
By Travis Mullis
“Well, nobody’s perfect.” — Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot
Dying is easy, comedy is hard. Throughout the history of cinema, comedies have been seen as lesser entities than that perennial awards contender — the serious drama. Yet few films have combined the acting talent, exceptional writing and confident direction of Some Like It Hot. If comedy is hard, you wouldn’t know it from the effortless performances of Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
Released in 1959, Some Like It Hot is now so rewatched and memorialized that a plot summary seems unnecessary, so I’ll keep it brief. Two musicians in Prohibition-era Chicago (Curtis and Lemmon) find themselves witnesses to a fictionalized take on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Spooked, broke and the target of a local mafia boss, they do the most sensible thing possible: dress as women to join an all-female band headed by train to Miami. What’s waiting for them on the train is Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe at the peak of her fame and three years before her death at age 36. Curtis and Lemmon, as “Josephine” and “Daphne,” arrive in Florida and discover that their hotel is host to an undercover meeting of mob bosses from across the U.S., including the goons chasing them down as witnesses to mass murder. “Josephine” does another switcheroo and impersonates a millionaire playboy to seduce Sugar Kane, while “Daphne” fights off the advances of a bonafide tycoon called Osgood Fielding III. At one point, “Josephine” and “Daphne” find themselves at the mafia meeting where, by stroke of cinematic luck, the big mafia boss guns down the mobsters who have been on their tail. The film ends with all the main characters heading to a yacht where an exasperated “Daphne” finally drops the act and confesses the truth to Osgood Fielding III, whose immortal response is quoted above.
Are you keeping up? Don’t worry, the plot is beside the point. What matters are the performances and a script so well written, paced and plotted, it makes other Hollywood comedies look amateurish in comparison. The American Film Institute, largely a publicity wing of the big studios with a spotty record of recognizing deserving films, got it right when it named Some Like It Hot as the best comedy of all time. I’m tempted to nominate His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story, but cowriter and director Billy Wilder seems to have a better grasp of human psychology than either Howard Hawks or George Cukor. And those two films didn’t have Marilyn Monroe, who is at her best here, halfway between the babyish naif she is most remembered as and the sophisticated actor keeping everyone entranced and second-guessing themselves.
Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe are the ones who give the film its staying power, not the more critically lauded Jack Lemmon, who at times seems overeager in his comedic performances. Curtis and Monroe were too often taken as pretty faces with nothing of substance to offer, but both knew a thing or two about becoming other people. Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz, took on the persona of ultra-suave Tony Curtis to protect himself from the prejudices of a society that wasn’t likely to take a Jewish street kid from New York seriously. Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe for different reasons, but with the same outcome. Here was America’s answer to the question: Who is the perfect woman? Blonde, with an hourglass figure, a ditzy demeanor and the type of lovable innocence that audiences craved in the 1950s. There’s still debate about how much of the Marilyn Monroe persona was a deliberate choice by a woman who knew what she had to do to be successful.
The following quote from the book Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot illustrates my point. Curtis is talking about the film’s tailor:
Anyway, he measured me, 16, 34, 43, 18, 19, 18 … and then he goes to Marilyn, this is all in the same day and this is the truth … He comes into Marilyn’s room and Marilyn had on a pair of panties and a white blouse and that’s all. He put the tape around her legs, looked up at Marilyn and said, “You know, Tony Curtis has got a better-looking ass than you.” She was standing there, she unbuttoned her blouse and said, “He doesn’t have tits like these.”
Someone with a wit as quick as that could never be accused of having a subpar intellect.
A lot more could be said in 2025 about a film in which men dress as women and the penniless pretend to be millionaires. It’s best to let the film speak for itself. Go see it at the Independent Picture House, which is showing the film to celebrate the centennial birthday of Tony Curtis. Screenings start Friday, May 30.