Some Like It Hot

The first time I saw Some Like It Hot, I was a teenager, alone, attending a matinée screening at my local independent cinema. I hadn’t seen Marilyn Monroe on-screen before, and I was just at the beginning of what became a life-long obsession with classic Hollywood cinema. I remember leaving the cinema in a state of unexpected shock, knowing that I had just seen a phenomenal film, without quite having the vocabulary yet to articulate why it moved me so much. If you haven’t seen Some Like It Hot before, then you’re in for a real treat. But more likely, you have already seen it, perhaps a few times, and you’ve come back confidently knowing that it will be just as good as the first time. Or, like all good things over time, even better…

Some Like It Hot is a story about two musicians who flee the mob, disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band. It wasn’t the explicit violence of a gangster plot line—see: the multiple shootouts in the film—that caused a stir. Whilst the film is now U-Rated, it was banned in a handful of U.S. states upon release for its inclusion of cross-dressing characters. It also broke daringly free of the conservative sexual constraints of the Hays Code. Miraculously, for a 1950s Hollywood comedy, the film is a certifiable queer classic, with an admirably bold and relatively unproblematic take on gender and sexuality. There’s drag, sexual perversion and general gayness, to the backdrop of a macho mafia mob story. This innovative formula provided the blueprint for contemporary comedies that queer hyper-masc genre films, most notably White Chicks (2004), where two Black FBI agents go undercover as white women.

Most notably, Some Like It Hot has gone down in history for its stellar comedy performances, with the perfect casting duo of Jack Lemmon (Jerry/Daphne) and Tony Curtis (Joe/Josephine/Shell Oil Junior). Jerry and Joe are forced into roles as women, and in turn, they discover the gendered roles that are forced onto women. They meet Marilyn Monroe (Sugar Kane), who is the lead vocalist of an all-female band, Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators. Some Like It Hot is my favourite Monroe performance, because she exhibits a century-defying magnetism unlike anything else—ever. Her acting isn’t fantastic, and she’s as equally attractive as all the other girls in the band. But there’s just something ineffably and effervescently charming and beguiling about Monroe that cuts right through the screen, even decades later. And then, of course, there’s that dress which—rightly so—won an Academy Award.

As one would expect from a Billy Wilder production, the plot and script of Some Like It Hot are tight and impenetrable, with perhaps the best ending dialogue in cinema history (co-written by Wilder and his regular collaborator, I. A. L. Diamond). The camera-work, shot by cinematographer Chris Lang, also adds comedic value to the film. For example, the drunken sway of the camera, from the perspective of a lulling boat, as we watch Joe E. Brown (Osgood Fielding III) tipsily making his way down the boardwalk… Or the deft use of cross-cuts, between parallel scenes of seduction: a make-out session on a yacht, and a tango scene in the hotel. Speaking on which: iconic drag queen Barbette was hired by the studio to coach Lemmon and Curtis in dancing, running and performing femininity. The sheer comedy and energy of the performances, screenwriting and camera make for such a vibrant production that—as a contemporary viewer—I forget each time I watch the film that it was shot completely in black and white. In my memory, Some Like It Hot lives in iridescent colour.