Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot
March 29, 1959
United Artists
Comedy, Historical, Musical, Romance
DVD
A

Probably my all-time favorite movie (as well as the top comedy on the AFI list), this is hilarious, clever, sexy, warm, sweet, romantic, cynical, dark, light, wise, silly, gay-friendly, and remarkably well-timed.  That last quality really struck me on this viewing, how not just the wisecracks but everything, from sound effects to exits and entrances, is Swiss-watch-like.  The script by Wilder and Diamond is top-notch, from running jokes like "Type O" to plot twists to its justly famous curtain line to double entendres .  (This time I caught "cherry tarts.")  The three leads were probably never better than they are here: Curtis, playing "heel" Joe, prissy Josephine, and Cary-Grantesque Shell Oil Jr.; Lemmon as insecure Jerry and unsinkable Daphne; and Monroe, still lighting up the screen as she did at the beginning of the decade in All About Eve, here more vulnerable but also more fun-loving as Sugar Kane.  They're well-supported by the rest of the cast, especially the veterans, with "satchel-mouthed" Joe E. Brown priceless as Lemmon's suitor.  Although the film is not a musical per se, it does use music very effectively, not just the jazzy background themes and incidental music, but Marilyn's three very different songs.  (Needless to say, far more memorable than poor Jayne Mansfield's ditties in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw.)  The costumes, Marilyn's especially, are just right, and the movie is definitely an argument for the beauty of black & white.  (In fact, on their anti-Colorization program, Siskel & Ebert showed a clip of Marilyn teasing and being teased by the shadows and lights during "I Wanna Be Loved by You.")  The comparisons to the farce of the Marx Brothers don't seem overblown, and in fact there's a great improvement on the "crowded compartment" scene of A Night at the Opera.

So why not an A+?  Well, I could say something about perfection, but I think it's that the gangster plot doesn't quite work.  Don't get me wrong.  It provides some great moments, especially when George Raft (Spats) and Pat O'Brien face off, or when we see how stupid and crude Spats's henchmen are, and it doesn't bring the movie too far down, as the gangsters do in The Girl Can't Help It.  But when the mob, or rather mobs, show up in the last half hour of the movie, it takes away some of the sunny bubbliness of the Florida setting.  Still, the two wrong-for-each-other-yet-so-right couples manage to go off into the horizon, on their way to a yacht, and there is that lovely end-line.

Tom Kennedy (not the game show host), who plays a bouncer here, was in the Marxes' Monkey Business.  Jack Gordon was in It's a Wonderful Life.  Carl Sklover was in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.  Billy Wayne was in The Girl Can't Help It.  Bert Stevens was in Citizen Kane and Auntie Mame, the latter with Arthur Tovey.

Joe Palma and Joan Shawlee (Sweet Sue) would be in The Apartment.  Tiger Joe Marsh would do Beware! The Blob.  Dave Barry (not that Dave Barry), who is Beinstock here, would be in Spinout.  Mike Mazurki, one of Spats's more memorable henchmen, would appear in The Magic of Lassie.  George Raft would play himself in Sextette, while Tony Curtis would chew a lot of scenery as one of the many ex-husbands (the Russian one) of Mae West's character.  Nehemiah Persoff, who's Little Bonaparte, would have a completely different role as Yentl's papa in the Streisand movie.