It makes sense. Jerry's the practical one of the duo. When the movie opens, he's planning to use his paycheck to pay a little something to everyone he owes, to get to the dentist to get a bad tooth taken care of. But he lets Joe talk him into hocking their overcoats (in a Chicago February!) to put the money on a "sure thing" at the dog track. He's sick of not eating, of not knowing where the next job will come from, of running for his life. He looks at the way women are taken care of, protected, fawned over -- even the girls in the band, watched like hawks by Sweet Sue and her manager, Beinstock -- and feels envious.

At last! An end to all his troubles. Plenty of money, plenty of clothes, and three squares! And if all it takes is the occasional night of tangoing or a pinched ass in the elevator, well, he can live with that. To be a man in "Some Like It Hot" means to be either a killer or on the run from one. So a touch of cuckoo nirvana hovers around Lemmon's fantasies of married bliss. He's so far gone into his dream of fussed-over ease that all he can see in Joe's objections is his best friend ruining what may be his last chance to marry a millionaire.

Envisioning the honeymoon, he says, "He wants to go to the Riviera -- but I sort of lean toward Niagara Falls." And when Joe asks him if his engagement present, a diamond bracelet, is the real thing, he answers huffily, "Naturally. You think my fiancé is a bum?" Not that he expects it all to work out. "I'll tell him the truth when the time comes," Joe promises. "Then we'll get a quick annulment -- he'll make a nice settlement on me -- and I'll have those alimony checks coming in ehhvv-ery month!"

Not everyone in the movie is lucky enough to be so deluded. Neither Joe, who's after Sugar the first chance he gets, nor Sugar, who keeps falling for tenor sax players, the type who leave her with no more than "a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out," can be anything other than what they are. (In fact, Joe is the exact sort of heel Sugar is running away from. And the means he uses to get her -- fulfilling her fantasy of the sensitive, bespectacled millionaire -- are trickery.) Like romantic comedy, which it is not, "Some Like It Hot" envisions sexual attraction as chaos, an adventure, perhaps a compulsion, but not as a promise of happiness. Joe and Sugar, who each know which end of the lollipop they like, are stuck in their sexual roles, and ready to take their respective lumps all over again.

There's a shot that rather elegantly sums up the movie's sexual topsy-turviness. Sugar, on the bandstand, believing her millionaire has shipped out to South America to marry the daughter of a Venezuelan oil tycoon, is pouring her heart out in "I'm Through With Love." Joe, dressed up as Josephine and about to make his final getaway, watches from the sidelines. He walks on stage right up to her, brushes away her tears, and -- using his real voice, the first time she has heard it -- tells her, "None of that, Sugar. No guy is worth it." It's Joe's admission that he's been a heel, and his wish that he could do better. But the great moment follows, as he takes her in his arms and kisses her. Sugar responds not with her head but with her heart, melting into the kiss and then realizing who this man is that almost got away.

It's the vision of Monroe and Curtis in drag, locked in that kiss, maybe the only sexual exchange in the picture where both partners are being honest with each other, that stands for the movie's world of crazy possibility. "Some Like It Hot" does exactly what a farce is supposed to do -- it gives you the sense of the world careening pleasurably but unstoppably out of control. Neither Wilder nor Monroe nor Curtis nor Lemmon ever equaled the work they did here. But nobody's perfect.

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