Don't watch this movie based on Billy Wilder's credentials

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2014)

I noticed that most people watch this movie solely because of 2 names. Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe although the real credit goes to Jack Lemmon who became a woman and played as a woman so good which I almost forgot he was Jack Lemmon! Jack Lemmon's performance was nothing short of a masterpiece dwarfing any subsequent similar attempts like Dustin Hoffman's in Tootsie so there is something very original and unique about this movie however even Jack Lemmon's mind blowing performance was not enough to cover the shitty screenplay, insane cheesiness and obvious deficiencies in production. Let's start from Miami. I have no problem that Wilder decided to film Miami in San Diego California. Palm trees are palm trees and the thing about the difference in direction of afternoon shadow on east coast and west coast in not something an ordinary audience would pick up immediately however filming the the movie in a famous landmark like "Hotel Del Coronado" was an unforgivable insult to the audience's intelligence. That's something I never expected from Billy Wilder, a shameful disappointment. The second problem was character development or the character ark. Sugar Cane (Monroe) was a woman attracted to millionaires, yachts, private train cars and money of course. She was the best imitation of a shallow character. Now to make her fall in love with a 2 bit musician like Joe (Tony Curtis) was required a great character ark. Sugar Cane remained the shallow character till the very end. She fell in love with a fake millionaire or his fake money to be more precise as there was nothing lovely about the fake millionaire that Joe invented but his money. When Joe called her o say goodbye, she became upset and sad because she lost the millionaire. She never fell in love with the quality of kiss or sex, bottom line is that she never fell in love with Joe as a human being. What one could reasonably expect was shocking and emotional encounter between Sugar Cane but what really happened was a flat hasty encounter as Joe exposed himself in front of everyone and gave her the hasty and flat kiss. Based on what was developed (or not developed) in the movie, the logical response was anger and despise not that hasty baseless character ark in final minutes of the movie. It was so bad and cheesy that it could win an award of cheesiness and awfulness! Also nothing was cute about the humor, the flat humor was as childish as a Pink Panther cartoon which made the movie almost boring. 2 hours was a long time for such movie, a better editing and possibly trim it to 90 minutes could mask most of the problems so I would say the editing was a masterpiece of awfulness by itself. I don't know where the 8+ rating came, I can't find a reasonable answer why a serious film critic would give this movie anything more than 4. 3/10