Some Like It Hot (1959)

d. Billy Wilder / USA / 120 mins.


Note: Correction Appended

By 1960, the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code had received two firm and successive kicks to the groin. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho – different films if there ever were any – hit theaters in 1959 and 1960 with two things in common: they were both strongly condemned for their content*, but both had the ability to pull in massive crowds. Hugely successful among audiences, both directors received Oscar nominations and today each film is considered a crowning achievement in its genre. The Production Code, already weakened by films in the 1950s the 1960s motoring out into undisturbed waters, seemed less in touch with audiences than ever before. It would not live to see the end of the decade.

This is not the say Some Like It Hot and Psycho are exploitive or vulgar; on the contrary, although they both lingered on the edge long enough to be deemed too risqué for the censors' approval, both films are prime examples of teetering restraint, deriving their ingenious entertainment value from what is not actually on the screen. It's the camera and editing tricks of Psycho and the sheer innuendo of Some Like It Hot that are most penetrating and admirable to the modern viewer. Imagine if Wilder's film – which turns a very youthful fifty-years-old in 2009 – was released today, maybe by a director like Judd Apatow. Would the comedy still be so subtle, so sly, so brilliantly between the lines? Would the gender politics still be so creative and funny fifty years on? How much nudity or swearing or homophobic jokes would there be? Would the joy be unrepentant, or would the characters become hurt and betrayed? The assumable answers are not encouraging.

As it is, Some Like It Hot is an ideal comedy. It is funny – truly funny – for the sake of being funny. There is no heart-warming lesson; the only thing warmed is your face, cranberry-red from laughing so loudly. (And maybe your general demeanor is warmed, depending how you feel about Marilyn Monroe.) It is silly, yes, but also sophisticated. For every joke about how ridiculous it is for the male characters to dress as women, there's a double entendre or body language expertly filmed as to insinuate what you already know but what the film won't come out and tell you.

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two struggling musicians in 1929 Chicago who witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Fearing for their lives (and rightly so), they skip town in drag as two new members of all-girl band. But, as is always the case in the movies for men who dress in drag, inevitably they find their new proximity to women to be sexually frustrating, and Some Like It Hot puts Joe and Jerry's libidos into overdrive when they meet the band's lead singer, Sugar (Monroe).

I've never found crossdressing and drag humor particularly funny, and part of me wishes I could say Some Like It Hot transcends its drag premise and becomes something grander and more intellectual. The reality is that it doesn't really, but the screenplay – by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, adapted from the German film Fanfares of Love – does something arguably even better: it takes the premise and runs with it in two wildly different but structurally parallel directions. Curtis as Joe escapes his dress for another costume, a blue blazer and ascot, posing as the heir to an oil baron's fortune (and acting as a wicked parody of Cary Grant) to woo Sugar, who has always ended up in relationships with saxophonists and longs to find a millionaire. Lemmon as Jerry can't seem to escape his dress when he becomes the romantic quest of an actual, eccentric millionaire (Joe E. Brown), who eventually proposes and allows Lemmon to deliver one of the best lines of the movie:

Curtis: You're not a girl! You're a guy! Why would a guy want to marry a guy?
Lemmon: Security!

Some Like It Hot has many such hilarious lines and gags, too many to recite here and too many that depend upon the perfect delivery of the actors. Curtis and Lemmon are topnotch, although I would disagree with those who would say it is the best film for either. Lemmon's best work is probably in The Apartment, but his comic timing with Curtis and Brown is impeccable. Curtis is a scant better overall, particularly in his Cary Grant impression and his consistence through the multiple takes needed with the fickle Monroe, who reportedly required 47 takes to say "It's me, Sugar" and 59 takes to say, "Where's the bourbon?" And yet Monroe is the film's real sight to behold – both in the way her physicality holds your sight and in the way her performance is bubbly perfection. Some Like It Hot is the best performance of her career, and no doubt it required someone like Wilder to do what was necessary for her to reach the level she does. The grand presence she has in the film is best illuminated in the box cover to the collector's edition DVD: while Lemmon and Curtis are half-sized, yellow-screened and in drag, Monroe dominates the cover, air-brushed and in radiating full color.

Wilder was one of three directors to have multiple selections inducted into the National Film Registry during the first year of balloting. (The other two: Victor Fleming and John Ford.) Each of those two films – Sunset Boulevard, his most incisive satire; and Some Like It Hot, his funniest comedy – are at different ends of a spectrum he played like a maestro from end to end. This film came toward the end of an incredible streak of filmmaking for Wilder, beginning in 1944 with Double Indemnity and going through to The Apartment, which earned him Oscars for picture, director, and screenplay. Many films have tried to imitate the brilliance of Wilder's simultaneous zaniness and subtlety in Some Like It Hot; the imitators always seem to ignore the perfect structure, with Curtis and Lemmon on the opposite sides of being incognito, and try for the one-trick-pony of men in drag. Yet the real laughs come through the sharp way that the jokes push far enough to make an impression before they recoil.

Some Like It Hot has been called the funniest movie of all time. I don't know if that's the case, but it might have a fighting shot for that title if you exclude all silent films and don't count Dr. Strangelove. At least as far as its particular brand of humor is concerned, I can't think of another comedy that has come close to achieving the laughs produced under Wilder's direction. Oh well, what else should we expect? Nobody else is this perfect.




* An earlier version of this review stated both Some Like It Hot and Psycho lacked certificates of approval from the Production Code. Reader Mark A. Vieira, author of Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, challenged this claim. While I have read before that the films did not receive certificates of approval, I was unable to authenticate it with multiple references. As such, I've changed the sentence slightly to continue to express how the Code was becoming impotent with more daring and risqué films.

