Some Like it Hot

Some Like it Hot – Billy Wilder treats Marilyn Monroe as a dirty joke in his 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot. By today’s anorexic standards, Monroe is grossly overweight; apparently, even late fifties movie audiences snickered at the film’s leering display of her tits and ass. Jack Lemmon famously describes her walk as “Jello on springs” and, as she struts along the side of a train, the engine itself ejaculates creamy white steam at her wiggling behind. Monroe is essentially topless during the last half of the film, clad in vaporous skin-tight outfits that leave nothing to the imagination – if anything, the astounding cantilever required to support her bosom is matched, or, even, surpassed by the spectacular vista offered when she turns to show her milky back and buttocks almost entirely exposed by garments that exist entirely to highlight, rather than conceal, nudity. How exactly censors allowed Monroe to be shown in these garments is something of a puzzle. Presumably, the context – a rowdy Elizabethan-style comedy involving cross-dressing and murderous gangsters – was thought to defuse Monroe’s sexuality with silliness; the humorless tend to regard comedy as anaphrodisiac, sex being a matter of high and grave importance to such sensibilities, and censors are always, and by definition, humorless. Further, the film seems overtly cruel toward its leading lady. She is shown naked in more than just a physical sense. The script makes fun of her supposed lust for men with glasses (presumably a reference to the bespectacled Arthur Miller), shows her engaged in clandestine drinking, and makes her admit, not once, but several times, that she is stupid. The miracle about the film is that despite Wilder’s apparent contempt for Marilyn Monroe, and his use of her as a kind of lubricious prop, her great warmth and generosity somehow penetrates the dirty joke and yields a portrait that is surprisingly endearing – her valiant attempt to conceal her dismay at the loss of what she believes to be a millionaire boyfriend is heart-wrenching and yanks the film above (or below, depending upon your perspective) the sit-com elements of the plot. Wilder’s script is fast and funny after the manner of 30’s screwball comedies which it self-consciously imitates – the lines are good, and sizzle, although they don’t ever achieve the demotic poetry of Preston Sturges in his great comedies made twenty years before. (Truly great sex comedy requires the leading lady to be as sharp or sharper in her wit than her male counterparts, a character like those played by Katherine Hepburn in her thirties comedies or Rosalind in As you like it .) The film’s direction is fast and clever – Wilder structures his scenes like a silent film director, taking care to tell the story visually, and little details (for instance, the pursuing gangster’s spats) are used with great graphic ingenuity to propel the narrative. In part, the film’s abiding appeal – and I think it is a wee bit over-praised – lies in its aspect of sexual wish fulfillment. This is most obvious during the famous scenes in the sleeper car conveying to Florida the all girl band – the somewhat blowsy blonde conductress says “All my girls are virtuosos and I intend to keep them that way” (winking broadly); crossdressing Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are confined in a space claustrophobic with casually half-naked women. They keep shifting uneasily with motions that can be read (and that are inevitably read) as trying to hide their erections. The final scene with Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon is convincingly strange and, in fact, that entire subplot, designed really as just a contrivance to support the featured romance between Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, is so peculiar and interesting that the homosexual subtext threatens to overwhelm the heterosexual romantic comedy.