at her best in the late afternoon, when the other actors are dropping like flies."

Jack Lemmon had a different perspective on why Marilyn needed multiple takes to get a scene right: "Marilyn had a kind of built-in alarm system. It would go off in the middle of a scene if it wasn't right for her, and she would stop. It would look like she was doing exactly what she'd done in the previous take. But for her, something wasn't clicking. She knew she was limited. She knew what was right for Marilyn. She wasn't about to do anything else. So would stand there with her eyes closed, biting her lip, and wringing her hands until she had worked it out."

Joe E. Brown and Lemmon

Curtis repeats the now-infamous anecdotes of the "Where's the bourbon?" scene which took 59 takes; and how the studio wanted a "big name" like Frank Sinatra to star (who didn't seem at all interested). What I hadn't heard before was that Danny Kaye wanted to be in the film, but that Wilder turned him down and requested Jack Lemmon. Curtis comes up with an elaborate explanation for his "like kissing Hitler" quote; and is still smarting from jokes about his line reading, "Yondah lies da castle of my faddah," from an early film, Son of Ali Baba.

Even with all of his grand-standing, Curtis can't help but be interesting on how Hollywood shaped his life. He describes how intense ambition for Hollywood success was the cornerstone of his marriage to Janet Leigh, "Our marriage changed that [feeling like he was a long way from stardom]. The explosion of publicity pushed both of us much farther than we would have gone in the same amount of time if we hadn't gotten married." He is unapologetic about his countless affairs — he had a reputation for having affairs with his leading ladies, and wife Leigh was used to it — it was part of the territory.

But he always comes back to Marilyn, which does make for the most interesting stories in the book. He claims to have had an affair with her, when they were both just starting out in Hollywood. That seems possible, but all such claims are suspect when they appear so long after the other party has died. What doesn't ring true at all are his claims that later he had a one-night stand with her on the set of Some Like it Hot, which resulted in her becoming pregnant, complete with a show-down scene with her husband Arthur Miller.

Curtis signing autographs

Curtis clearly had no love lost with the famous playwright. He repeats a wicked quote from Wilder about Miller, "In meeting him, I had at last met someone who resented Marilyn more than I did." Ouch, but observant. Curtis can't wait to share another story which shines an unflattering light on Miller. At at a pre-movie Hollywood party he witnessed Miller being pretentious to Billy Wilder and co-writer I. A. L. "Izzy" Diamond, pontificating on comedy and tragedy. "Billy and Izzy just stood there, with faces down, listening to this bullshit. Finally Billy rolled his eyes and shifted his weight. Arthur backed off. I could see Marilyn. She was standing off to the side, watching. She looked uneasy. She knew that her husband had made a fool of himself and had insulted Billy's intelligence. It was not a happy scene. It was not a happy way to start a picture."

He's alternately full of praise for Marilyn and knocking her down, saying she had hips "like a Polish washerwoman" and "an incredible, unique body." Like so many, he couldn't understand why she found some things so difficult. "She was the most important star in movies, she didn't really understand that. She had so much power. She could have used it in so many ways, become so great. … So much of Some Like it Hot rested on her. If only she used her power to bolster her self-confidence. But she didn't. Even if she was turning in this miraculous performance, she was losing her sense of self."

Fun facts he includes about Marilyn:

Marilyn "stole" one of Jack Lemmon's black dresses from wardrobe for herself to wear in the film. 

She recorded her songs for the picture and then, unsatisfied, re-recorded them, "A picture has to be great to be good." 

She posed for countless publicity stills but only approved a few, as she was self-conscious about her weight gain — of which the press was unremittingly unkind. Marilyn had to put up with a lot of crap during filming about her weight. Wilder asked if she would consider losing a few pounds. She used humor to deflect the insult. "You want your audience to be able to distinguish me from Tony and Jack, don't you? And besides, my husband likes me plump." She was pregnant at the time. 

She traveled with an entourage — secretary May Reis, acting coach Paula Strasberg, dance director Jack Cole, and hair designer Sidney Guilaroff. 

Marilyn was unsatisfied with her first scene in the film, which consisted of just walking past the train, and complained to Wilder. He and Diamond then came up with the burst of steam that gooses her — and makes a much funnier, more memorable entrance. 

Everyone came to see Marilyn on set, from extras to Montgomery Clift and Maureen Stapleton — they all were enthralled with her.

Curtis, Lemmon, and Montgomery Clift

Possibly the most important thing that Curtis reminds us of is that the two guys being in drag for most of the picture was quite daring and unusual for its time. That edge is exactly what makes Some Like it Hot still so brilliant, so entertaining, so funny today. But Curtis can't just end his story there. His ego demands additional soothing. He quotes a review of the film by Philip Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times: "'Curtis is good enough … But his Cary Grant accent (not his doing) annoyed the hell out of me.' Some actors never read reviews. I do. Mr. Scheuer's review annoyed the hell out of me. To make myself feel better, I bought the rights to the autobiography of the Italian poet Gabriel d'Annunzio, a wild, sexy artist not unlike myself."


