Some Like It Hot

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Some Like It Hot
Directed by	Billy Wilder
Produced by	Ashton Productions / Mirisch Company
Written by	Billy Wilder I. A. L. Diamond
Starring	Jack Lemmon Tony Curtis Marilyn Monroe
Music by	Adolph Deutsch
Cinematography	Charles Lang
Editing by	Arthur P. Schmidt
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	March 29, 1959
Running time	120 min.
Language	English
Budget	$2,883,848
IMDb profile

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film directed by Billy Wilder. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, and the supporting cast includes Joe E. Brown and George Raft. In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Some Like It Hot as the funniest American film of all time.

The movie was adapted by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan. Logan had already written the story (but without the gangsters) for a German movie, Fanfaren der Liebe (directed by Kurt Hoffmann, 1951), so that Wilder's film is seen by some as a remake.

[edit] Plot

Some Like It Hot tells the story of two struggling musicians, Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Lemmon), who are on the run from a Chicago gang after witnessing the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. Spats Columbo (Raft), the gangster in charge, orders the execution of Jerry and Joe. They escape in the confusion and decide to leave town. But the only out-of-town job they can find is in an all-girl band, so they disguise themselves as women and call themselves Josephine and Daphne. They join the band and go to Florida by train. Joe and Jerry both fall for "Sugar" Kane Kowalczyk (Monroe), the band's Polish-American vocalist and ukulele player, and fight for her affection while maintaining their disguises.

In Florida, Joe woos Sugar by assuming a second disguise as a millionaire (claiming to be "Junior", the heir to Shell Oil, and mimicking Cary Grant's voice), while an actual millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Brown), falls for Jerry in his Daphne guise. The mob eventually finds Joe and Jerry again, when they arrive at the same hotel for a conference honoring "Friends of Italian Opera". After several humorous chases (and witnessing yet another mob rubout), Jerry, Joe, Sugar, and Osgood escape to the millionaire's yacht.

[edit] Trivia

• It was said that Tony Curtis's voice was dubbed when pretending to be Josephine since he wasnt able to get his voice to fit a woman's voice.

• On the set, Wilder grew exasperated by Monroe's inability to remember her lines. He had several of them written in inconspicuous spots on the set, so she could read them. It is possible to see Monroe's eyes move back and forth during the scene where she talks to Curtis' character on the phone in her hotel room - she was reading from a chalkboard held behind the camera.

• Monroe was pregnant during the film's production and had a miscarriage the day after its first audience preview. Her pregnancy is most notable in the famous yacht scene.

Cover of VHS release

• Jack Lemmon considered a scene from this film to be the best of his screen career. Tony Curtis enters the hotel room to find Lemmon lying on a bed clothed in an evening dress, singing and shaking a pair of maracas. Lemmon announces he's engaged to Joe E. Brown. After blithely answering a string of objections - What will you do on your honeymoon? morphs into a comparison of the French Riviera and Niagara Falls - Lemmon admits that he plans to annul the marriage and collect alimony as hush money.

• Wilder paid tribute to three great gangster movies of the 1930s with subtle gags in the movie's script. The crimelord "Little Bonaparte" stems from Little Caesar, while Spats Columbo threatens to smash a grapefruit in the face of one of his henchmen (James Cagney's famous scene from The Public Enemy). He then grabs a coin from the air as it is being flipped by another gangster, a cliché that originated with Raft's character in Howard Hawks' Scarface —— thus making Raft's line "Where did you pick up that cheap trick?" a bit of meta-humor.

• The film was originally planned to be filmed in full color, but after several screen tests it had to be changed to black and white. The reason for this was a very obvious 'green tint' around the heavy make-up of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon when in role as Josephine and Daphne.

• Scenes were filmed at the Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, California.

• The film's title is a line in the nursery rhyme "Pease Porridge Hot." It also occurs as dialogue in the movie when Joe, as "Junior", tells Sugar he prefers classical music over hot jazz.

• The film's working title was "Not Tonight, Josephine".

• The passenger car used in the movie, Clover Colony, is owned by the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

• In an uncredited role, Grace Lee Whitney (later known for creating the role of Yeoman Janice Rand on Star Trek), plays a member of the all-girl band.

• Some Like It Hot received a "C" (Condemned) rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency. The film, along with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and several other films, led to the end of the Production Code in the mid-60's. Some Like It Hot was released by United Artists without the MPAA logo in the credits or title sequence since the film did not receive Production Code approval.

[edit] Adaptations

In 1972, a musical play based on the screenplay of the movie, entitled Sugar, opened on Broadway, starring Elaine Joyce, Robert Morse, Tony Roberts and Cyril Ritchard, with book by Peter Stone, lyrics by Bob Merrill, and (all-new) music by Jule Styne. A 1991 production of this show in London featured Tommy Steele and retained the original title.

In 2002, Tony Curtis performed in a stage production of the film, portraying the character originally played by Joe E. Brown.

[edit] Awards

The film won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White (Orry-Kelly) and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jack Lemmon), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

It won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy. Marilyn Monroe won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in Musical or Comedy, and Jack Lemmon for Best Actor in Musical or Comedy.

The movie has been acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest movie comedies ever made. It ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest comedies (curiously, #2 on the list is Tootsie, also a film about a crossdesser) as well as #14 on their list of the 100 best American films. The film has also been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the 8th greatest comedy film of all time (see Total Film Magazine's List of the 50 Greatest Comedy Films of All Time).

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Some Like It Hot

[edit] Famous quotes

"I'm a MAN!" - "Well, nobody's perfect."

Jerry (as Daphne): Now you've done it!
Joe (as Josephine): Done what?
Jerry (as Daphne): You tore off one of my chests!

Sugar: "Real diamonds! They must be worth their weight in gold!"

Joe: "The ship is in ship-shape shape!"

Sugar: "It's the story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

Sweet Sue: "Didn't you girls go to a conservatory?"
Jerry (as Daphne): "Yes, for a whole year."
Sweet Sue: "I thought you said it was three years."
Joe: "We got time off...for good behaviour."

(Last Lines) Jerry (as Daphne): "You don't understand, Osgood! Aaah... I'm a man!"
Osgood: "Well, nobody's perfect."

Jerry: Have I got things to tell you!
Joe: What happened?
Jerry: I'm engaged.
Joe: Congratulations. Who's the lucky girl?
Jerry: I am!

[edit] See also

• Cross-dressing in film and television

[edit] External links

• Plot summary for Fanfaren der Liebe
• Some Like It Hot at the Internet Movie Database
• Roger Ebert's review of Some Like It Hot [1]