Marilyn Monroe's Best Performance

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2012)

Some Like It Hot is a comedy film that was directed by Billy Wilder and it starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and George Raft. The supporting cast includes Joe E. Brown, Pat O'Brien and Nehemiah Persoff. The film is a remake by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond of a 1935 French movie, Fanfare d'Amour, from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, which was itself remade in 1951 by German director Kurt Hoffmann as Fanfaren der Liebe. However, both the French and German films were without the gangsters that are an integral part of the plot of Some Like It Hot. Wilder's working title for his film was Fanfares of Love, then Not Tonight, Josephine before he decided on Some Like It Hot as its release title.
The launching pad for Billy Wilder's comedy classic was a rusty old German farce, Fanfares of Love, whose two main characters were male musicians so desperate to get a job that they disguise themselves as women and play with an all-girl band in gangster-dominated 1929 Chicago. In this version, musicians Joe and Jerry lose their jobs when a speakeasy owned by mob boss Spats Columbo is raided by prohibition agent Mulligan. Several weeks later, on February 14th, Joe and Jerry get a job performing in Urbana and end up witnessing a gangland massacre in a parking garage. Fearing that they will be next on the mobsters' hit lists, Joe devises an ingenious plan for disguising their identities. Soon they are all dolled up and performing as Josephine and Daphne in Sweet Sue's all-girl orchestra. En route to Florida by train with Sweet Sue's band, the boys (or girls?) make the acquaintance of Sue's lead singer Sugar Kane. Joe and Jerry immediately fall in love, though of course their new feminine identities prevent them from acting on their desires. Still, they are determined to woo her, and they enact an elaborate series of gender-bending ruses complicated by the fact that flirtatious millionaire Osgood Fielding has fallen in love with "Daphne." The plot gets even thicker when Spats Columbo and his boys show up in Florida.
Nominated for several Oscars, Some Like It Hot ended up the biggest moneymaking comedy up to 1959. Full of hilarious set pieces and movie in-jokes, it has not tarnished with time and in fact seems to get better with each passing year, as its cross-dressing humor keeps it only more and more up-to-date.This was also Marilyn Monroe's best performance in her legendary acting career.Overall,this comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft for movies like this, with a sense of humor that is as broad as it can be sophisticated, come along only infrequently.