"Some Like It Hot" review revisited

From the opening one-liners intending to set the scene (e.g., “Suppose the stock market crashes”), to bachelor Tony Curtis and funnyman Jack Lemmon donning fake breasts and pantyhose, Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” revolves around irony. After the two Chicago musicians (Curtis, Lemmon) witness what appears to be the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, they flee to Florida disguised as well-studied female sax and bass players with a blonde, all-girl jazz band.

The nugget that seals the deal for this film isn’t Marilyn Monroe’s predictably intoxicating presence or the underlying love story the grows between Curtis’ character, Joe and Monroe’s character, Sugar “Kane” Kowaczyck—it’s how deliciously oblivious everyone except the audience is toward the guys’ protruding adam’s apples and broad shoulders.

There are plenty times Curtis and Lemmon—rather, “Josephine” and “Daphne”—have their slipups and are almost given away. Monroe unintentionally turns Lemmon on in the train car by rubbing his legs, and Curtis almost forgets to remove his costume earrings when racing to meet Monroe at the dock after the night’s show. And sure, there’s the part when love-struck millionaire Osgood Fielding III can’t figure out why Lemmon—er, “Daphne”—keeps taking the lead while dancing. Even then, both remain undetected by Fielding, the mob too focused on finding those two musician witnesses and bandleader, Sweet Sue, who is all too happy two female musicians showed up at the eleventh hour. What remains a treat for the audience are the transvestite connotations over airy comments that suggest polarization of the sexes, including jokes that represent conflicting gender roles obvious to the characters, which get played off by trivial laughter.

“Some Like It Hot” challenges the audience to keep up with such jokes in introducing the very fake character, Junior, who, created by Curtis’ character, Joe, and given a Cary Grant-like voice at Curtis’ behest, is a second-generation heir to the Shell gas company. Though the focus of the show is on trysts Monroe has with Junior—who miraculously embodies what she wants in a man, Lemmon steals the show with a gait all too girly and a voice hitting his higher registers—all a theatrical attempt to appear feminine. As the boisterous Daphne, Lemmon’s character Jerry channels his giddy paranoia of the mob through incessant giggling, suggestive jokes and perpetual thwarting Joe’s plan to lure Monroe as the nerdy, fictitious Junior.

While the men-on-the-run-dressed-as-women shtick of “Some Like It Hot” would work in today’s society as a B-movie plot, this film was witty and edgy for 1959. It captures the spirit of the Prohibition Era, gives a hat tip to the exiting touch of black and white in a world that was turning to color and a touch of gender-bending connotations risqué in both time periods.