In Prohibition-era Chicago two jazz musicians, saxophone player Joe and double bass player Jerry, accidentally witness a gangland massacre. Joe and Jerry know that they have been seen fleeing from the scene of the crime and that the gangsters will therefore be coming for them. They decide that they must get out of town, and learn that a jazz orchestra heading by train to Miami are in urgent need of a saxophonist and a bassist. This seems like the answer to their prayers, but there is one catch. The band in question is an all-female one. Undaunted, Joe and Jerry join the band disguised as women, calling themselves Josephine and Daphne.
In Miami things become more complicated. Both Joe and Jerry find themselves attracted to Sugar Kane, the band's beautiful young vocalist. In order to woo Sugar, Joe adopts a second disguise as a wealthy oil millionaire, while a real millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, falls for the supposed "Daphne" and will not take no for an answer. Things get more complicated still when the Chicago gangsters turn up in Miami for a meeting of the "Friends of Italian Opera", a code term for a mafia convention.
This film was made without the approval of the Hays Office; transvestism was not specifically listed in the Production Code's list of "thou shalt nots", but it could be caught under the ban on "any inference of sex perversion". This was especially so in a film like "Some Like It Hot" which contains slight overtones of lesbianism, and more-than-slight overtones of male homosexuality. The film's final line has passed into legend; when "Daphne" reveals the truth, that she is a man, Osgood famously replies "Well, nobody's perfect", implying that he is bisexual. Today an exchange like this would be mild stuff; in the moral climate of the America of the late fifties it would have been strong stuff indeed.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its controversial theme, the film was a big critical and commercial success in 1959, and received six Academy Award nominations. (It only won for "Best Costume Design"; other films did not get much of a look-in in the year of "Ben-Hur"). It has remained popular ever since, and is one of my favourites. When I watched it again recently I wondered if I would enjoy it as much as when I first saw it a number of years ago. I didn't. I enjoyed it even more.
Trying to analyse exactly why I love any film is a difficult task, particularly in the case of comedies, because comedy generally defies analysis. You either find something funny or you don't, and I find "Some Like it Hot" very funny, even though it was made more than sixty years ago and even though it no longer seems as daring and transgressive as it once must have done.
Part of the reason must be the acting, particularly from Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (who received a "Best Actor" Oscar nomination). Their characters are subtly differentiated, with Curtis's Joe being the more the easygoing and relaxed, and Lemmon's Jerry the more serious of the pair. These differences are carried over into their female personas; Curtis's "Josephine" is notably more feminine-seeming than Lemmon's "Daphne", which makes it all the funnier that it is "Daphne" with whom Osgood falls in love. I would rank this as the best of Curtis's films which I have seen (equal with "Spartacus" in which his was a supporting role) and the best of Lemmon's (equal with "Days of Wine and Roses", a serious drama about as different from this one as one could imagine).
And then there's Marilyn Monroe as Sugar. Billy Wilder had initially pencilled in Mitzi Gaynor for the role, not imagining that a star as big as Marilyn would be interested. But Marilyn wanted the role and made it her own; seldom, if ever, can she have as been as utterly adorable as she is here. Again, this is probably the best of her films I have seen- certainly the best in which she had a leading role. And then there are Wilder's direction and the very witty script which he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond. This is one of those films where all the elements seem to have come together to produce something of high quality. 9/10.
In Miami things become more complicated. Both Joe and Jerry find themselves attracted to Sugar Kane, the band's beautiful young vocalist. In order to woo Sugar, Joe adopts a second disguise as a wealthy oil millionaire, while a real millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, falls for the supposed "Daphne" and will not take no for an answer. Things get more complicated still when the Chicago gangsters turn up in Miami for a meeting of the "Friends of Italian Opera", a code term for a mafia convention.
This film was made without the approval of the Hays Office; transvestism was not specifically listed in the Production Code's list of "thou shalt nots", but it could be caught under the ban on "any inference of sex perversion". This was especially so in a film like "Some Like It Hot" which contains slight overtones of lesbianism, and more-than-slight overtones of male homosexuality. The film's final line has passed into legend; when "Daphne" reveals the truth, that she is a man, Osgood famously replies "Well, nobody's perfect", implying that he is bisexual. Today an exchange like this would be mild stuff; in the moral climate of the America of the late fifties it would have been strong stuff indeed.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its controversial theme, the film was a big critical and commercial success in 1959, and received six Academy Award nominations. (It only won for "Best Costume Design"; other films did not get much of a look-in in the year of "Ben-Hur"). It has remained popular ever since, and is one of my favourites. When I watched it again recently I wondered if I would enjoy it as much as when I first saw it a number of years ago. I didn't. I enjoyed it even more.
Trying to analyse exactly why I love any film is a difficult task, particularly in the case of comedies, because comedy generally defies analysis. You either find something funny or you don't, and I find "Some Like it Hot" very funny, even though it was made more than sixty years ago and even though it no longer seems as daring and transgressive as it once must have done.
Part of the reason must be the acting, particularly from Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (who received a "Best Actor" Oscar nomination). Their characters are subtly differentiated, with Curtis's Joe being the more the easygoing and relaxed, and Lemmon's Jerry the more serious of the pair. These differences are carried over into their female personas; Curtis's "Josephine" is notably more feminine-seeming than Lemmon's "Daphne", which makes it all the funnier that it is "Daphne" with whom Osgood falls in love. I would rank this as the best of Curtis's films which I have seen (equal with "Spartacus" in which his was a supporting role) and the best of Lemmon's (equal with "Days of Wine and Roses", a serious drama about as different from this one as one could imagine).
And then there's Marilyn Monroe as Sugar. Billy Wilder had initially pencilled in Mitzi Gaynor for the role, not imagining that a star as big as Marilyn would be interested. But Marilyn wanted the role and made it her own; seldom, if ever, can she have as been as utterly adorable as she is here. Again, this is probably the best of her films I have seen- certainly the best in which she had a leading role. And then there are Wilder's direction and the very witty script which he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond. This is one of those films where all the elements seem to have come together to produce something of high quality. 9/10.
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