Some Like It Hot (1959)

Jane Russell was one of the biggest sex symbols of the 40s and 50s. She was at the center of a several-year spanning controversy concerning her first movie, Howard Hughes' The Outlaw (1943), in which Hughes, at the height of the Production Code era, exploited her voluptuous figure on his film as much as he could. Appearing in some of the biggest box office hits of her time, she also worked with screen legends such as Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx. Then, in 1953, she starred in Howard Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, having as co-star a then relatively unknown newcomer called Marilyn Monroe. The film went on to become a box office success, with both Russell and Monroe being praised for their performances, as well as immortalizing their handprints in front of the prestigious Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. As years went by, however, both the movie's notoriety and its top billed star's fame waned away, crushed under the weight of Monroe's posthumous existence: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is now hold dear mainly because of Monroe's Lorelei Lee, while poor Russell has long become best remembered for having co-starred in it with the Blonde Bombshell -- the Monroe Curse had struck again.

There are many many many many MANY anecdotes about the hurdles of working with Marilyn Monroe: she was never on time, she used to forget her lines, she would often hide in her dressing room and refuse to work. The Monroe Curse, however, has proven to be the de facto worst reason for having been associated with the star, since nearly every actor she has ever shared the screen with is now remembered precisely for that fact, and the renown of virtually every movie she has ever appeared in has come to become proportional to her time onscreen. Ever heard of Tom Ewell, an actor whose career spans nearly six decades? How about, 'remember that guy that starred in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn Monroe'? And that lady who was billed above Monroe in the screen credits of Jean Negulesco's How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)? As for movies, how about that one in which a wind gust coming from the subway lifts Monroe's skirt? And that one in which she sang Diamonds are a girl's best friend? The list of victims goes on and on...

Joe/Josephine (Tony Curtis), sax, and
Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon), bass

In order to get away from the Monroe Curse unscathed, a film would need to be the near-perfect amalgamation of its parts, and an actor would need to not only have an impeccable résumé, but also give a career-best performance while in a movie with the actress. A handful of big-name actors like Laurence Olivier, Clark Gable and Lauren Bacall managed to work with Monroe and still be remembered today as more than her sidekicks. As far as movies are concerned, nevertheless, only two were proven immune to the Curse: one is Joseph L. Mankiewicz's masterfully executed All About Eve (1950); the other, Billy Wilder's wickedly funny Some Like it Hot.

Chicago, 1929. Womanizer sax player Joe (Tony Curtis) and his best friend and roommate, bass player Jerry (Jack Lemmon), are witness to a massacre by notorious mobster Spats Colombo (George Raft). Finding no other way to quickly flee the state, they decide to disguise themselves as women and join a touring all-girl band on their way to the other side of the country. Joe, now Josephine, is instantly attracted by the band singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), who confides to Josephine that she hopes to catch herself a millionaire at the fancy hotel they will be playing. Armed with that information, Joe then decides to pose as Shell Oil Junior to woo her, being successful in his deceit. In the meantime, Jerry, as Daphne, catches the eye of wealthy Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), whose pastime seems to be marrying show girls, an information Joe also uses to his advantage.

In order to take Sugar to bed, Joe convinces Jerry to, as Daphne, distract Osgood at the shore while he shows off Osgood's yacht as Shell Oil Junior's to her. His plans proves successful, but, despite of selfishly wanting to use each other for sex and money, they end up falling in love. Joe, guilt-stricken for deceiving her, decides to abandon the band alongside Jerry, only to discover that a Mafia gathering is taking place at the very same hotel they are at, attended by none other than Spats Colombo himself! They try to flee the hotel, but end up at the center of the gathering, right on time to watch Spats and his men being executed by Little Bonaparte (Nehemiah Persoff), the mafia boss (it so happens that one of the men Spats had executed back in Chicago was a very dear friend of Bonaparte's). Having now witnessed two Mafia killings, they become the mobster's top priority. "We got our guys watching the railroad station, the roads, the airport -- they can't get away", they overhear. Yachts, Joe remarks, fortunately were not mentioned. He then persuades Jerry to, as Daphne, convince Osgood that Daphne wants to elope with him, with bridesmaid-to-be Josephine tagging along. On their way to the pier, Joe, dressed as Josephine, passes by Sugar singing sadly. He kisses her goodbye, and runs away. Sugar recognizes him by his kiss, connects all the dots and decides to go away with him. Later on, in Osgood's boat, as Sugar kisses Joe passionately, Jerry discovers, to his surprise, that, for Osgood, "nobody is perfect".

