Some Like It Hot (1959)

Official trailer

Some Like It Hot is the Billy Wilder-directed comedy that became the most influential American screwball film of its decade and a permanent reference point for cross-dressing comedy. Wilder directed and co-wrote with I.A.L. Diamond. The screenplay drew on the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love and the 1951 German remake Fanfaren der Liebe. Tony Curtis plays Joe, a Chicago jazz saxophonist who witnesses the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Jack Lemmon plays Jerry, his bassist partner.

Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, the singer in the all-female band the men join while disguised as women to escape mob retribution.

Joe E. Brown plays Osgood Fielding III, the eccentric millionaire who falls for Jerry’s female persona Daphne. George Raft plays Spats Colombo, the mob boss pursuing the witnesses. Pat O’Brien plays Federal Agent Mulligan. The plot follows the two musicians’ flight from Chicago to Miami in disguise and the complications that develop with both Sugar and Osgood.

Some Like It Hot makes me laugh harder than any comedy I know, and it hasn’t lost a step in more than sixty years. Wilder never lets a scene sit still, Lemmon is out of his mind in the best way, and Monroe gives the film a heart I don’t expect from a farce about two musicians in dresses running from the mob.

The film made approximately twenty-five million dollars in initial 1959 release on a two point nine million dollar budget. The commercial performance was exceptional. The film received six Academy Award nominations and won one (Best Costume Design). The American Film Institute named Some Like It Hot the greatest American comedy of all time in its 2000 poll. The film is consistently cited among Billy Wilder’s major works, Marilyn Monroe’s defining performances, and the major American comedies of the twentieth century. Joe E. Brown’s closing line “well, nobody’s perfect” is among the most-quoted final lines in American cinema.

The Disguise Premise

The film’s premise depends on the audience accepting Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as plausibly female-passing musicians. The premise is structurally fragile. If the audience can’t suspend disbelief about the disguises, the entire film fails. Wilder and Diamond manage the credibility problem through specific staging choices.

Wilder films the other musicians in the band at distances that obscure the disguise. He shows the two men working at the disguise (the makeup, the wigs, the voices, the postures) as ongoing labor instead of as accomplished fact.

The audience is shown the effort. That reads as the source of the comedy instead of as a flaw in the premise.

Jack Lemmon’s commitment to the Daphne character is the film’s central performance. Where Curtis plays Joe playing Josephine as continuous performance discomfort, Lemmon plays Jerry playing Daphne as gradual character displacement. Daphne develops her own personality. Jerry starts to enjoy being Daphne. The third-act sequence in which Jerry tells Joe he’s engaged to Osgood (“I’m going to be married”) is one of the great pieces of comedic acting in American cinema. Lemmon plays the moment with complete sincerity.

The audience reads the layers (Jerry as Jerry, Jerry as Daphne, Jerry as Daphne who has lost track of which one she is). The Oscar nomination was deserved. The engagement scene is the one I’d show anybody who doubts Lemmon was a great comic actor. He plays Jerry so happy and so sincere that I’m laughing and rooting for Daphne at the same time, and I can’t think of another actor who could have pulled that off.

The Monroe Performance

Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Kane in one of her most accomplished performances. The character is a band singer whose romantic biography is a chain of musicians who took advantage of her. Sugar drinks. Sugar plays the ukulele. Sugar wants to marry a rich man this time so she can stop being treated badly. The performance commits to Sugar’s specific brand of bruised optimism. Monroe plays the character as a person instead of as the era’s archetype the studio publicity was trying to make her into.

The production difficulties around Monroe’s work have been extensively documented. She arrived late or didn’t arrive at all on multiple days. Wilder’s recorded remarks about Monroe’s professionalism are well known. The performance that emerged from the difficult production was nonetheless her most consistently strong dramatic work. The “Running Wild” ukulele sequence on the train, the “I Wanna Be Loved By You” stage performance in Miami, and the closing reunion with Joe all hold the film’s emotional weight. Monroe trusted Wilder’s structure enough to commit to the role’s vulnerability.

The work outlasted the production tension that produced it.

Monroe is the part of this film I’d fight hardest for. Sugar is funny and sad in the same breath, and when she sings “I Wanna Be Loved By You” I believe she means every word. Whatever went wrong on set, none of it reached the screen.

The Closing Line

“Well, nobody’s perfect” ranks among the most-cited final lines in American cinema. Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III delivers the line to Jack Lemmon’s Jerry, who has just removed his wig to reveal that the woman Osgood has been planning to marry is a man. Osgood’s response refuses to be deterred. The line works because Brown delivers it with sustained commitment to Osgood’s romantic philosophy. The character isn’t surprised and has decided that the love is the love.

The line has been read multiple ways across six decades. Some readings emphasize the comedic absurdity of Osgood’s persistence. Other readings emphasize the line’s accidental progressivism (a 1959 film closing with a man choosing to marry the other man despite knowing). Wilder and Diamond have stated in interviews that the line was a placeholder added during script development. Neither writer expected the line to land as the film’s final word. The audience response in early screenings made clear that the line was the ending.

“Nobody’s perfect” is my favorite last line in any film. Brown delivers it like a man who’s already picked out the china pattern, and it tickles me that Wilder ends the picture right there without letting anybody explain it.

The lesson about endings is that sometimes the best closing line is the one that emerges from the writing process instead of the one that was planned.

Does Some Like It Hot still hold up?

10/10. This is the comedy I’d hand anybody who thinks old movies can’t be funny. Wilder is at peak craft, Lemmon gives a comic performance I’d put against anybody’s, Monroe finds real hurt under Sugar’s sparkle, and the train berth scene and that closing line belong to the permanent record. My one small gripe is that Curtis gets the thinner part, since Josephine never comes alive the way Daphne does. Watch it, then watch Tootsie (1982) for the most accomplished American successor to the same template.

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