FILM IN REVIEW: FARCE, DREAMS, AND DESIRE: SOME LIKE IT HOT

1 9 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W F A R C E , D R E A M S , A N D D E S I R E : S O M E L I K E I T H O T B E R T C A R D U L L O Having just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Some Like It Hot (1959) is still significant in four ways in American film history. It is the best film by the last European director to flourish in this country. (Hollywood has seen two principal ‘‘waves’’ of European directors. The first group, including such men as Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau, was imported in the 1920s by an American industry that was jealous of European artistic advances and worried about commercial competition. The second group consisted of political refugees during the 1930s.) It is the best film of the last great sex star created by Hollywood. It is the last of the carefree American comedies that sprang up when sound came in, bloomed through the thirties, and had a revival after World War II. And it is the last really good film farce produced in the United States to date. There have been new imitations of old farces, there have been new farces, but all are inferior to Some Like It Hot, in part because, unlike Billy Wilder’s picture and all other great farces, cinematic or theatrical, they lack conviction in the moving body – running, sliding, hurtling, wheeling, bicycling, jumping, climbing, and falling – as a source of wonders. The plot concerns two young, broke musicians, Joe (played by 1 9 3 R Tony Curtis), a saxophone player, and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), a bass fiddler, who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of one gang by another in Chicago in 1929. (Wilder here uses a notorious real event like the cushion of a billiard table for a wild carom.) The victorious gang chief, Spats Columbo (George Raft), wants the two witnesses killed, but they manage to escape. Penniless but frantic to flee Chicago, they dress as women and grab jobs with an all-girl band headed for a three-week gig in a Florida resort hotel. On the southbound train they meet the luscious band vocalist, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), who hopes to catch a millionaire at the resort hotel. When they arrive in Florida, an aging playboy millionaire does appear, Osgood Fielding (Joe E. Brown), but he falls for the disguised Jerry, now called Daphne. Meanwhile, Joe, disguised as Josephine, re-disguises himself after working hours as a millionaire in order to woo Sugar. Things are progressing steadily toward simply normal madness when suddenly Spats appears at the hotel for a gangland convention. A rival gangland chief has Spats killed at a banquet, a murder that Joe and Jerry also accidentally witness. Now, doubly dangerous to the gangsters, they flee again. Sugar pursues Joe because she realizes, after a good-bye kiss, that her bandstand girlfriend ‘‘Josephine’’ is really the ‘‘millionaire’’ she loves. The two of them, with Jerry and Osgood, speed out to the latter’s yacht. Along the way, Osgood talks about wedding plans with Jerry, who is still in female dress, and dismisses Jerry’s frenzied objections. At last, at the risk of spoiling their means of escape from the hoods, Jerry is forced to rip o√ his wig and say that he can’t marry Osgood because he is a man. To which the smiling, unswervable Osgood replies with the famous last line, ‘‘Nobody’s perfect.’’ That’s the plot. Now for a few words about the script itself. Like many good directors, Wilder began as a scriptwriter. And such a director knows that poor films can be made from good scripts, but good films cannot be made from poor scripts. This Wilder script (co-written with I. A. L. Diamond) is a model of what a literate farce – and, ultimately, a filmic one – should be. The dialogue is not a collection of gags but a temperamental use of language: that is, the vernacular is filtered through a chuckling temperament, and diction is selected...