"I Want to be A Bull Again"

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2006)

Billy Wilder being as daring as he could with Code still firmly in place decides to stretch all the gender boundaries he could with this comedy in drag. The results some say resulted in the funniest film ever made.
Some Like It Hot concerns a couple of jazz age musicians in 1929 witnessing the murder of informant George E. Stone. Of course the head doer George Raft spots our intrepid duo and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are forced to flee Chicago.
The getaway plan. Take a gig with an all woman orchestra going south to Florida. The orchestra has Marilyn Monroe as a singer so the trip will have its pleasant diversity.
After the trouble Wilder had with Monroe on The Seven Year Itch he swore he wouldn't do another film with her. But United Artists wanted a big name for box office guarantee before he could get the financing and Curtis and Lemmon weren't big enough. So Monroe was signed and by all accounts the picture was another trial to make for all concerned.
Tony Curtis's feelings were well known about Monroe, he didn't like her. Yet his scenes with her were very funny indeed both with him in drag and doing a spoof of his idol, Cary Grant.
Jack Lemmon was far more philosophical. I saw him in an interview once simply say that Marilyn was a girl with a whole lot of problems and unrealized talent when she died. That's what you would expect from Lemmon, one of the nicest people ever in the film industry.
Jack Lemmon also got an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. But Some Like It Hot ran into the year of Ben-Hur sweeping all the Oscars that year. It wasn't even nominated for Best Picture. Billy Wilder lost for Best Director. The only Oscar it did win was for Orry-Kelly for costume design for those recreations from the Twenties and the special costumes that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis wore.
Billy Wilder sprinkled his cast with a lot of people identified with the gangster genre. Who more than George Raft who really lived the part in real life. And others like George E. Stone, Mike Mazurki, and Nehemiah Persoff. Pat O'Brien plays the federal man on the trail of the mobsters and in his memoirs O'Brien thanked Billy Wilder profusely for giving him a part in a classic film when his career hit the skids in the Fifties.
Of course the real daring here was Joe E. Brown as the dissolute playboy and his infatuation with Jack Lemmon in drag. Today Brown's character would be really a gay guy who's into drag queens and Lemmon after some initial misgivings might just decide that gay for pay pays a lot better than playing the bull fiddle. But the Code while not broken was stretched a might in Some Like It Hot.
A film that didn't get into the top five in 1959 is now considered the funniest comedy of all time. You won't get any argument from me over that one.