Still the Gold Standard

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2004)

"Some Like It Hot" is the best farce ever produced by a major Hollywood studio. Viewed as farce and not as a straight comedy -- but it's both -- its lofty position on so many "movie best" lists is easily understood.
The glue that holds "Some Like It Hot" together on screen is Jack Lemmon. His scene with Marilyn Monroe in the upper berth of the train is probably his most brilliant in the film, but he has several. Its dialogue is top heavy with innuendo, and no one but Lemmon could have pulled it off without descending into embarrassing burlesque. The script requires Tony Curtis to do an extended burlesque, and while he was not the subtle comedian that Lemmon was, his "Cary Grant" is still a comic delight.
The exposition is lengthy for a comedy, but sets up numerous punchlines that will be used again and again. Such gags as the one about "type O blood" actually get funnier with repetition.
Pat O'Brien's Chicago detective is always overlooked in discussions of this film. I don't think he has a single line that isn't a pun. His deadpan delivery may be lost on audiences who don't recall the dozens of crime movies he made at Warner Brothers in the 30s where he played this sort of role straight.
According to legend, "Some Like It Hot" was filmed in black and white for two reasons, one of which is the (very) revealing costumes Marilyn Monroe wears on the bandstand. The second is that Billy Wilder fretted that he could not get Lemmon's and Tony Curtis's drag makeup to look believable in color.
:sigh: I'm afraid younger viewers are put off by B/W movies. TCM hosts Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz share my thinking, and I have heard both men urge viewers to give a black and white movie a chance.
In a world where the Vice President of the United States can tell a senior U.S. Senator to "go blank himself," and Janet Jackson can do a striptease on national television, I'm afraid "Some Like It Hot" must seem creaky and stodgy indeed. Yet, "It's not what's said and shown, it's what ISN'T said and shown" that make "Some Like It Hot" such a treat.
It should never have worked, but Wilder and writing partner I.A.L. Diamond and a gifted cast breathed life into dozens of hoary clichés. Taking on such broad, heavily mined topics as the battle of the sexes, gangsters, Prohibition and skirt-chasing musicians was a gamble, but it worked. It worked in 1959, and it works today because there is no psychological subtext weighing down the story, as there is with "Tootsie" (1982).
"Tootsie" is a drag comedy that wants audiences to laugh, but also to rethink and ponder gender roles in society. "Some Like It Hot" has no such pretensions, which is why it has not dated as much as more recent comedies that share its theme.