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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
But somehow these bits tickle you instead of making you groan. "Some Like It Hot" is naughty, all right, but it's never coarse. Part of the fun is watching the movie parody a then not-so-distant past that had already become iconic lore. Set in Chicago and Florida during Prohibition, the movie is full of gun-toting bootleggers, cops giving chase in Black Marias that seem to turn corners on two wheels, girls in flapper get-ups, millionaires whose life is one extended toot. (Joe E. Brown's yacht is called the New Caledonia. "The Old Caledonia," he explains, "went down during a wild party off Cape Hatteras.")
Curtis and Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two perpetually down-on-their-luck musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the spectacular Chicago Mob hit of 1929. Fleeing for their lives, they don drag and get a job with Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, an all-girl jazz orchestra heading for two weeks in Miami. Lemmon's Jerry is pop-eyed at the "talent" that surrounds him. It all reminds him of a recurring childhood dream of being locked overnight in a pastry shop with "jelly rolls and mocha éclairs and sponge cake and Boston cream pie and cherry tarts" (another of those double-entendres). Curtis warns him, "We're on a diet!"
But when they get to Florida, the roles are reversed. It's Lemmon who blooms in his new identity and Joe who risks it all by impersonating an oil millionaire to woo Sugar Kane (Monroe), the band's singer. It's also not too long before the gangsters chasing them turn up at the hotel, attending a convention for -- you should pardon the expression -- "Friends of Italian Opera" (or, as the hoods themselves like to say, "Eye-talian Opera").
Years ago, I ran across a comment by a feminist film critic who said that "Some Like It Hot" depicted a male world so predatory that the heroes were literally forced to abandon their sexual identities in order to survive. There's something to it. This comedy of sexual role confusion is, deep down, a joke on the male desire for security, the fantasy of abandoning yourself to the protected and pampered place of women.
That's all visible in Jack Lemmon's performance, perhaps the finest work he ever did. Lemmon doesn't so much play the role as it plays him. He transcends the obvious joke (one that would have soon worn thin) of how ungainly he and Curtis look in drag and completely surrenders to the woman within. You see something of that in Dustin Hoffman's performance in "Tootsie" (the movie's most obvious offspring) and in Michel Serrault's performance in "La Cage aux Folles." But I think Lemmon goes even further. He enters that state of comic logic where madness and delusion seem like the most reasonable thing in the world. Wilder brought in a German drag artist to work with Curtis and Lemmon. The guy left after one day in disgust. Curtis was OK, he said, but Lemmon was hopeless. In an interview in the "Some Like It Hot" book, Lemmon says he didn't want to turn the role into gay shtick. And he doesn't. He goes for something much farther out and riskier -- utter immersion in the feminine.
When he first enters in drag, all he can do is complain about how drafty his dress is and how tough it is to walk in heels. By the end of the movie he's so comfortable in heels that he wears them without thinking, giving himself away. But his transition starts long before then. Jerry introduces himself as "Daphne," instead of the agreed-upon "Geraldine." And there's a crestfallen look on his face when Sugar tells him that she envies him being "so flat-chested."
But Jerry's transformation really comes out in his scenes with the incomparable Joe E. Brown (who, like Harpo Marx, can seem like one of God's crazed angels) as Osgood Fielding III. Osgood is a lecherous old millionaire who's been married to so many showgirls he can't keep track (luckily, his ma-maw does). To help Joe in his seduction of Sugar, Jerry agrees, under much protest, to a date with Osgood. The two of them tango till dawn and Jerry returns, still shaking his maracas, and announces without a trace of irony, "I'm engaged." When an incredulous Joe asks him, "Why would a guy want to marry a guy?" Jerry answers, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, "Security."
