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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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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shuffling through marilyn's receipts

I have been researching Marilyn Monroe for a project I am working on, so have been immersing myself in the iconic Hollywood star's life via a lot of different books. MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe presents the contents of two file cabinets that were left after Marilyn died in June 1962 as a peek into the star's private and professional life. Author Lois Banner and photographer Mark Anderson have reverently presented everything from letters, memos, and telegrams to jewelry that may have belonged to Marilyn, and even items of clothing. Some of the items are photographed placed on rose petals, which is admittedly kind of corny; but page after page of piles of saved receipts, although mundane items, still serve as a touching reminder of Marilyn's brief but compelling life.

There is a bit of a mystery behind how these files and the book came to be. When Marilyn was married to Joe DiMaggio he helped her find a new business manager, Inez Melson, to help take care of her mother, Gladys Baker Eley, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and was in and out of mental institutions most of her adult life. Inez not only managed Gladys but also Marilyn's burgeoning career, helping her with her financial affairs. When the marriage with DiMaggio went bust and Marilyn left California for New York, she soon also severed ties with Inez, apart from her continuing custodianship of Marilyn's mother. But Inez didn't want to lose Marilyn and managed to stay connected through the years.

When Marilyn died Inez was called, and there is some dispute over whether she may have tampered with evidence in the apartment, as far as removing prescription medicine bottles in an effort to protect Marilyn. She did help plan the funeral with Joe DiMaggio. She managed to immediately secure one of Marilyn's two file cabinets, and then bought the other at auction, using her nephew's name for the purchase, even though they both rightfully belonged to Lee Strasberg, the major beneficiary in Marilyn's will.

What Inez did was clearly fraud, but if she hadn't maneuvered getting hold of Marilyn's belongings the contents of the file cabinets would have certainly been tossed or scattered by now. Instead, readers get to flip through these intact, daily records of Marilyn's life. At times it's admittedly a little creepy, like going through her drawers, shuffling through her papers. Drugstore receipts for enemas and colonics tell the tale of quick weight loss methods, common to Hollywood actresses, but did we really need to know that? Marilyn surely wouldn't have wanted to tarnish any mystique she may have had with her public. Some of the items are frankly boring or indecipherable. But some, mostly letters, are interesting, and shed a light on Marilyn's personality, as well as her more familiar Hollywood persona.

- Marilyn wanted Frank Sinatra, not Tony Curtis as her co-star in Some Like it Hot (a terrible idea, as Sinatra just wouldn't have worked and we would have lost the Curtos/Lemmon dream team). She had an affair with Sinatra much later, shortly before her death, after she broke up with husband Arthur Miller.

- In a typewritten (probably by a secretary) note to magazine illustrator Jon Whitcomb, who did an illustration of the actress that appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan in March 1959, Marilyn's distinctive voice and humor comes through, as she apologizes for the hold-up in their getting together:

"Please forgive the long delay in answering, but I have been up to my derrière in preparation for two movies for the near future… I would love to have the picture from you and I repeat 'at last to be a Whitcomb girl!' .… I am looking forward to meeting with you and I want you to meet Arthur [husband Arthur Miller]."

Her sense of humor also shines through in letters to Miller's son and daughter, which she wrote as if from their dog or cat.

- In a telegram to director George Cukor after she was fired from Something's Got to Give, she blames herself and offers to make it up to him, by cleaning his house, "I can dust."

- The are some intriguing fan letters that she chose to keep, including the offering up of a newborn baby girl for adoption. It makes one wonder if she was seriously tempted to accept the baby.

- One of the more interesting letters is an apology from public relations man Joe Wolhandler in reaction to her anger at a magazine article quoting Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Billy Wilder about how difficult she was to work with during Some Like It Hot.

"As you know, TIME Magazine is, of all the ghoulish press, in a class by itself for unmitigated nastiness and inaccuracy. It has been a "middle-class confidential" for a long period. I don't believe they are quoting Wilder and Curtis accurately. We have asked for a retraction…"

- More poignant is a letter from April 1952 that she taped to her stomach before an appendectomy, begging, "Dear Doctor no ovaries removed - please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars. Thanking you with all my heart, Marilyn Monroe"

- Some of the receipts do tell heartbreaking stories — gifts of roses and a bed jacket from a maternity store from Arthur Miller, given right before two separate miscarriages.

So much has been written about how difficult Marilyn was to work with, with the focus in most biographies on her addictions, men in her life, and instability, but the more and more I learn and read about her this behavior seems to also speak of her quest for power. If she wasn't considered such a valuable commodity to the studio, she would have been fired and replaced, and that would have been that. She used her frequent illnesses and perpetual lateness to protest scripts she didn't like, or too-controlling studio executives. Marilyn used many different methods to have more control of her career and her life, not an easy thing for a woman of her time.

History professor Banner frames the bits and pieces of Marilyn's life in biographical sections. Her text jumps around chronologically and at times is a bit repetitive, as the reader is told in at least three separate sections about her infamous stroll from one end of the studio to the other in a see-through negligee. Apparently that exhibition of her sexual power made quite an impression on the author. She even repeats the anecdote in another book she wrote on the star, Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox. There are no major revelations here in the oft-told story of Marilyn's tragically short but eventful life, but some of the items photographed by Anderson and selected by Banner do help frame her life in a more easily relatable and approachable context.

MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe is by no means a definitive text on the star, but it is an interesting glimpse into the actress's life, and it makes one wonder how our own lives might be pieced together by the detritus of our daily lives.

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.


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


Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder Trivia and Quotes

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