Some Like It Hot

Each season we aim to include one "classic" film that has a significant anniversary, and this year we selected Some Like It Hot: it was a unanimous decision.

I'd actually seen the film on a big screen once before where it reinforced my belief that you do not really appreciate a film until you see it on a big screen. It was good to have this opportunity to re-acquaint myself with this true classic.

Some Like It Hot

USA 1959        116 minutes

Director:          Billy Wilder

Starring:            Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon

Award and Nominations:

• Five Oscar nominations including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon) Best Director, Best Cinematography (Black and White) and one Oscar win (Best Costume Design, Black and White)
• BAFTA award for Best Foreign Actor (Jack Lemmon)
• A further eight wins and eight nominations

“Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. ‘Nobody’s perfect’ is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are musicians in Chicago, and when they accidentally witness a gangland killing they board a train bound for Florida disguised as Josephine and Daphne, the most recent recruits of an all-girl jazz band. Their cover is perfect until Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) falls for Josephine and an elderly playboy (Joe E Brown) takes a shine to Daphne.

The idea of two men disguising themselves as women to join an all-girl band was borrowed from a 1951 German film called Fanfares of Love (Fanfaren der Liebe) which itself was a remake of a 1935 French comedy called Fanfare of Love (Fanfare d’amour). However Billy Wilder and his co-screenplay writer I A L Diamond had the inspired idea to add a gangster subplot to the main story both as motivation to keep the musicians on the run as well as allowing themselves as filmmakers to make witty references back to Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s. On its re-release in 2014 Peter Bradshaw hailed the film as “the best remake in movie history” and the screenplay received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The casting of the main roles is superb and from the perspective of today it is difficult now to imagine other actors in the roles, but at one time Wilder had hoped to cast Frank Sinatra in the film and earlier on had even thought about a double act of Bob Hope and Danny Kay. Additionally with Marilyn Monroe in great personal distress during the making of the film Wilder had Mitzi Gaynor on standby to take over the role, but without Monroe the chemistry of the central roles would have worked nowhere near as well.

The film opened to positive reviews, with eminent critic Dilys Powell praising all the performances and also commenting on the transgressive subject matter, describing it as “a farce blacker than is common on the American screen [that] whistles along at a smart, murderous pace”. The film subsequently received six Oscar nominations (and won one) and since then has never fallen out of favour with either the public or critics. In 2000 the American Film Institute selected it as the top comedy in its 100 Years… 100 Laughs poll, a BBC poll of 253 films critics in 2017 chose it as the best comedy of all time and in 2005 the BFI included the film in its list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.

In recent times it has been possible to identify the transgressive nature of the story more clearly. In Have You Seen, his epic introduction to 1000 films, eminent film historian David Thomson highlights this new perspective:

“I suspect, literally, that no one knew that the film was a gay breakthrough. If they had guessed, they would have taken fright. But here is another film from the late fifties that blows up every convention it can see and discloses miracles in the explosion. Everybody’s perfect.”

The overwhelming and ongoing success of Some Like It Hot is considered to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the Hays Code which since 1930 had defined what was acceptable content for films produced in the USA, although the code itself was finally abandoned only in 1968, a year which saw the release of films as diverse as The Producers, Rosemary’s Baby and Barbarella.

Here is a link to the trailer: