Some Like It Hot (1959)
Simply put, Some Like It Hot is the best comedy ever made. Director Billy Wilder’s hilarious screenplay is elevated to greatness in the hands of a trio of all-time comedic performances from Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis. The nonstop momentum of the film is unparalleled — it gets funnier and more poignant with each scene, culminating in one of the greatest closing lines in cinema history. It’s a sacred cinematic experience, a film I could watch endlessly without ever growing tired of its joys.
Some Like It Hot follows Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon), two musicians who inadvertently witness a mob hit in 1920s Chicago and scramble to get out of town. Their solution: Dress up as women and take a gig with a women’s band traveling to a Florida resort. There they meet Sugar Kane (Monroe), a beautiful member of the band whom they quickly befriend. Joe switches from his female alter ego Josephine into a fake millionaire at the resort in order to win Sugar Kane’s heart, while Jerry finds his time role-playing as his female alter ego Daphne more enjoyable than he expected. All this, while the mob still looms.
The premise of Jack and Jerry’s deception only works because of Monroe’s unique ability to see the best in people, to trust them even if they are obviously not presenting their true self. Everything rolls off of Sugar Kane; when she describes something bad happening it’s as if it is completely alright because she already expected it not to work out. Her performance is both heartbreaking because of Sugar Kane’s misfortunes and uplifting because of her moxie in spite of them. She’s so genuinely engaged with everything happening around her, so full of life, it feels like she can see the world at a full 360-degree vantage point while everyone else can only view a sliver.
It’s a lights-out comedic showcase from Monroe, who is dynamite at shifting Sugar Kane’s behavior to fit the scene. When singing with the band on the train, unaware any men are around, she is loose and a little out of control. Yet when she gets on stage to perform at the resort Sugar Kane is tight and professional, her movements carefully calibrated. As Josephine and Daphne’s friend she is sweet and supportive; when trying to attract Joe’s fake millionaire character she is theatrically seductive. Curtis and Lemmon pull off the challenging trick of playing multiple characters, but Monroe is constantly reinventing herself on screen as well.
Curtis and Lemmon are also terrific, of course, and Lemmon in particular cracks me up every time he is on screen. The actors’ dual roles put a fascinating spotlight on the performative nature of gender, especially for a film released in 1959. Joe and Jerry intuitively know what behaviors are required to pass as a man or a woman, and their ability to fluidly perform as women calls into question the extent to which their lives as men were also a performance. The pair also quickly learns about how power imbalances inform definitions of gender.
Jerry finds himself genuinely enjoying his life as Daphne, going so far as to get engaged to another man. He is forced to repeat to himself who he actually is and gets tripped up in doing so; what he feels is true and what he tells himself should be true appear to be at odds. The film’s gender dynamics are accentuated by the clever casting of Monroe, America’s vision of the ideal woman throughout the 1950s. How could two down-on-their-luck musicians expect to pass as women next to Marilyn Monroe? Their ability to do so highlights both the artifices of gender and how the enforcement of gender standards makes those standards a concrete reality. Curtis and Lemmon’s comedic performances are largely an exercise in trying to keep up with Monroe’s ability to demonstrate how much of her persona was all for show.
Some Like It Hot ends with a legendary punchline, after Jerry/Daphne reveals to Osgood (Joe E. Brown), the man he was set to marry, that he is in fact not a woman at all. "Well, nobody’s perfect!” Osgood replies, completely unbothered. It is the lines leading up to this punchline that really strike me — Daphne insisting that they are wrong for each other because she smokes, or because she can’t have children. Osgood reacts to these disclosures the same as he does the discovery that Daphne is a man.
It’s a joke, of course, but there is something wise in the implication that when you’ve found the one it doesn’t matter much what they look like as long as you love them. It’s a fitting end to the best film of Monroe’s career; she was an actor who constantly toyed with the the performative aspects of the relationship between men and women. Some Like It Hot is a smart, timeless, and perfect film.