Suspend Your Disbelief and Have Some Fun

Rating: 9/10 (28 April 2020)

There is plenty about this comedy with music that stands the test of time. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians who are being pursued by gangsters because they have witnessed a murder. Masquerading as women, they go on tour with an all-girl band. Marilyn Monroe sings "Runnin' Wild" on a train to Florida, and the rest is movie history. How do the guys shave? How do they fool anyone with those ridiculous wigs? Does Jack Lemmon actually put out for Joe E. Brown? Don't ask. Just suspend your disbelief and have some laughs.
The most obvious ethnic references in this comedy are to Italians, since it is set during Prohibition and the heyday of the mafia, but there is also a Polish connection. Once Curtis and Lemmon join the all-girl band on its way to a gig in Florida, enter Monroe as a "dumb blonde" who identifies herself as Sugar Kane, adding that "I changed it from Sugar Kowalczyk." "Polish?" she is asked. "Yes, I come from this musical family. My mother's a piano teacher. My father was a conductor." To the question "Where did he conduct?" she replies, "On the Baltimore and Ohio." In the end, the dizzy Polish girl from Sandusky, Ohio, turns out to have a heart of gold, and she gets her man with her well displayed sex appeal. In the bargain, Marilyn Monroe gets to appear in what is considered one of the most enduringly funny movies ever made.