The 1950s presented a sharp tonal shift in the way women had been depicted in US cinema during the previous decade. Gone were the strong, independent female characters played by great actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, targeted at the women who had taken over the industrial work force while most able-bodied men were busy fighting in WWII. In their place, the 50s welcomed stars like Doris Day and Sandra Dee, whose on- and off-screen personas were meticulously crafted to reinforce traditional gender roles, deemed more palatable to the men who had came back from the war and had resumed their roles as breadwinners.

Sugar Kane, one of the many dumb blond
roles Marilyn Monroe played in her career

Stars like Day and Dee were instrumental in the cultural idealization of the patriarchal nuclear family that was taking place in the fifties, both as a reaction to the Cold War paranoia and as a means to encourage the then employed women to return to their roles of homemakers. Instead of wanting a career, female characters in fifties movies yearned to be married; as for independent women, they then either possessed a subconscious need to be tamed and subdued (as in John Ford's Mogambo - 1953), were threats to be dealt with (see Henry Hathaway's Niagara - 1953), or were personified as tomboys needing a man to discover their femininity (as in David Butler's Calamity Jane - 1953). "Femininity" is a keyword here. From a 1950s male perspective, together with "frailty", "virginity" and "submissiveness", they embodied the ideal woman to an almost fetishist extent.

In comes waltzing Marilyn Monroe, an actress whose immense talent was only matched by her dexterity in manipulating her own image. She was smart enough to take advantage of the social context in which she was living to devise a way to exploit her biggest asset, her voluptuous sexuality, to set herself apart from her peers: to make sex seem less menacing. She figured that, as long as she were constantly projecting an aura of childlike innocence and feminine vulnerability, so venerated by society in the fifties, she was allowed to flaunt her voluptuousness in the most deliberate and self-conscious way possible. Thus, the Monroe "child-woman" was born; it was then just a matter of setting up the stage so that she could be unleashed into the world.

In a decidedly cunning business move, Fox released, in January of 1953, a movie in which Monroe's sensuality was portrayed in its rawest form, Henry Hathaway's Niagara, with the explicit intent of putting her in the media spotlight. Later that year, after having reaped enough publicity for her, Howard Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (July) and Jean Negulesco's How to Marry a Millionaire (November) cemented Monroe's image as the not-so-bright, helplessly sexy blonde who wants nothing but to get married -- a role she would play variations of throughout the entire decade, including in Some Like It Hot. 

Jack Lemmon as Daphne, justifying
 her disdain for men

Monroe was a very talented comedienne, and it is no different here. Yet, even though there were many other great comediennes in the fifties, precisely because of her perfect blend of sensuality and vulnerability that no actress other than her would have been up to the task of playing Sugar. That is because, in order to hold the movie together, Sugar would have to be sexy enough so that both Joe and Jerry would feel drawn to her even when surrounded by the other gorgeous members of the band. On the other hand, she would also have to be sweet and vulnerable enough so that we could believe only she would have been able to make Joe feel bad for treating her the same way he had treated every women in his life up to that point, and then to realize he had fallen in love with her.

Director Billy Wilder knew that very well, reason why he ditched his first choice for the part, the "leading lady of light musicals" Mitzi Gaynor, as soon as he heard Monroe had become available. He might have regretted that decision while shooting the movie due to Monroe's well-known psychological instability. Nearly half a century later, however, with Some Like It Hot having been recognized as the comic masterpiece that it is, in great part because of Monroe's Sugar, he is openly glad that he did.

Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) on
the dance floor with Daphne 

If Monroe is the reason why the movie stands above its farcical premise, Jack Lemmon is why it works so well as a comedy. No matter how many times I watch it, he always manages to make me laugh -- particularly in the scene in which he announces Daphne's engagement with Joe E. Brown's equally hilarious Osgood. That specific scene packs in so many gags that director Billy Wilder had Lemmon shake a pair of maracas after every line he uttered, so the audience would have time to laugh and not lose the next joke -- well, thank you, sir! I dare say Lemmon, with his impeccable comic timing, is the only actor who managed to upstage Monroe in her entire career.

Tony Curtis, though, is relegated for most of the movie to play the straight man acting as a counterpart to Lemmon so Lemmon can look funnier by juxtaposition. He stands out, though, whenever he embodies Shell Oil Junior, with his Cary Grant-esque accent and his affected mannerisms. His scene with Monroe in Osgood's yacht, in which he makes up a ludicrous story about his one and only love's demise to extract pity out of her, is his best in the movie. Sadly, not good enough for the Monroe Curse to pass him by. 

Still, if those wonderful actors have plenty of chances to shine it is all thanks to the witty screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. They are to be commended first and foremost for the ingenious motivation they devised for blurring the lines between gender roles in a time when both men and women rigorously observed those roles: to kickstart their the story with the very real 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, one of the bloodiest and most publicized of its time. By making Joe and Jerry witness that gruesome event, they surely intended to draw empathy from their strict 1950s audiences to justify the drastic, not-Hays-code abiding measures their protagonists see themselves forced to take in order to stay alive. Seeing how the movie was a critical and commercial success upon its release despite not having been approved by the MPAA, one can say their venture was a resounding success.

Joe, as Josephine, right before kissing Sugar good-bye

Their script is also surprisingly progressive in the way they denounce misogyny through the evolution of the relationship between Sugar and the two male protagonists. When they first meet her, neither Jerry nor Joe can bring himself to see her as anything but an object of desire, just some "goodie in a pastry shop" enticing you to eat it. It is only by living as women themselves that Jerry, going though the same kind of harassment that Sugar does, and Joe, becoming her confidante and witnessing first hand the suffering he was causing her as Shell Oil Junior, that both protagonists gain greater sensitivity toward women, and become, in the process, better men. I strongly believe that it is precisely because of this strong and very relevant message that Some Like It Hot has aged much better than most blockbusters made in the fifties (*specially* those starring Monroe).

With endearing characters, a timeless message, sharp-witted and self-referential one-liners and probably the best closing line in any comedy, Wilder and Diamond's Oscar nominated script was, alas, not the recipient of that year's award. The reason most certainly is their handling of their villains, as they have written into existence some of the most appallingly stupid mobsters in the history of cinema -- stupid even for a screwball comedy. Why the hell would Toothpick Charlie (George E. Stone) accompany the police as far as the speakeasy he was ratting on, where he could be promptly recognized by the gang managing the place? And how come Spats Colombo (George Raft) did not find suspicious Little Bonaparte (Nehemiah Persoff)'s birthday surprise for him months away from his actual birth date, soon after having killed Bonaparte's best friend? And would any Mafia boss in his right mind commit mass murder in a room he himself had booked, located in a hotel all Mafia leaders were staying at, while that hotel is under police surveillance??? If I may paraphrase Jack Lemmon's Jerry, "fat chance"!

Summarizing it:

Liked	Didn't like
Jack Lemmon has never been funnier	Plagued by the dumbest mobsters that have ever appeared on film
Marilyn Monroe is enthralling as usual
Its many witty one-liners give Casablanca a run for its money Gorgeous costume design by Orry-Kelly

The setup for probably the best punchline in any comedy:

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Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.

If you liked this movie, then maybe try watching Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982).

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