Information about Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot
Directed by	Billy Wilder
Produced by	Ashton Productions / Mirisch Company
Written by	Billy Wilder I. A. L. Diamond
Starring	Marilyn Monroe Tony Curtis Jack Lemmon George Raft Joe E. Brown
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 and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. The supporting cast includes George Raft, Joe E. Brown, Pat O'Brien, and Nehemiah Persoff.

The film 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 film, Fanfaren der Liebe (directed by Kurt Hoffmann, 1951), so that Wilder's film is seen by some as a remake.

In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Some Like It Hot as the greatest American comedy film of all time.

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. The two disguise themselves as women and call themselves Josephine and Geraldine (later Jerry changes it to Daphne). They join the band and go to Florida by train. Joe and Jerry both fall for "Sugar Kane" Kowalczyk (Monroe), the band's sexy 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. One night Osgood asks Jerry/Daphne out to his yacht. Joe convinces Jerry/Daphne to keep Osgood ashore while he goes on his yacht with Sugar. That night Osgood proposes to Daphne/Jerry who, in a state of excitement, accepts. 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. Enroute, Sugar tells Joe she's in love with him, not with Junior. Jerry tries to explain Osgood that he can't marry him for many different reasons, all of which Osgood seems oblivious to. Eventually Jerry/Daphne produces his trump card, pulling off his wig and saying "I'm a man!". Thereupon Osgood simply utters the immortal line "Well, nobody's perfect".

Trivia

• After the major success of Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe wanted to work with Jack Lemmon again. She auditioned for the role of Fran Kubelik in The Apartment, a 1960 comedy drama which starred Lemmon. But when Monroe had to do the comedy, Let's Make Love instead, Shirley MacLaine got the part that she wanted. But Lemmon was able to fix a few things and it was all set. Monroe was set to star with Lemmon in Irma La Douce instead. But she died just before production started in August, 1962.
• 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.
• At the Some Like It Hot premiere in March 1959, before the interviewer asked Marilyn Monroe anything, she said; "Isn't Jack Lemmon the funniest man in the world?"
• Tony Curtis is frequently quoted as saying that kissing Marilyn Monroe was like "kissing Hitler." In a 2001 interview with Leonard Maltin, Curtis stated that he never made this claim.

• Wilder paid tribute to three great gangster films of the 1930s with subtle gags in the film'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.
• In one scene, Joe allays Jerry's concerns about losing their jobs at the speakeasy ("suppose it doesn't last a long time?") by saying, "suppose the stock market crashes. Suppose Mary Pickford divorces Douglas Fairbanks. Suppose the Dodgers leave Brooklyn!" By 1959, of course, all of these things had happened.
• 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.
• The film's title is a line in the nursery rhyme "Pease Porridge Hot." It also occurs as dialogue in the film when Joe, as "Junior", tells Sugar he prefers classical music over hot jazz.
• The film's working title was "Not Tonight, Josephine".
• 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-1960s. 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.
• The title of a 1939 comedy movie called Some Like It Hot starring Bob Hope was eventually changed to "Rhythm Romance" for television reruns to avoid confusion with the more successful Marilyn Monroe film released two decades later. Aside from the title, taken from a nursery rhyme, the two comedies are unrelated. The 1939 film was made the year before Road to Singapore transformed theatre and radio personality Hope into a box office sensation.

Cast

Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk
Tony Curtis as Joe - 'Josephine'/'Junior'
Jack Lemmon as Jerry - 'Daphne'
George Raft as Spats Colombo
Pat O'Brien as Det. Mulligan
Joe E. Brown as Osgood Fielding III
Nehemiah Persoff as Little Bonaparte
Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue
Billy Gray as Sig Poliakoff
George E. Stone as Toothpick Charlie
Dave Barry as Beinstock
Mike Mazurki as Spats' henchman
Harry Wilson as Spats' henchman
Grace Lee Whitney as Rosella
Beverly Wills as Dolores
Barbara Drew as Nellie
Edward G. Robinson, Jr. as Johnny Paradise

Adaptations

In 1972, a musical play based on the screenplay of the film, 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.

In 1975, an Indian film director Narendra Bedi directed Rafoo Chakkar (u-turned), a film majorly inspired by Some Like It Hot starring Indian actor Rishi Kapoor and actress Neetu Singh as the main stars.

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 film has been acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest film comedies ever made. It ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest comedies 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).

Soundtrack

• I'm Through With Love
  

by Gus Kahn, Matty Malneck, Jay Livingston
Performed by Marilyn Monroe

• I Wanna Be Loved By You
  

by Bert Kalmar, Herbert Wood, Harry Ruby
Performed by Marilyn Monroe

• Some Like It Hot
  

by Matty Malneck and I.A.L. Diamond
Performed by Marilyn Monroe

• Runnin' Wild
  

by A.H. Gibbs, Joe Grey, Leo Wood
Performed by Marilyn Monroe

• Down Among the Sheltering Palms
  

by Olmar-Brockman

• Sugar Blues
  

by Williams-Fletcher

• By the Beautiful Sea
  

by Harry Carroll, Harold Atteridge

• Sweet Georgia Brown
  

by Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard, Kenneth Casey

• La Cumparsita
  

Written by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez

Famous quotes

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!

See also

• Cross-dressing in film and television

External links

• Roger Ebert's review of Some Like It Hot
• Plot summary for Fanfaren der Liebe

•  • [ e] Films directed by Billy Wilder

Mauvaise Graine • The Major and the Minor • Five Graves to Cairo • Double Indemnity • Death Mills • The Lost Weekend • The Emperor Waltz • A Foreign Affair • Sunset Boulevard • Ace in the Hole • Stalag 17 • Sabrina • The Seven Year Itch • The Spirit of St. Louis • Love in the Afternoon • Witness for the Prosecution • Some Like It Hot • The Apartment • One, Two, Three • Irma la Douce • Kiss Me, Stupid • The Fortune Cookie • The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes • Avanti! • The Front Page • Fedora • Buddy Buddy