Hot damn this film is fun. It’s got everything you want for a good time. Car chases, police raids, hot jazz, Marilyn Monroe singing, steam trains, saxophones, Billy Wilder’s jokes at their camp knowing best, Tony Curtis imitating Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe dancing, a cross-dressing plot crossed with gangsters, innuendo, machine guns, prohibition, Marilyn Monroe looking refulgent in every scene—truly, she glows like the moon.
When the band is rehearsing on the train, the band leader snaps put a little heat under it. That’s exactly what this film does in every scene. It’s full of winks and nods and glances; people are always screeching cars round corners, sneaking out of windows, swinging with the band, or heeling it from the mob; there are dancing girls, spinning basses, screaming whistles, flasks of bourbon, and glittering jewels. This is everything a movie ought to be. Goose it up a little the band leader demands. Oh did they and how.
And boy does Billy Wilder know how to frame a scene. So much is happening in every shot. You get the fullest possible sense of the life of the film. It all fits, a careful composition, and yet it feels organic and natural. The clarinets and the mobsters are all lined up as elegantly as swans. The dancers move through the picture like the music of the spheres. The whole thing has a perfect quality, as if any little change in the shot would ruin the piece.
Surely it would be possible to write commentary about it all. But why? Why spoil the bloom of one of the great comedies? What’s needed is appreciation, a full-throated demand that you get yourself down to the cinema right now. Don’t you want to see beauty and genius and Jack Lemmon in a dress running from a gangster with a gun? Who can see Some Like It Hot and not feel young again, not fall in love with Marilyn again, not tap their foot or swing in time? This is the way comedy overwhelms. We know the tragic and profound in the way it makes us chill and prickle; we know the joy of the comic as it gives us a flush of spring and the urge to wiggle.
It is all well and good to think of films like this as fun and only fun, but fun is the life force underneath it all, and if you’re feeling the approach of autumn in the creak of your knee or the lag in your head, get yourself a shot of the good stuff. Go and see it while it is on the big screen. This is art. This is the golden age. And it’s as fresh as the day they made it. I don’t care what it takes. Skip work. Go alone if you have to. All the joy that film can bring, and yours for $12.
I saw this movie with my mother and two sisters when I was a teenager. We loved it and chuckled over it for a long time, quoting lines to each other with bursts of hilarity. I still think of it as one of the most enjoyable, best movies I've seen.
I've seen the movie, and I've seen the musical live on tour. It puts a modern spin on the ending that makes it quite sweet! Such a fun show either way.