Some Like it Hot
“Well, nobody’s perfect!” – Joe E. Brown as Osgood Fielding III
Some Like it Hot (1959) undoubtedly has one of the best punchlines in cinema history. Even with the lore that remains surrounding this film’s troubled production, and the onset clashes between director Billy Wilder and actress Marilyn Monroe, what shines through and remains timeless is the comedy of this film. To set the film in 1929, during prohibition, provides some great cinematic fodder and becomes an almost nostalgic look at the recent past through the lens of 1950s cinema. What stood out to me, and probably why I love this film so much, are all the intertextual references and homages to other moments in cinema history.
When Tony Curtis, as “Shell Oil Junior,” puts on his ‘Cary Grant’ accent, and mockingly jokes that no one talks like this, and attempts to seduce Sugar (Monroe), it absolutely leaves me in stitches. (It also reminds me of that moment when Grant, clad in a fuzzy bathrobe, shouts “I’ve gone gay all of a sudden” in the 1938 screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby...) The whole film comes off like an adoring homage to cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly screwball comedies and gangster films, with a little ‘Keystone Cops’ thrown into the opening for good measure. From the choice to film in back-and-white, to all the quick quips and rapid-fire dialogue, Some Like it Hot is full of contradictions and subverts the audience’s expectations of what is going to happen. The set up to the reveal of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s female personas, with the two riffing off their first names ‘Joe’ to “Josephine” and ‘Jerry/Gerald’ to “Geraldine,” and then Lemmon’s exuberant, “Hi, I’m Daphne!” is so perfectly timed, and all the funnier due to the length of time the characters debate their names and build up to the moment they join the all-female band.
For me the standout performances in this film are those of Curtis and Lemmon, even though Monroe had top billing. Sure, Curtis’ character is absolutely deplorable, he is a womanizer, gambler, and overall bad excuse for a friend, but Lemmon’s character is really no better, and that’s what makes the film so enjoyable. These characters are built up to be pretty unlikeable, and yet you end up rooting for them throughout the film. You want them to get away with their ruse of joining an all-female band, and you definitely don’t want them found and killed by the mob. Half of the fun with this film is seeing how everything they are trying to get away with unfolds. As for Monroe’s performance, I didn’t really care for her in this role as much as I used to. There were aspects of the film that felt exploitative, like the costuming, which really tried to play up the ‘sex symbol’ status the actress has acquired up to that point. Moreover, several of Monroe’s scenes felt forced, particularly between her and Curtis, and were not as believable upon re-watching the film. There was more on-screen chemistry between Monroe and Lemmon, in Daphne’s upper train bunk, than anything that transpired on Osgood’s boat…
Comically speaking, some of the greatest moments of the film are the aspects that play with conventions surrounding gangster films. For instance, ‘Spats’ (George Raft) and his crew are drinking buttermilk in the speakeasy, much to the consternation and frustration of the agent responsible for the raid on the joint. Much later, when Spats and his crew are gunned down at the banquet, the man who pops out of the cake with a machine gun is Edward G. Robinson Jr., son of Edward G. Robinson who is probably most well known for his role as ‘Rico’ in the pre-code gangster film, Little Caesar (1931). This nod is yet another example of how this film creates intriguing connections and allusions to earlier moments in cinema, which for me is what is so brilliant about this film. It creates layers of context and builds the comedy on common knowledge and draws upon the expectations that audiences might have based upon other films that they may have seen before.
But what was truly groundbreaking and revolutionary about this film, is the fact that it got released without the approval of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code. Between the ongoing innuendo within Wilder’s dialogue, emphasis on sex, cross-dressing, and implied homosexuality, topics generally considered taboo under the code, but increasing in frequency throughout cinema from the time the code was introduced to well into the 1950s, the film became a turning point that would ultimately signal the demise of the code. Some Like it Hot would go on to be nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Costume Design, and would even win three Golden Globe awards, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and Best Actor and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Lemmon and Monroe, respectively.
I don’t quite know how many times I have seen this film, but each time I watch it I walk away with a greater appreciation for the comedy and nuances of the actor’s performances. Without question, Some Like it Hot will remain a staple in my comedy collection, and is sure to delight audiences for years to come. – Sarah 🥂🌹💃
I went into my first viewing of Some Like It Hot with a wealth of trepidation. While I fully admit that Mrs. Doubtfire (1993, dir. Chris Columbus) is a lifelong beloved film of mine, the cross-dressing comedy becomes more and more of an outdated and questionable subgenre. While such plot mechanics allow characters of a certain gender to, as Joe puts it, learn “how the other half lives,” this form of comedy encourages exclusive and binary attitudes toward gender through the comedic center of the film being the fact that a character’s biological gender and socially gendered clothing are mismatched. I force myself to continuously wrestle with these considerations whenever watching films of this sort, and in the case of Some Like It Hot, I found myself surprised more than once at how transgressive and forward-thinking (well, for the 1950s, at least) the film is, though certainly not without its problems.
