Billy Wilder (1959)

Some Like It Hot, although one tends to think of it as a one-off, is based on a story by Robert Thoeren, which became a French film musical of 1935 and was remade as a German one in 1951.  The IMDB plot synopsis for the latter, Fanfares of Love (‘fanfare’ is singular in the French forerunner), explains that:  ‘Two out of work musicians put on drag to get work in an all girl band. Inevitable comical romantic complications ensue’.  Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond turn the set-up into something decisively and dynamically American:  the insouciant saxophonist Joe and the fusspot double bassist Jerry, after accidentally witnessing, then dodging bullets at, the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, have urgently good reason to disguise themselves and get out of Chicago.  In spite of their alarming circumstances, the film is a bit effortfully frenetic until Joe and Jerry get into drag but from then on they’re a great partnership.

The hyperactivity of the early scenes is what you always expect from Jack Lemmon but his performance as ‘Daphne’ is his finest hour on screen:  the involutions of the plot and the abundance of comic business in the script require breakneck comic invention and zest, which Lemmon supplies in spades.  His feminine evolution is very enjoyable.  At first, Daphne, trying desperately to be just one of the girls, comes across as a game spinster.  Then the idea of using his charms as a woman starts to grow on Jerry.  Tony Curtis’s Joe is perfectly complementary.  Curtis’s voice and mannerisms for Josephine are a masculine actor’s idea of what a woman is like; he’s nothing like as detailed or as comically ingenious as Jack Lemmon.  Yet Curtis, as a woman, retains the sex appeal he has as a man and he does a very witty Cary Grant vocal impression when Joe, in order to seduce Marilyn Monroe, puts on another disguise as a (male) millionaire.  (The impression is funny partly because it’s energetic rather than perfectly accomplished.)

As Sugar Kane, the vocalist and ukulele player for Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, Marilyn Monroe is at her most luminous and, at the point at which Sugar thinks she’s lost her millionaire, affecting.   When she performs the songs (which include “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and “Runnin’ Wild”), her sensual vividness is as elating as it’s amusing.  There’s too much of the gangsters – both at the start and in their climactic pursuit of Joe and Jerry in Florida – although they’re a great collection of ugly mugs.  (George Raft is the chief mobster; Edward G Robinson Jr is the man who eventually dispatches him.)  The film’s abrupt ending is convenient for ignoring Sugar’s reaction to the revelation of who and how low on funds Joe really is; but it’s also justly famous for the final exchange between Daphne and her persistent suitor, the vastly wealthy Osgood Fielding III, whom Joe E Brown, in a perfect performance, invests with the innocent, egotistic serenity of a little boy used to getting his own way.  ‘I’m a man!’ protests the exasperated Jerry, ripping off his blonde wig and eliciting from Osgood the classic last line, ‘Nobody’s perfect’.

Postscript:  There was a nice extra touch to the screening of the film that we went to at BFI.  The silly front-of-house man whose public address announcements try to sound cool and end up incomprehensible came to the front of NFT1 to introduce a surprise guest:  one of the film’s cast members was in the audience.  He couldn’t quite rid his voice of a note of surprise that such a person was still alive but Marian Collier, who’ll be eighty-three later this month, entered from the wings and proceeded to give a modest and commendably succinct explanation of her uncredited role as Olga, one of Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators.  Collier, who also reminded the audience that the next day would be the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, asked us to look out for Olga’s big moment in Some Like It Hot, when she hands ice to Sugar and Daphne for the midnight drinking session on the train from Chicago to Florida.  Marian Collier certainly makes the most of delivering the ice.  She deserved the most likeable round of applause that I’ve ever heard at BFI.

4 August 2014