Some Like It Hot
Feb. 14th, 2005 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakValentine’s day, and in face of a busy RL, I’m managing to stay away from spoilers for my current shows. Let’s talk about old stuff instead. My favourite Valentine Day related movie has to be Some Like It Hot by the late, great Billy Wilder, which opens with the famous massacre conducted on that day. (Trust B.W. to start a comedy this way, long before the likes of Woody Allen got the idea to combine the mob and show biz.) Which gives our two heroes, unwilling witnesses to the whole affair and played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, the impetus to get into drag and hide themselves in a female band.
Comedy often dates more than tragedy because many jokes are too closely tied to the area in which the comedy in question was written. I’ve had my share of Steve Martin related “huh”s. Wilder at his best, though? Is as effective decades later as he was in in his heyday. Some Like It Hot milkes the men-disguised-as-women situational comedy for maximum effect, but there are other films doing that which aren’t nearly as dazzling. It’s Wilder’s great ear for dialogue, it’s Curtis’ character, Joe, doing his Cary Grant impersonation and hitting on the ultimate seduction technique: pretend to be shy and repressed in addition to being rich, so that the woman seduces you. It’s Marilyn Monroe who, no matter how much of a mess she was already off camera, is luminous here, making Sugar’s naivité believable and endearing instead of annoying, and showcasing her perfect comedic timing with such lines as her reply to Joe telling her he tried to get over his sexual inhibition on Dr. Freud’s couch. (She asks him whether he considered trying women instead. How did Wilder get that through the censors?) It’s that utterly unfarcical and tender moment when a broken-hearted Sugar, believing herself to be dumped, sings “I’m Through With Love”, and Joe, in disguise as Josephine, kisses her on the lips as a woman with more truth of emotion than he ever kissed her as a man and tells her, sincerely, “No guy is worth that.”
Above all, though, it’s the madcap genius of Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne. “Daphne” actually succeeds in doing what Sugar and the other girls dream of – “she” wins the affection of a nice available millionaire. Lemmon doing the tango and being utterly thrilled with getting proposed to is divine, and his dissappointment when his friend points out why he won’t be able to marry Osgood the millionnaire is played just right, not overdone. “I am a man. I am a man. I am a man.” In the end, though, that doesn’t matter any more. Wilder gives the last scene not to the “serious” (as far as comedy goes) lovers, Joe and Sugar, but to the farcical ones, “Daphne” and Osgood, and it has become one of these all-time classics everyone can quote even if they haven’t seen in question, as Jerry lists objection after objection on the marriage thing and then at last throws off his wig and screams “I am a man”, to which Osgood, dead-pan and utterly content and blissful, delivers the immortal: “Nobody is perfect.”
Indeed, nobody is. But this film comes pretty damn close. Happy Valentine, everyone.
Comedy often dates more than tragedy because many jokes are too closely tied to the area in which the comedy in question was written. I’ve had my share of Steve Martin related “huh”s. Wilder at his best, though? Is as effective decades later as he was in in his heyday. Some Like It Hot milkes the men-disguised-as-women situational comedy for maximum effect, but there are other films doing that which aren’t nearly as dazzling. It’s Wilder’s great ear for dialogue, it’s Curtis’ character, Joe, doing his Cary Grant impersonation and hitting on the ultimate seduction technique: pretend to be shy and repressed in addition to being rich, so that the woman seduces you. It’s Marilyn Monroe who, no matter how much of a mess she was already off camera, is luminous here, making Sugar’s naivité believable and endearing instead of annoying, and showcasing her perfect comedic timing with such lines as her reply to Joe telling her he tried to get over his sexual inhibition on Dr. Freud’s couch. (She asks him whether he considered trying women instead. How did Wilder get that through the censors?) It’s that utterly unfarcical and tender moment when a broken-hearted Sugar, believing herself to be dumped, sings “I’m Through With Love”, and Joe, in disguise as Josephine, kisses her on the lips as a woman with more truth of emotion than he ever kissed her as a man and tells her, sincerely, “No guy is worth that.”
Above all, though, it’s the madcap genius of Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne. “Daphne” actually succeeds in doing what Sugar and the other girls dream of – “she” wins the affection of a nice available millionaire. Lemmon doing the tango and being utterly thrilled with getting proposed to is divine, and his dissappointment when his friend points out why he won’t be able to marry Osgood the millionnaire is played just right, not overdone. “I am a man. I am a man. I am a man.” In the end, though, that doesn’t matter any more. Wilder gives the last scene not to the “serious” (as far as comedy goes) lovers, Joe and Sugar, but to the farcical ones, “Daphne” and Osgood, and it has become one of these all-time classics everyone can quote even if they haven’t seen in question, as Jerry lists objection after objection on the marriage thing and then at last throws off his wig and screams “I am a man”, to which Osgood, dead-pan and utterly content and blissful, delivers the immortal: “Nobody is perfect.”
Indeed, nobody is. But this film comes pretty damn close. Happy Valentine, everyone.