Photos from Some Like it Hot

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• what happened behind the scenes on some like it hot

what happened behind the scenes on some like it hot

Here's another essay from the longer-format piece I'm working on about Marilyn Monroe.

Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot has always been a favorite film of mine. I love the combination of crime, comedy, and musical. Marilyn Monroe is breathtaking and fresh and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, by donning women's clothes not only make the audience laugh, but are given a bird's-eye view of how the other half lives. I have reviewed the film before, but only alluded to its behind-the-scenes drama:

There are plenty of stories surrounding the making of Some Like it Hot. Marilyn's notorious difficulties in nailing a simple line. The possible casting of Frank Sinatra instead of Lemmon. But no matter how difficult filming conditions may have been, it is undeniably a classic, and Wilder had good things to say about his lovely star, "She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line."

Wilder, Monroe, and Lemmon

Although it was one of her greatest films, Marilyn never seemed to have much fondness for Some Like It Hot. She wanted Frank Sinatra for one of the male leads (who thankfully blew off a meeting with Wilder, so they went with Curtis and Lemmon). Wilder’s collaborator, screenwriter I. A. L Diamond tells of a different sequence of events regarding the casting. “The first person we wanted was Jack Lemmon, but he was then under contract to Columbia, and the first actor we actually signed was Tony Curtis because we felt he could play both parts in an emergency. United Artists felt that we needed a big box-office name and that Lemmon wasn't big enough. They suggested that Mr. Wilder see Frank Sinatra. He made a lunch date with him and Sinatra never showed up, which may be one of the luckiest things that could have happened to us. At this point we got Marilyn Monroe, and the studio no longer felt the need for another big name. Then we signed Jack." Wilder apparently intended to cast Mitzi Gaynor to play Sugar, but after he heard from Marilyn Monroe, the part was hers.

Marilyn married Arthur Miller in 1956 and had only made one movie since they became husband and wife, The Prince and the Showgirl, which had been fraught with its own set of problems. She had been out of Hollywood, concentrating on her marriage, but she was still the clear breadwinner in the family. With Miller's continuing troubles with the government and costly legal fees, she jumped at the chance to work on another film with Wilder (they had made The Seven Year Itch together). She signed on, even though she wasn't too excited to be playing a character so dumb that she wouldn't be able to tell that her two new best girlfriends were actually guys.

The habitually late to the set Marilyn drove Curtis and Lemmon crazy, who had to wait around in their high heels, thick make-up, and wigs for Marilyn to arrive — and then to get a scene right. The most infamous story from the production involves a brief scene near the end of the film, where a bereft Sugar, dumped by Shell Oil Junior (Curtis's other disguise), bursts into the girls' room for some alcoholic comfort. Her one line was, "Where's the bourbon?" But she reportedly kept getting the line wrong, saying "Where's the whiskey?" or "Where's the bottle?" Wilder came up with a brilliant idea — to have the line written on a piece of paper and put in the drawer that contained the bottle, but Marilyn kept forgetting which drawer it was in. The total number of takes were 59. She drove Wilder crazy, but he was always glad that he cast her, and both complained about her and praised her "She has her own natural instinct for reading a line, and an uncanny ability to bring something to it. ... To tell the truth, she was impossible – not just difficult. Yes, the final product was worth it – but at the time we were never convinced there would be a final product."

Filming the Pullman scene

The story may be gospel or apocryphal, but it is true that Marilyn always suffered a sort of stage fright on set, and would delay and delay before she would come out to perform. Once she became involved in The Method, the number of her takes increased, as she would frequently ask a director if she could try a line another way, and then another. Adding to the mayhem was her omnipresent acting coach, Paula Strasberg, wife of The Actors Studio's Lee, who she was constantly consulting with, much to the chagrin of Wilder.

There were many other factors going on in Marilyn's life that made her work on Some Like It Hot difficult. She was caught in a cycle of drug-taking that had become commonplace in Hollywood, using downers and uppers to keep her going. The sleeping pills and painkillers that her doctors supplied in abundance to help curb her insomnia and extreme menstrual pain made her groggy, and it would take several hours in the morning to get her up and running and ready to go. She was trying to make her marriage to Miller work, but there had been problems between the couple from the beginning. Miller spent a lot of time hanging around the set and running interference for Marilyn, but he didn't seem to be able to curtail her pill dependencies or get her to the set on time. She was still reeling from an earlier ectopic pregnancy when she discovered she was pregnant during the making of Some Like It Hot — that brought its own cycle of joy and worry. She would ultimately miscarry the baby in December 1958, after the film had wrapped.

