Well, nobody’s perfect ✵ Some Like It Hot - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Comedy

DIRECTOR

Billy Wilder

WRITERS

I. A. L. Diamond, Billy Wilder

STARS

Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis

BEFORE

1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’s musical comedy, is an early hit for Marilyn Monroe.

1955 In Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy, The Seven Year Itch, Monroe poses on a subway grate, an updraft lifts her dress.

AFTER

1960 The Apartment reunites Jack Lemmon with Billy Wilder for a darker, more cynical take on romantic comedy.

1961 John Huston’s The Misfits is Monroe’s last movie.

The final words of Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect,” could have been writer/director Billy Wilder’s motto. His movies are case studies of the fatally flawed and the cheerfully cynical, the suckers, hustlers, and fraudsters who are motivated by money and sex and not much else.

Set at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, Some Like It Hot is no exception. Its main characters are as selfish, deceitful, and grasping as they come—they’ll do anything to get what they want. But Wilder’s movie is also a breezy feel-good comedy that sparkles with charm, pathos, and the spirit of romance.

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This poster flaunts the glamour of its starry cast, but other versions of this group shot show the two leading men dressed in drag.

"Hilariously innocent, though always on the brink of really disastrous double-entendre."

Pauline Kael
5001 Nights at the Movies, 1982

Money and lust

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two Chicago jazz musicians who disguise themselves as women to flee the mob after they witness a gangster shootout during the famous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. They join an all-girl orchestra en route to Florida and meet vocalist Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), who dreams of bagging a millionaire husband. Joe falls head over heels in lust and disguises himself again, this time as a playboy, in a bid to bed the singer. He’s after sex, she’s after money, but they also fall in love.

While Joe cavorts with Sugar on a yacht—in Curtis’s memorable spoof of Cary Grant—the dress-wearing, tango-dancing, but decidedly heterosexual Jerry gets engaged to an aging but genuine millionaire, Osgood (Joe E. Brown). “You’re a guy! Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” asks Joe when he finds out. “Security!” replies Jerry, without missing a beat, his eyes moony at the thought of all that cash.

In the end, Jerry drops the act and tells Osgood the truth. “I’m a man!” he admits with a growl. But Osgood isn’t bothered. “Nobody’s perfect!” he beams, and Jerry shoots the camera a “Well, whaddyaknow?” look as the movie fades out.

In Some Like It Hot, everybody is desperate to get their hands on something, and in Marilyn Monroe the movie has the most lusted-after star in Hollywood history—“Like Jell-O on springs!” is how Jerry describes her body. Yet Monroe’s performance delivers something truly magical. In one scene, during a lull in the action, Monroe sings I Wanna Be Loved By You straight into the camera: she’s seductive, sweet, and wistful all at once, and she succeeds in transforming Sugar’s cynicism into a childlike vulnerability. When she kisses Joe on the yacht, he is transformed, too—from seducer to seduced.

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As “Josephine” and “Daphne”, Joe and Jerry hope to blend in with Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators on a night train to Florida, but there’s no mistaking who plays the ukulele.

Flaws and frailty

Some Like It Hot reputedly suffered from behind-the-scenes tensions. Monroe was initially unhappy with being filmed in period-style black and white, and Curtis famously said that kissing Monroe was “like kissing Hitler.” Whether the actor meant it or not, this illusion-shattering jibe echoes Wilder’s great preoccupation with human flaws and frailties. Nobody’s perfect, it seems—not even the legendary Marilyn Monroe.

JACK LEMMON Actor

“Magic time” was how Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) described acting. He would mutter this phrase to himself before stepping onto a stage or in front of a camera. Lemmon worked in television and light entertainment before finding his feet in movies, where his everyman qualities made him a star. He was often one half of a double act; key collaborators included zany comedian Ernie Kovacs, actor Walter Matthau, and filmmaker Billy Wilder.

Key movies

1959 Some Like It Hot

1960 The Apartment

1968 The Odd Couple

1992 Glengarry Glen Ross

What else to watch: Ninotchka (1939) ✵ How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) ✵ Sabrina (1954) ✵ The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) ✵ The Apartment (1960) ✵ Irma la Duce (1963) ✵ The Fortune Cookie (1966) ✵ Tootsie (1982)