One Big Wink!

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2005)

Yep -- the poster, with Marilyn winking over the shoulders of Lemmon and Curtis, says it all.
Sometimes, the whole is LESS than the sum of its parts. For there may be no more delightful PARTS in the history of film, than these scenes. Yet the whole, curiously, doesn't quite add up.
Probably because the entire premise -- two male jazz musicians passing as women to escape the Mafia -- devolves into the notorious final, utterly improbable, line: "Nobody's perfect!" But by then any pretext at reality has been dropped. We are immersed in some Neverland of movie-making which, really, has never been attempted before or since.
Namely, a thoroughly ridiculous vanity film for the director, writers, cinematographer and actors that remains utterly delightful nearly half a century later -- and always will.
About halfway through, audiences realize they're not watching anything resembling real life. Instead, they're watching some of the best talents in the business having fun! And fun it is! The script is tight as a drum: the direction is flawless (particularly in light of the on-set problems with Miss Monroe): the cinematography is luscious (never has Monroe been lit and photographed so successfully; not even in "The Prince and the Showgirl.").
Yet what we're given is scene after scene with two masterful actors -- Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis -- masquerading as women. And Marilyn Monroe -- masterful in her narrow range -- also masquerading as a woman.
Let's face it: without her voluptuous body (and Orry-Kelly's jaw-dropping costumes), Miss Monroe would have been NOTHING had she been Kate Moss. Or any other actor. Imagine ANYBODY else "breathing" those lines and slinking around in those gowns and getting by with it.
You can't.
Every scene "works." Lemmon and Curtis are priceless -- particularly Curtis -- in female drag. Not for one second do they condescend to "playing" women. Sure, the plot demands it. But there's not a moment where they're "putting down" the "weaker" sex. That would have been an easy "comedic" choice back in the day. That nobody chose it says a lot about the talents and sensibilities at work here.
Only Joe E. Brown could have been cast as Osgood, perhaps. So obliviously innocent is he that he makes his love for "Daphne" work without a hint of homosexual subtext.
It may be a small miracle, in fact, that a film of this era, dealing with two men in drag, and an older wealthy man in love with one of them, has absolutely NO hint of homosexuality, much less anti-gay sentiment. The film is, truly, beloved in homosexual circles for precisely that reason.
But forget all that. "Some Like It Hot" becomes a tour-de-force for everybody involved: a film about the joys of acting and pretending, rather than a film to be believed or taken seriously -- since it's so preposterous.
One finally yields to the audacious conceit that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are "believed" as "Josephine" and "Daphne" and simply lets the deliciousness of their playing wash over audiences.
The tidal wave that is Marilyn Monroe (though nearly impossible to work with, by this point: her lines being pasted inside bureau drawers and anywhere else on the set that couldn't be seen, because she couldn't recall even the simplest of them), is perhaps the ultimate in feminine pulchritude on screen. (Monroe was reportedly pregnant during filming, though she miscarried.) Forget that she's written (and plays) a woman as dumb as a post. She looks like nothing anybody ever saw before or since.
So "Some Like It Hot" works, scene by scene. Yet, curiously, if fails in the end because it's so patently phony.
No matter the era, when a man proposes to another man (thinking he's a woman), and that fiancée pulls off his wig and confesses, "I'm a man," the last line is NEVER, "Well, nobody's perfect." No matter how funny. No matter ANYTHING. By then we're in Neverland and all that's left is to relish the performers relishing performing.
That, we do.