About SO much more than the gender-terrorists will have it.

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2001)

'Some Like it Hot', that ultimate paean to life in all its protean subversiveness, begins with death. A funeral to be precise. Of course, it's not a real funeral - a gang of grimly gormless bootleggers are smuggling illegal liquour in a casket, Death mocked by whiskey, the water of life. This gives a socially disruptive comedy a metaphysical depth not always present in Wilder.
Because, for all the farcical high jinx, there is real death in this film, which is a true gangster film, not a spoof. No matter how many times I see this film, it never ceases to shock me, in the garage massacre scene, that Jerry and Joe are a dying man's last jerk away from being mown to pieces like yesterday's grass. Why not, we've just seen it happen, and such 'innocent' murders were commonplace at the time. It's ironic, then, that a film driven by self-preservation should result in the discovery of different selves. This is why Spats and cronies must die - they are tied down, by genre, by history, by period, by identity - Spats is literally what he wears. Joe and Jerry survive by transforming, from one genre to another, gangster to comedy, from one part of the country to another, from one gender to another. 'Hot' is another of Wilder's modern fairy tales, and transformation is a necessary component of any good fairy tale.
That opening sequence is still breathtaking - the police shootout where people actually die; the solemn funeral 'front'; the arrangements for the police sting. When Mulligan moves from the quiet of the funeral home to the Jazz Age vibrancy of the speakeasy, it's like he's magically entered another realm, shown by the very Wilder mirror that reflects the fun. Even before Joe and Jerry enter, the film is rife with disguise, deceit, division, reflection, transformation. This is 'Hot''s real subversion - Joe and Jerry aren't disruptive imps, changing the world in their own image; they are playing the world by its own rules, its own self-delusion. After all, the film isn't set in 1929 for nothing, and the monumental shadow of the Crash looms over every scene, every musical-comedy cliche of the millionaire.
The 1920s, the Jazz Age, Prohibition, gangsters - all this is one big aberration in American history, a subversion of what it conservatively means to be an American, where hedonism, a weirdly social self-interest reigns, where respectable people are forced by law to become criminal just to have a lousy, lethal drink. This isn't just a subversive comedy about gender and identity - after all, dressing up as a woman isn't quite the same as menstruating or having babies - this is a two-fingers to Eisenhower's vision of America, where people have to pretend to be what they are not (conformist, all-American, nuclear-family etc.) so as not to stick out and be lynched.
Do I really need to say that this is hilarious (although there are longueurs, some lines don't take off, and the film itself doesn't really zing until we reach Florida - maybe I've seen it too often), that Marilyn Monroe for once is a beautiful and sexy woman, rather than a caricature of one, that I know every scene and line by heart? What's most interesting is that while Joe is the most convincing woman in the film (best scene in the movie - Josephine kissing Sugar near the end), it is Jerry, the most aggressively male to begin with, who ends up wishing he were a girl. Do people really think through the consequences of this film, that if there is a wedding night, Osgood and Daphne...