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Sunset Boulevard (1950)

d. Billy Wilder / USA / 110 mins.


Few movies would be brazen enough to begin with a shot of the main character dead, seen from the point-of-view of the floor of the swimming pool where he drowned (among other things), his voice from the afterlife gritty and firm in the film's narration. Fewer still would actually get better from that point onward. Both characteristics apply to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, a 1950 masterpiece that both satirizes the pomposity of Hollywood and sends flowers to its funeral. Rarely is a film so good that it takes conventional storytelling devices and breaks their hearts.

The man in the pool is Joe Gillis (William Holden), a struggling screenwriter who eventually comes to hide out at the dilapidated mansion of a reclusive silent movie star named Norma Desmond (do I actually need to say it's Gloria Swanson?). It's best to summarize as little as possible, but suffice it to say we get an intimate portrait of Norma's fall from grace when Joe agrees to help her polish a screenplay in return for keeping the repo men away. The two actors were not the first choices for their respective roles, but as is so often the case, they are the best. Holden adroitly delivers the proper balance of masculine pride and manic desperation to Joe Gillis; he needs Norma's benefaction enough that it is difficult to complain about her insufferable and jealous meddling in his professional and personal affairs. Swanson as Norma is still, of course, everything the role has come to be known for: moody, delusional, narcissistic, and oblivious, but also forgotten and fragile. It is one of those truly great performances in movie history – overplayed to perfection, simultaneously parodic and pained, a generous cocktail of humanity and artifice kicked up with a shot of sheer insanity.

Sunset Boulevard premiered in 1950, halfway through the first century of film and the year cinema burned Hollywood's false idols to the ground. Also hitting theaters that year were Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, which exemplified actress bitchiness and swept the Oscars, and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, which starred Humphrey Bogart as a violent screenwriter suspected of murder. Although the story of Joe and Norma is essentially fiction, the script – co-written by Wilder, Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman Jr. – continually strives to place the events inside an authentically real Hollywood, boosting the film in its entertainment value and making its satire more cohesive. Wilder uses as few fictional characters as possible, but even then so many of them feel like talking shadows. The most notable are ex-silent star Swanson and silent film director Erich von Stronheim, who plays Norma's devoted servant Max (among other things). Von Stronheim's work in silent films is regarded well, but he was among the many who failed to transition into sound. Indeed, when Norma shows Joe a scene from one of her silent movies, it's actually Swanson in a silent film actually directed by von Stronheim. The real life cameos for Sunset Boulevard include director Cecil B. DeMille and gossopi columnist Hedda Hopper, appearing as themselves, as do Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner, and Buster Keaton appear as Norma's card-playing friends luxuriously dressed for no one. The characters all speak in Hollywood parlance, and Norma talks of her respect for Greta Garbo and does a pantomime of Charles Chaplin.

The acting, directing, and writing are all topnotch, and any film lucky enough to have Holden and Swanson as stars and Wilder as a director and writer would have a more than fair shot at being called great. But its the presence of all the other elements that make Sunset Boulevard an entirely wondrous experience. The famed Edith Head designed the costumes. The cinematography was spearheaded by John F. Seitz, who worked extensively in silent films and saw much success in the sound era, including Wilder's best noirs (this film, Double Indemnity, and The Lost Weekend). Cinematic music is so frequently overlooked despite its power to make a film feel complete, but no discussion of Sunset Boulevard is over without mentioning Franz Waxman's memorable and atmosphere score.

What to make of the fact that the most famous parts of the film are its beginning, with Holden's character dead in the pool, and its ending, with Swanson's character inching her way down the staircase, proclaiming she is "ready for my close-up"? Well, for one, the knowledge of either does not necessarily spoil the movie. (For another, the swimming pool sequence wasn't even the original opener, but fortunately for history we ended up with the swimming pool.) There's little irony lost in the realities that this film, devoted to revealing the artificial nature of the film industry, would be remembered for its two most cinematic scenes. They are hypnotic bookends to a great film, and for all the attention lavished on the dramatic ending, it is nevertheless resonant – the same way Terry Malloy's "I coulda been a contender" speech resonates in the heart of On the Waterfront despite countless overplaying and mimicry.

The voice-over narration from a dead man is often maligned by storytelling purists who perceive it as gimmicky. If used in another film I might be inclined to agree, but consider this: Sunset Boulevard is a film about second chances. Joe is failing as a screenwriter and needs a second chance to pay his debts; Norma Desmond has fallen from the surly bonds of celebrity and desperately wants a comeback (although she'd argue with you on whether that's the right word); and Max is serving Norma in a second chance, if not as her director then as her butler, the best position to shield her from herself and from a world that has stopped caring. Not counting his work for Norma, telling his story from the afterlife and cutting through the facades of Hollywood (thus cracking open the story's darkness) is Joe's second chance. Ironically enough, the story told by a dead screenwriting character who never saw success was good enough to earn Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman Academy Awards for their original screenplay.

It's difficult to pick Wilder's most accomplished film because so many of them are just too damn good. As a director and a writer, the man had a streak of genius running from 1944 to 1960 that included Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, and those are only the great ones. He dabbled in noir as skillfully as comedy. He was nominated for writing Oscars twelve times and directing Oscars eight times. But at the end of the day, you'll probably have to wager that Wilder will be most remembered for this masterfully eviscerating noir.

Hey, it's not a bad way to be remembered, either.

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