Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film by Billy Wilder. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O'Brien, Joe E. Brown and Nehemiah Persoff. The movie was adapted by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan. more...

Logan had already written the story (but without the gangsters) for a German movie, Fanfaren der Liebe (directed by Kurt Hoffmann, 1951), so that Wilder's film is seen by some as a remake.

Synopsis

Some Like It Hot tells the story of two struggling musicians, Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Lemmon), who are on the run from the Mafia after witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. The gangster in charge is Spats Columbo (George Raft), who orders the execution of Jerry and Joe. Jerry and Joe escape in the confusion and decide to hide from the gangsters by disguising themselves as women (Josephine and Daphne). They join an all-girl band headed to Florida. Joe and Jerry fall for a ukulele player and band vocalist named Sugar (Monroe), and fight for her affection while maintaining their disguises. In Florida, an aging millionaire Osgood (Joe E. Brown) falls for Daphne (Jerry), while Joe dresses up as a Cary Grant-imitating millionaire to woo Sugar. The mob eventually finds Joe & Jerry again, when they arrive at the same hotel for a conference honoring "Friends of Italian Opera". After several humorous chases (and witnessing yet another mob rub out), Jerry, Joe, Sugar and Osgood escape to the millionaire's yacht.

Trivia

On the set, Wilder grew exasperated by Monroe's inability to remember her lines. He had several of them written in inconspicuous spots on the set, so she could read them. In particular, it is possible to see Monroe's eyes move back and forth during the scene where she talks to Curtis' character on the phone in her hotel room - she was reading from a chalkboard held behind the camera.

It has been reported that Monroe was pregnant during the filming of this movie.

Tony Curtis was famously quoted as saying that kissing Marilyn Monroe during the love scene in this movie was like "kissing Hitler," but he later denied saying it.

Jack Lemmon considered a scene from this film to be the best of his screen career. Tony Curtis enters the hotel room to find Lemmon lying on a bed clothed in an evening dress, singing and shaking a pair of maracas. Lemmon announces he's engaged to Joe E. Brown. After blithely answering a string of objections - What will you do on your honeymoon? morphs into a comparison of the French Riviera and Niagara Falls - Lemmon admits that he plans to annul the marriage and collect alimony as hush money.

Wilder paid tribute to three great gangster movies of the 1930s with subtle gags in the movie's script. The crimelord "Little Bonaparte" stems from Little Caesar, while Spats Columbo threatens to smash a grapefruit in the face of one of his henchmen (James Cagney's famous scene from The Public Enemy). He then grabs a coin from the air as it is being flipped by another gangster, a cliche that originated with Howard Hawks' Scarface.

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