Some other little-known factoids: 

Tony Curtis had some trouble maintaining a higher-pitched voice for his characterization of Josephine, so Wilder had actor Paul Frees dub his lines. 

Marilyn's vocal coach was Judy Garland. 

Marilyn's film contract stipulated that all her films were to be in color, but Wilder showed her the color costume tests with the two actors, and when she saw how the garish make-up photographed she agreed with the director that it would look better in black and white.

Some Like it Hot is as funny today as it was when it first came out. To paraphrase Sugar, it's a real diamond, worth its weight in gold.



Sources:

Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto

Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond, Go Into The Story, The Black List, by Scott Myers

Behind the scenes Some Like It Hot

imdb

Photos from Some Like It Hot

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• xoxoxoe's #CBR4 Review #29: Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, by Anthony Summers

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classic film favorite — it should happen to you

Long before Andy Warhol said his famous quote, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" in 1968, Judy Holliday tested out the concept in a little gem of a movie, It Should Happen to You.

The 1954 film, directed by George Cukor, stars Judy as Gladys Glover, a young woman who has been working as a model in New York City, but is pretty much fed up with her life there, which she feels is going nowhere. On a stroll through Central Park one afternoon she meets a cute filmmaker, Pete Sheppard, played by Jack Lemmon in his first film role. Holliday and Lemmon are dynamite together. Pete is immediately smitten with Gladys and manages to get her address by asking her if he can send her his documentary film when it is finished (he has shot some film of her feeding pigeons in the park).

Gladys, "Really? I'd give my right arm to see myself in the movies."
Pete, "You don't need to give me your right arm, just give me your right address."

How can she not fall immediately for this guy (or he for her)?

Gladys gets a look at her billboard in Columbus Circle while going for a ride in young Adams's convertible

They part, and Gladys, still dejected about losing her job as a girdle model (her hip size is 3/4" too big!), suddenly catches sight of a gigantic, blank billboard at Columbus Circle. She is suddenly overcome with a "great" idea — she pictures her name in lights and decides to contact the company that is advertising "this space for rent." She gets the brush-off at the advertising firm until she pulls out her nest egg of $1000 cash — and then she is able to rent the billboard for $210 per month, for a minimum of three months. She pays the fee, and we watch her directing painters to make her name as big as possible on the billboard.

Soon it seems the whole city and the Adams Soap Company, who usually rent the advertising space, are wondering who exactly is Gladys Glover? Peter Lawford, in hs usual second-banana role as the rich soap company scion Evan Adams III, adds some romantic complications when he becomes interested in finding out exactly who Gladys Glover is for himself. After wrangling with the soap company over her prime advertising space and location, Gladys manages to trade in her big sign for six small ones and her celebrity grows. Let's make a deal!

Meanwhile the adorable Pete has moved next door to Gladys, but she only seems to have eyes for her own fame. She gets a thrill when she is recognized at Macy's and is soon appearing on television shows —but she is just a familiar name, but without any discernible talent. Sound familiar? Instead of today's reality stars, however, Gladys becomes a figure of fun. Her quest for fame is shown to be shallow and ultimately unrewarding.

Gladys, "Listen, Peter, I'm over twenty-one."
Pete, "From the neck down, yeah."

Gladys could easily become an obnoxious, unlikable character, but played by Judy Holliday and loved by Jack Lemmon, it's impossible not to root for her and to like her. Pete finds possibly the cutest way ever to tell the obtuse Gladys that he loves her, by leaving his 16mm film called "Goodbye, Gladys" for her to watch on a projector in her apartment.

It Should Happen to You is a classic romantic comedy with some extremely appealing leads and some great footage of New York City in the 1950s — it was filmed on location. It is also impossible not to watch it without thinking how people like Gladys have shaped our current culture of celebrity. The last scene in the movie is not afraid to hint at how addictive fame can really be.

best movies ever — some like it hot

Some Like It Hot is one of the funniest movies ever made. It was voted the #1 comedy by the American Film Institute. It has probably the most famous closing line in movie history. Its plot is simple. In 1929 Chicago two down and out musicians, Joe and Jerry (played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) are witnesses to the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. The rest of the film has them hiding out and on the run from gangsters Spats Colombo (played by George Raft). Joe's brilliant idea is for them to hide in plain sight, in an all-girl musical band, which is on its way to a booking in Florida. For this to work, they will have to disguise themselves as women — hello Josephine and Geraldine (a name Jerry hates, so he  changes it to Daphne). They intend to ride to Florida and then run, but a curvaceous complication in the name of Sugar Kane (played by Marilyn Monroe) causes both of them to want to stick around with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators a little longer. It's probably the best gig they've ever had.

