In Focus... Some Like It Hot
In Focus is a new collection of articles focussing on an important film appearing on Sky Movies Classics that month. In-depth, analytical and revealing, In Focus aims to shed new light on old films. To get a seat at the table, all we ask is the film be one of the finest examples of its genre.Focus No.3 pulls its stockings up for Billy Wilder's legendary, hilarious cross-dressing, gangster fleeing gag-o-rama Some Like It Hot (1959).
Some Like It Hot is funny. An obvious thing to say, but many a classic comedy has aged badly, its funnies losing the punchline down the years.
But, not every comedy was directed by Billy Wilder, and his amazing twenty year run of out-of the-park movies from 1944 to 1964 saw some of the best screen comedies.
What makes these mirth fests click is Wilder's knack for blending different genres in one movie. Some Like It Hot is a comedy, but it's a screwball comedy, a romantic comedy, a Hollywood spoof and a gangster film with a shocking hit sequence.
Some Like It Hot is also a showcase for Marilyn Monroe's luminescent screen presence, not that Wilder would have wanted it that way. For an expertly constructed comedy will a rat-a-tat gag rate, the film had a tense shoot.
The premise though is golden. Chicago, 1929 and two musicians, Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon), eking out a living playing sax and double bass in speakeasies, stumble into the middle of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and are marked by merciless crimelord Spats (Raft) for the big sleep.
Disguising themselves as women, Josephine and Daphne ("Well, I never did like the name Geraldine"), they gatecrash a girls-only band and night train it to Florida. Both fall head over heels over head again for "Sugar" Cane (Monroe), the band's singer, unlucky in love and looking for a millionaire knight in shining armour.
Joe disguises himself as her millionaire and sets about getting himself some Sugar, while Jerry must fend off the advances of retired moneybags Osgood Fielding III.
All this love has to take a backseat when Spats and crew turn up for a mob meeting, and recognize the two dames.
In 2007, the American Film Institute placed in 22nd in their Greatest Movies of All Time list, and in 2000 had named it the No.1 funniest movie ever.
The best comedy ever might be overstating its brilliance (Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Ace in the Hole (1961), though not as obviously comedic, pack more wit), but Some Like It Hot is the last great screwball comedy, made long after the subgenre's 30s and 40s heyday, but equal to It Happened One Night (1934), The Palm Beach Story (1942) and Bringing Up Baby (1938).
Screwball comedies were "sex comedies without the sex", and while Some Like It Hot is frequently coitus interruptus, it remains one sexy flick due to Marilyn's appeal burning off the screen.
The film packs in all screwball conventions: mistaken identities, secret information, slapstick chases and cross-dressing... lots of cross-dressing.
Curtis and Lemmon make passable drag artists, but the fun comes from these obvious men in women's clothes receiving amorous attention from a queue of wannabe suitors. The actors spent time with a coach who taught them how to walk like a lady, until Lemmon, the comic master, realized the gold came from them walking like men trying to walk like ladies. They did walk around the MGM lot though as women to see how they passed muster, powdering their noses in the ladies' loos. When no-one screamed, they knew they were onto something.
Originally designed to be a colour movie, Some Like It Hot had to be shot in black and white due to Curtis and Lemmon's make-up giving them a greenish tinge, and Some Like It Dead didn't have the same ring.
Although it is amazing murder wasn't committed on set. Marilyn Monroe rarely wore the hat marked helpful, and her tussles with director Wilder and star Curtis became legendary. She refused to leave her dressing for hours at a time, took a reported 47 takes to correctly deliver the line, "It's me, Sugar", and for the emotional climax, a telephone conversation when she bids farewell to Joe's "millionaire", her eyes are visibly reading the words on out-of-frame blackboards.
As Wilder put it, "We were in mid-flight, and there was a nut on the plane."
But, Some Like It Hot needs Marilyn Monroe because only an icon could match the killer pairing of smooth Curtis and Lemmon the clown. Her fragile performance is the film's heart and line reading or not, that phone conversation tugs the heartstrings.
Wilder and co-writer I.A.L Diamond mixed in the tears and the gangster excitement, but put the laughs up front. As well as some fine physical pratfalling and "Daphne's" tango with Osgood that is both hilarious and a hot example of dirty dancing before the term was coined, the film is in-joke heaven.
Curtis famously modelled his millionaire's voice on Cary Grant, to which Grant, after watching the film, said, "I don't talk like that" sounding exactly like what has just played onscreen.
George Raft's Spats riffs on his menacing hood from Scarface (1932), even asking a coin-flipping hood, "Where'd you learn that cheap trick", a trick he "coined" for the classic gangster movie.
Also, listen out for Joe's list of "imagine what could go wrongs" at the beginning of the movie - everyone was destined to come true after the film's 1929 time-setting.
The film was loosely derived from the 1951 German film Fanfaren der Liebe that had the same story minus the gangster drama. Some Like It Hot became so popular that a 1939 Bob Hope movie of the same name had to be retitled Rhythm Romance for TV screenings when audiences complained they weren't getting Curtis, Lemmon and Monroe.
Although upon initial release it was banned in Kansas, because cross-dressing was deemed too disturbing for Kansans. But, as Osgood says in the film's most famous line, "Nobody's perfect".
CLICK HERE FOR THE SOME LIKE IT HOT TRAILER
Rob Daniel
Some Like It Hot is playing on Sky Movies Drama as part of the Oscar Winners on the following dates:
Friday 1st February - 1.10pm & 8pm
Monday 11th February - 6am & 4.55am
Friday 22nd February - 8.55am & 9pm
