by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’m diving back to the year 1959 to watch Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot. I’ve been on a bit of a Wilder kick lately, having only just started working through his filmography last year, and I’ve quickly become enamored by his unique filmmaking prowess. My favorite of his films so far (and one which quickly earned a spot on my top 20 movies of all time list) is The Apartment, so for the first column of 2025, a year which I want to spend looking back at the works of some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, I wanted to start with Wilder’s first collaboration with Jack Lemmon that had been released one year prior: Some Like it Hot.
A crime comedy starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Lemmon, Some Like it Hot tells the tale of Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon), two musicians from Prohibition-era Chicago on the run from the gangster “Spats” Colombo (George Raft) due to their witnessing of a massacre. Needing to flee the city, they disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band, which is traveling to play at a luxury hotel in Miami, Florida. On their way to Miami, they meet Sugar Kane (Monroe), the band’s vocalist and ukulele player, with whom they both immediately become smitten. Once in Miami, the duo continuously find themselves in prickly situations as they attempt to woo Sugar, maintain their disguises, handle handsy millionaires, and evade Spats and his goons.
Although I was familiar with Lemmon from his starring role in The Apartment (and in the much later film Grumpy Old Men), I don’t believe that I had ever seen Monroe or Curtis in a film before. Lemmon is the real standout and as great and endearing as always, but he definitely takes a back seat narratively to Curtis and Monroe, who I thought were both really solid in the film as well. Curtis is a lot of fun throughout the film, whether in drag as Josephine, or when masquerading as smooth-talking millionaire Shell Oil Jr. to try and win Sugar’s affections. Monroe, despite purportedly having been miserable to work with behind the scenes, also plays her part well, and I can clearly see how she was able to achieve the level of stardom that she had.
Really, though, it is not because of Lemmon, Curtis, or even Monroe that Some Like it Hot is still celebrated 66 years after its release. Rather, I feel like the bulk of the credit for that goes to Wilder’s writing and direction. Although his name may get lost in the shuffle of great filmmakers today, he absolutely deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best to ever do it. I am particularly obsessed with his ability to craft incredible characters through the dialogue he writes, and the performances he coaxes out of his actors, creating figures who feel a little too heightened for the mundane world that we live in, but perfect for the world that we aspire to have. Some Like it Hot is certainly chock-full of these incredible characters, from our main trio of Joe, Jerry, and Sugar, to the gangster Spats and the down-on-his-luck millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who’s willing to look past a lot for a woman who’s willing to love him.
Aside from his ability to write great characters, one of the things that I love most about Wilder is his sense of humor. He excels at writing zany situations, but having his actors play the scenes straight, earnestly diving headfirst into absurd scenarios. This great sense of humor is ever-present in Some Like it Hot,particularly as Joe and Jerry take on their disguises and try to con their way to love and safety. There’s also a brilliant subtlety to a lot of the jokes in Some Like it Hot, and despite the fact that the film is old enough to be Medicare-eligible, most of these jokes still hold up well today.
Lastly, I couldn’t possibly write about Some Like it Hot without commending it for pushing Hollywood’s boundaries. In fact, the film was released without the approval of the Production Code Authority, the governing body that oversaw the adherence of film’s to the Hays Code, a conservative set of self-censored guidelines that dominated Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1960s. To feature its leading stars in full drag for a large portion of the runtime ,and to make strong, if indirect, allusions to homosexuality, wasn’t just controversial for mainstream films at the time; as far as I can tell, it was unheard of. Wilder wasn’t afraid to rebel against the restrictive Hays code, and though he certainly can’t take all of the credit, the commercial success of Some Like it Hot likely plays a factor in the Code’s downfall in the ‘60s.
Some Like it Hot isn’t a perfect film, and despite its relatively progressive content, there are certainly some moments of misogyny and homophobia that haven’t aged well, even if viewed through the lens of satire. However, it’s still an excellent piece of filmmaking that deserves to be mentioned in conversations about the best films of Hollywood’s classics era. Lemmon has quickly become one of my favorite actors of all time, and while I don’t like him here quite as much as I do in some of his later collaborations with Wilder, he is still incredibly charming, and his charisma with Curtis cannot be denied. Wilder, likewise, has proven himself one of the most adept filmmakers of his era. Is Some Like it Hot his best work? No, but it’s still a joy to watch. And hey, nobody’s perfect.
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