SOME LIKE IT HOT
A film by Billy Wilder
Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon (Out to Sea), and Joe E. Brown
A miracle of filmmaking, "Some Like It Hot" is a brilliant film, and maybe the foremost example of slapstick comedy brought to screen with clever sight gags and plot twists. It is the pinnacle of writer-director Billy Wilder's career, a stunning feat considering the vast catalogue of films he had helped make.
Jerry (Lemmon) and Joe (Curtis) are two stage musicians who go from gig to gig, trying to earn enough money to feed themselves. One night, as they're playing at a banned Prohibition speakeasy, the place is raided. As it turns out, the owner, Spats Columbo (George Raft) was ratted out by Toothpick Charlie (George E. Stone). Several weeks later, on Valentine's Day, Jerry and Joe go to a garage to pick up a car and end up witnessing a gangland murder of Charlie by Columbo in a parking garage. Eager to escape, the duo are forced to take a job in Florida with all expenses paid. The only catch..its a girls band. So Josephine (Curtis) and Daphne (Lemmon), make their way onto the train and go to Florida. On the way there, they meet Sugar Kane (Monroe), a bombshell singer who is looking for love. Jerry and Joe immediately fall for the singer, but there's two problems: 1) they're in drag, and 2) millionaire Osgood Fielding (Joe E. Brown) falls madly in love with Daphne. What follows in pure hysteria, still complicated further by the arrival of Spats Columbo to Florida for the "Italian Opera Lovers Festival".
Tony Curtis is hysterical as Joe/Josephine, especially in his preposterous attempts to woo Sugar. Marilyn Monroe, in a wonderfully comic performance, is Sugar, providing incredible timing and sex appeal, along with true sincerity. The scenes, however, are all stolen by either Brown or Lemmon. Lemmon is hysterical as Daphne. Cast as the less rational one, Lemmon's performance is ridiculously crazy, it is disorder in the style all Billy Wilder's. Brown is particularly hilarious as Osgood, as we are treated to the finest kind of comedic irony. He manages to use Lemmon's ingenious performance as a springboard for an even loonier performance as a completely eccentric millionaire.
Every set-piece is flawless, as Wilder brilliantly changes settings constantly, and uses every comic trick in the book to make his picture. Wilder's script is stunning, as he carefully combines gangsters, cross-dressing, romance, sex, music, gender roles, and social taboos in a riotous blend of wit and oddball craziness. Wilder manages to create scenes of utter hysteria, so pitch-perfect that the audience is dying of laughter with the last comic piece, the final line of this absolutely incredible film. Wilder's is dead wrong when he says nobody's perfect: Billy Wilder is, especially when he makes something this disastrously funny. Nobody's perfect but Billy Wilder.
RATING: **** out of ****
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Brian Koller's review of Some Like it Hot