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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Billy Wilder's manic, magical 1959 farce is more than drag shtick and Marilyn in that amazing gown -- it's a topsy-turvy exploration of sexual desire and identity.
Feb 11, 2002 | If "Some Like It Hot" isn't the funniest movie ever made, you can't blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder's 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long. Where most comedies wear out their audience after an hour and a half, "Some Like It Hot" goes on for 122 minutes and leaves you ebullient.
Years later, the stray memory of a scene or a bit of dialogue can get you chuckling to yourself: Consider the wheezing, open-mouthed laugh of Joe E. Brown, or his delivery of the movie's capper, the most perfect last line in the history of movies. Or what about the party in the upper berth of that railroad car -- even more cramped than the stateroom sequence in "A Night at the Opera" -- where an in-drag Jack Lemmon gets happily soused with an all-girl jazz orchestra?
Then there's Tony Curtis' affectionate takeoff on Cary Grant; hulking movie heavy Mike Mazurki asking Curtis and Lemmon, "Ain't I had the pleasure of meeting you two broads before?"; Marilyn Monroe somehow staying in her diaphanous gown while she sings "I Wanna Be Loved By You"; and Curtis and Monroe's love scene, on a moonlit yacht in the middle of the night, which got the film banned in Kansas City. (One of my best friends has broken me up for years by, without warning, quoting Lemmon's line, "We wore grass skirts," and then breaking into Lemmon's impromptu hula.)
There's still an amazing appetite for "Some Like It Hot." It's been reissued on DVD, in a transfer that preserves Charles Lang's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, with a few extra documentaries: reminiscences from Tony Curtis and the actresses who were part of the girl band. And it's the subject of a lavish $150 coffee-table book from Taschen that includes the entire script (accompanied by numerous stills), interviews with Lemmon, Curtis and Wilder, reproductions of the original advertising art and reviews, and even a facsimile of Monroe's prompt book (with handwritten notes: "Acting -- being private in public to be Brave"). It's a big, lush treat of a book, and its existence says something about the affection people feel for this movie.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about "Some Like It Hot" is how easily it could have all gone wrong. Billy Wilder was never an especially subtle filmmaker. His comedies both before and after this one tended toward the heavy-handed, even the vulgar. "Some Like It Hot," from a script he wrote with his frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, is played in broad farce style. The jokes don't quite jab you in the ribs but neither are they witty little glissades. Pauline Kael, who loved it, wrote that the movie hovers "on the brink of really disastrous double-entendre." You hear what she means in the dialogue: the oral-sex jokes implicit in Monroe and Curtis' backchat about the sweet or the fuzzy end of the lollipop, or the mannish pair telling Sweet Sue the orchestra leader that she doesn't have to worry about them getting involved with men. ("Rough hairy beasts," an offended Lemmon chimes in, "and they all want just one thing from a girl.")
You see it in the movie's advertising slogan, which introduced the stars as "Marilyn Monroe -- and her bosom companions." There is also one visual double-entendre, a taunt to the censors that to this day I can't believe Wilder got away with. The gown Monroe wears to perform with the band is a barely-there number of sheer nylon netting that clearly shows her breasts, the nipples just covered by small cascades of sequins. As she boop-boop-be-doops her way through "I Wanna Be Loved By You," Wilder puts a tight spotlight on her face and shoulders. When she gets to the line "I couldn't aspire/To any-thing higher" she wiggles slowly up so that the tips of her breasts stay teasingly just below the spot.
And then there are the winks at the audience. Lemmon is telling Curtis, aping the latter's Cary Grant routine, "No-body talks like that!" when Pat O'Brien and George Raft turn up as, respectively, a Chicago cop and a bootlegger, parodying the roles they'd played in so many other movies. Observing a slick young mobster doing the coin-flipping routine Raft perfected, Raft asks, "Where'd you learn that cheap trick?"
