Some Like It Hot

Shown: 22 March 1999
Sponsored and introduced by David Gainsborough Roberts
Best film - 52nd season

U.S.A. 1996
Directed by Billy Wilder
Leading players - Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe

Synopsis

Two hours of classic Hollywood comedy leaves you still wanting more - made nearly 40 years ago, there is not a sign of its age. Two struggling musicians are innocent witnesses of the St Valentine's Day gangland massacre in Chicago but George Raft decides his gang should silence them. The two decide that the best place to hide is in an all-girl band and spend much of the film in drag. Their disguise brings many problems, particularly when Jack Lemmon attracts a persistent suitor (Joe E Brown) and Tony Curtis falls for Marilyn Monroe.

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Marilyn Monroe was barely 20 when she had her first screen test yet only four years later, in 1950 in The Asphalt Jungle, she received favourable critical attention as a crooked lawyer's girl. By 1953 20th Century Fox was able to release three films featuring her in the same year Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hon to Marry a Millionaire and she was established both as a star and a sex symbol. Although often remarked on only for her sexual qualities, her later choice of scripts and her technical acting ability showed that she was a serious artist with a strong personality - after Some Like It Hot, when Tony Curtis was reported as saying that "Kissing Marilyn Monroe was like kissing Hitler", she retorted "He only said that because I had prettier dresses than he did".

Director Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Austria and, after working as a journalist in Berlin, found employment as a scenarist on comedies and light romances. He left for Paris in 1933 on the day after the Reichstag fire and was able to direct his first feature film there before moving to Hollywood in the same year. Within five years he and collaborator Charles Brackett had become the pair of highest-paid writers in the industry. His first four features as director - The Major and the Minor (1942), Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945) - showed his versatility and were critical and commercial successes.

Despite winning three personal Oscars in 1960 for The Apartment, by 1974 Wilder had fallen out of favour, largely because of his questioning of the American life-style - his films often send Americans to Europe where they undergo a process of humanisation. In 1978 he was back in Germany to make Fedora, a personal testament that some say is his greatest film.