Jack Lemmon as Daphne and Tony Curtis as Josephine

Some Like It Hot is a sex comedy, with gags that are always teetering on the brink from being just full of innuendo to crossing the line. But Marilyn's breathy innocence and all of the actor's wonderful timing with Wilder's and I.A. L. Diamond's funny dialogue keeps everything rollicking along to its punchline finish. As Wilder has said, "If you hit on a thing, which works, there’s that snowball effect of laughter. You get the audience in that rare mood when everything is funny ... The audience doesn’t have a chance to sober up. The picture just keeps going and going."

What makes Some Like It Hot really work, is that for one reason or another, Curtis and Lemmon don't want to get out of drag, which Wilder and Diamond cannily built into the script, "We have to find the ironclad thing so that these guys trapped in women’s clothes cannot just take the wigs off and say, ‘Look, I’m a guy.’ It has to be a question of life and death.' And that’s where the idea for the St. Valentine’s Day murder came."

There are amazing comic bits throughout the film — Curtis and Lemmon's fabulous drag personas, millionaire Osgood Fielding III's (played by a brilliant Joe E. Brown) unexpected affection for Daphne, Curtis's alter alter-ego of "Shell Oil Jr.," done with a right-on Cary Grant impersonation. Also peppered throughout are some really great musical numbers, the highlight Marilyn singing "I Want to be Loved by You" in a gown that is for all intents and purposes see-through (as are many of her costumes in the film), a spotlight, forever threatening and promising, to reveal all.

The movie has fun with its drag elements, but it also plays on the behavior of men and women. Joe has always been a hound, loving and leaving countless women without even a glance back or a single regret. His putting on a dress doesn't affect him at all. His first instinct is to bed the beautiful Sugar. He actually uses the girl talk between Sugar, Daphne, and Josephine to help create the perfect guy to seduce her. He's still a jerk, doing anything he can to get a girl into bed. He's lucky that Daphne has attracted the attention of a bona fide millionaire, Osgood, so he can use his yacht to impress Sugar while Daphne and Osgood are out on the town.

Jerry, on the other hand, is changed by his putting on a wig and heels. He is also attracted to Sugar, "Look at that! Look how she moves. Like Jell-O on springs. She must have some sort of built-in motor. I tell you, it's a whole different sex." But Jerry also listens to her, and empathizes with her stories of always getting "the fuzzy end of the lollipop" in romance. He sees how his and especially Joe's behavior have affected the women in their lives. He's not happy when "Junior" starts to romance Sugar under false pretenses, "What do you think you are doing to that girl, putting on the millionaire act, and where did you get that phoney accent from? Nobody talks like that." Jerry enjoys his role-playing so much that at times he truly becomes Daphne at moments. He considers marrying Osgood, and becomes upset when Jerry takes his gifts from Osgood and passes them along to Sugar.

Joe, "You're not a girl! You're a guy! Why would a guy want to marry a guy?" 

Jerry, "Security!"

When Spats and his minions arrive at the hotel to attend the "Friends of Italian Opera" meeting, Joe and Jerry's deception is revealed. It looks like curtains for the pair, but for the first time, Joe is reluctant to just run out on a girl. Sugar has gotten to him. He wouldn't have seen the aftermath of his dumping her if he hadn't been Josephine. Her rendition of "I'm Through With Love" opens his eyes. As Josephine, he kisses her, "None of that, Sugar. No guy is worth it." Even with Spats hot on his heels, he's willing to risk his life for love.

With the help of Osgood, Joe, Jerry, and Sugar take off together. As they ride off into the sunset towards Osgood's yacht, there is still the matter of Daphne. Jerry can't seem to get through to Osgood that things would never work between them. Finally, in exasperation, he pulls off his wig, "I'm a man!" Osgood glances at him and smiles, unperturbed, "Well, nobody's perfect."

There are plenty of stories surrounding the making of Some Like it Hot. Marilyn's notorious difficulties in nailing a simple line. The possible casting of Frank Sinatra instead of Lemmon. But no matter how difficult filming conditions may have been, it is undeniably a classic, and Wilder had good things to say about his lovely star, "She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line." Some Like it Hot is as funny today as it was when it first came out. To paraphrase Sugar, it's a real diamond, worth its weight in gold.


Quotes:


Billy Wilder, Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond [Part 7]


Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder Trivia and Quotes

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have a bubbly new year's eve

Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart raise a glass

Jack Lemmon jams with his warlock friends at the Zodiac Club in Bell, Book, and Candle

Cary Grant watches Katherine Hepburn's back in Bringing Up Baby

Rita Hayworth with Glenn Ford in Gilda

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart out on the town in In A Lonely Place