Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot is an American classic,
placed at number one on the American Film Institute’s list of the funniest
American movies (number two was Tootsie,
with which it has some obvious similarities), and voted among the best films
ever made in various other polls. I saw the film again recently, after a long
absence from it, and felt again that its status is a bit overblown. When I use
this space to write about non-current movies, it’s usually to illuminate the
under-appreciated, not to throw stones at beloved artifacts. But then,
defending our beloved artifacts only deepens our love for them. So take this as
my constructive gift to Some Like it Hot
fans.
Nobody’s perfect
The film follows
two jazz musicians who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre and take
the only available route out of Chicago: going in drag and joining an
all-girl’s band en route to Florida. Joe falls for the singer, Sugar Kane, and
makes moves on her at the resort in the guise of a millionaire oil heir,
disguised this time behind a thick pair of glasses and a Cary Grant
impersonation; Jerry finds himself pursued by a kooky real-life millionaire.
Eventually the gangsters turn up in Florida, but the two couples get away, with
the classic closing line when the kook discovers Jerry is actually a man:
“Nobody’s perfect” (number forty-eight in the AFI’s list of top movie quotes).
The movie is a
masterpiece of pace and structure. It starts with some artful misdirection,
allowing us to think we might be watching a gangster movie; the top-billed
Sugar doesn’t turn up for the first half hour or so. It’s crammed with
one-liners and conceptual flourishes, but by modern standards allows its key
characters lots of breathing space; when it cranks up the pace for the home
stretch, it almost assumes an air of blissful stream of consciousness (how do
the guys, under hot pursuit, change back so quickly into their female
disguises? Who cares!). It has great black and white photography, as polished
as onyx and silver. And above all perhaps, it has Marilyn Monroe, in one of her
most iconic roles, a little heavier than the studio wanted (and quite a bit
heavier than present-day conventions would allow) but beautiful and tender, and
performing some of her best-known musical numbers, in particular “I Wanna be
Loved by You.” It’s probably as easy to watch as any film could be.
So why the
reservations? Partly because much of its impact depends on simplifications
which, although constituting reasonable applications of suspended disbelief at
the time of its production, now seem rather grotesque. Most of these involve,
inevitably, sex. That famous last line speaks to a libido so over-charged, it’s
lost track of the basics, making any rational human interaction implausible
(and, it seems, making any meaningful physicality unthinkable). The movie pulls
Jerry into a similar vortex: his head initially spins from the intimate access
to scantily-clad women, but when the millionaire proposes to him, he succumbs
entirely to the notion that he might get married, with Joe having to forcibly
remind him he’s a boy. This doesn’t make any psychological sense of course,
especially since Joe never exhibits the slightest gender confusion. This might
sound like too heavy a hammer to apply, but I can’t help thinking in contrast
of how the richest Hollywood films - like many of Howard Hawks’ for instance -
remain emotionally plausible and moving, despite their heavy stylization and
the limitations of the time.
Jack Lemmon
The film’s
portrayal of Jerry is actually quite mean-spirited. Their relationship at the
start is one of those inexplicable double-acts where they seem to operate as de
facto life partners, making all major decisions collectively, even though Joe
basically abuses and manipulates him. Hawks uses structures like this too, in Only Angels Have Wings for instance, but
his films always convey a sense of an intricate and inherently balanced social
system, responding to each member’s inherent strength and weakness and moral
resources. In Some Like it Hot, Jerry
just seems like a loser who keeps getting duped, and there’s something rather
cruel in how he’s the first of the two to set his sights on Sugar, only to be
shoved aside when Joe focuses in the same direction.
Jack Lemmon plays
Jerry, and I’ll tell you, I love Jack Lemmon, he’s one of the few actors who
influences my movie choices (I recently chose to watch Under the Yum Yum Tree – what more do you need to know?) but this
is just about my least favourite of his major performances. I know that’s odd;
for a lot of people it’s the opposite. But his “Daphne” is a gargoyle,
tittering and screeching; to say the least, it’s an unsophisticated approach to
the character. Lemmon’s great strength as an actor, I think, was in embodying
the impossible weight of conformity – time and time again he showed how the
business suit barely stays on for all the tics and anxieties and excess booze. Some Like it Hot hints at that theme –
how could his sexuality be so fluid if his ego wasn’t basically a wreck? – but
it’s patently not what the film is about. Tony Curtis as Joe does more with
less, but once again the winner is Hawks, for I Was a Male War Bride, coincidentally with Cary Grant.
Billy Wilder
None of this
should suggest I dislike Billy Wilder’s work, although I guess I’m cooler about
it than The Artist’s Michel
Hazanavicius, who calls Wilder the “perfect director” and thanked him three
times in his Oscar acceptance speech. I tend to prefer the older Wilder,
loosening up the pace a bit and taking advantage of more relaxed standards in
films like The Private Life of Sherlock
Holmes and, especially, Avanti!
As for peak-period, firing-on-all-cylinders Wilder, I’d go instead for One Two Three with James Cagney, an even
faster-paced, higher-functioning machine, built around a Coke executive in West
Berlin. An interesting thing though – the plot turns in large part on a
Communist rabble-rouser who Cagney through force of will (and lots of shouting)
remakes in no time at all into an immaculate pin-striped capitalist, a
transformation not so far removed from Jerry’s instant inner metamorphosis into
a woman. You could view that as a wisely cynical view of human integrity, or as
plausibility sacrificed for narrative contingency, papered over by dazzling
speed and facility (his late curio Fedora
takes the device to its extreme, revolving around the substitution of one
person for another – the difference is that Fedora
illustrates greater empathy for the psychic toll on the victim).
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