Some issues I want to face...

Rating: 7/10 (23 February 2006)

Okay, this movie is, indeed, very amazingly made. It's uproariously funny, pretty exciting, and has some very fine performances. Being a Wilder fan as well helps this movie quickly earn a bunch of big stars on the rating scale.
However, I have always had a problem with this movie, and it wasn't until recently, my fifth time seeing it (yeah, it took that long), for me to realize what it was.
I just don't believe Marylin Monroe's character.
The thing is, she's so easily taken advantage of... and she admits it herself. However, her admitting it makes it okay. Sure, they sort of undercut it by making Lemmon's character actually finally tell the truth, but the fact remains that Sugar is ditzy, she's blond...she's everything a man wants, but for all the wrong reasons.
Even the way Wilder puts the camera to her is very male-fantasy oriented. Think back, for a moment, to when she sings that one song, "I wanna be loved by you/just you/nobody else but you." She's singing at the camera, meaning she's looking directly at the audience members... presumably male, at least half-so.
In fact a lot of this film could be considered prurient, but at this point I'd like to point out that so much of it is so playful, so light-hearted, that it doesn't really hold up that way. It's only with Sugar Kane herself that I begin to reject the notion that anything "real" is happening, making it all seem vaguely false.
Just a quick dampener before I go back to enjoying the rest of the performances.
--PolarisDiB