Wilder & A Fine Cast Make a Goofy Story Very Enjoyable

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2004)

Billy Wilder's great story-telling skills and a fine group of performers take a pretty goofy story and make "Some Like It Hot" a very enjoyable movie, whose carefree disregard for realism belies a skillful and creative production. With a tale so full of implausible developments and characters, it's almost as if Wilder wanted to see just how far he could stretch it and still come up with a top-quality picture. It's hard not to compare it with Hitchcock's "North By Northwest", released the same year, in which Hitchcock and another excellent cast tell an equally unlikely story with exceptional craftsmanship.
With their energetic yet contrasting personas, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis make an ideal leading pair for a movie of this nature, . Their energy and their sense of just how far they can exaggerate things make it very easy to like their characters and to become interested in what happens to them, and in turn that makes everything else fit together.
While much of what Marilyn Monroe does cannot properly be called acting, she does work particularly well here. She was very well-matched with her character, and comes across quite naturally. The supporting cast all have much smaller roles, but they are also crucial to making the movie so entertaining. George Raft, Nehemiah Persoff and Joe E. Brown all get some particularly good moments.
Wilder himself pulls out all the stops to add a lot of creativity to the settings and to move things along at an ideal pace, bringing the characters to one new predicament after another. The most implausible developments become amusing when handled with such craftsmanship. While some of Wilder's other pictures were more impressive as artistic achievements, for entertainment value this is as good as any of them.