The plot of the film is simple enough: two jazz musicians must disguise themselves as women to evade a group of gangsters whose murderous acts they witness. While simple, the exposition leading to the pair’s transformation felt a bit too on-the-nose and clunky at times, but once the plot gets rolling, the comedy is the face-paced, sharp setup-punchline back-and-forths that you would expect from the best of Billy Wilder. There is so much hilarity to be enjoyed in the film, not only in the witty repartee of the dialogue but also in the innovative comedic situations that occur throughout the script. The clandestine train party, for example, was an amazingly hilarious moment that just kept topping itself as the scene progressed. There were also plenty of visual touches that were similarly stellar. Any time Jack Lemmon had to hurry around with that giant double bass was nothing short of a joy to behold.
I also enjoyed the resistance against overly caricaturing the two main leads. Throughout the film, both of the characters experience moments of carelessness, reluctance, honor, and selfishness. There is no heavy stick in the mud or his self-serving comic foil. The characters are equally matched, and yet unexpectedly sporadic in their actions and attitude. Their chemistry is undeniable, and in this screwball comedy, they are matching each other’s pace and wit as well as any male/female pairing in a similar film in the genre. When it comes to the transformation to their female aliases, they are just as magnetic toward each other, sometimes so in character that they don’t bother to drop their facades in private. I particularly love Joe’s decision to make his lips pucker as a woman. Curtis’ face almost completely transforms as Josephine and he commits to the character constantly. I also adore their understanding of women’s attitude to men, or, as Daphne refers to them, “rough, hairy beasts with eight hands,” as well as their ‘catfights,’ such as Gerald’s accusatory remark regarding Joe and Sugar sharing lipstick (“She’s like a sister to me!”). Tony Curtis has the additional task of impersonating a wealthy yachtsman, and while he’s quite funny in this role, I’m not sure if his hybrid English/Yogi Bear accent is supposed to be convincing or as terrible as it is. Regardless, I admire the way he naturally falls into each of his roles.
Turning to the performance of Marilyn Monroe as Sugar, I found myself quite surprised at her comedic sensibility. Though according to Wilder it was extremely difficult for Monroe to complete takes and remember lines, that fact is completely hidden from the final product. I love the way she delivers the punchlines to the men’s setups with such sincerity, adding a new level to the comedic tone of the film. What I love most about this performance is that all of her ‘Monroe-iness’, for lack of a better term, is all strictly performative, either on the stage as a singer, or as a front in an attempt to bag a wealthy man. In a film that centers itself on the performance of femininity, allowing a female character to similarly ‘perform’ said femininity added an unexpected level of complexity to the story. I also greatly appreciated Sugar’s introducing Gerald to the world of the Mean Girls-esque backhanded compliment as she ‘envies’ Gerald’s flat-chestedness. I loved how he had genuinely no idea how to respond to it, as if it was the most complicated interaction he has in the entire film. Beyond Monroe, I was also delighted by Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue, the ulcer-ridden, ill-humored band leader whose suspicion of everyone in the group leads to some amusing obstacles that the leads must overcome.
In terms of the transgressive elements of the film that I found most notable, they were not particularly centered on the cross-dressing aspect, but rather on hints of non-heteronormative sexuality. These moments mostly come toward the end of the film, particularly the kiss between ‘Josephine’ and Sugar, after which Sugar looks longingly toward Josephine, eventually pursuing her onto the yacht. The second is the famous “nobody’s perfect line” that closes the movie which, while a little unsettling that the sexuality of Osgood Fielding is the big punchline of the movie, is a pretty huge deal in a movie where just a handful of minutes earlier, anything outside of a male-female attraction seemed completely unacknowledged (Joe: “But you’re not a girl. You’re a guy! And why would a guy want to marry a guy?”). These may seem to be small and tame transgressions in Hollywood, but the film as a whole was deemed unsuitable by the Hays Code, and I have a feeling that had a lot less to do with the cross-dressing humor than these final moments.
While it was a bit of a complicated watch, I enjoyed Some Like It Hot. Its humor doesn’t solely rely on the fact that there are a couple of men dressed as women. A lot is going on at once, and the film’s explorations are a bit more nuanced than they might first appear on the surface. The success of this film was one of the final nails in the coffin for the restrictive and dictatorial Hays Code, so in a small way, the rest of film history owes itself to this film. I wholeheartedly recommend giving it a watch if you haven’t recently and reflect on its progress and its problems. And of course, have a few good laughs at the same time. – Bailey 🎷
What did you think of Some Like it Hot? What do you think about our reviews? Share your thoughts in the comments below and stay tuned for our March Film Club Pick!
Copyright © 2021 Sarah Crane & Bailey Lizotte
