NOBODY’S PERFECT … HEAVEN KNOWS THEY TRIED
”…Problem is, the only open slots are with Sweet Sue and Her All-Girl Society Syncopaters. As if high heels, girdles, and falsies weren’t tsouris enough, “Josephine” and “Daphne” must keep those testosterone levels down while in the sensuous proximity of Marilyn Monroe’s “Sugar” Kane, the band’s sultry Chantootsie (“Look at the way she walks! Like Jello on springs!”), a melancholy baby who’s gotten “the fuzzy end of the lollipop” from a succession of jerk sax players… ”
“Transvestism, impotence, role confusion, and borderline inversion — all hilariously innocent, always on the brink of double-entendre.” – Pauline Kael. “A movie that’s about nothing but sex and yet pretends it’s about crime and greed...When sincere emotion strikes these characters, it blindsides them...
Billy Wilder took the plot from a forgotten German script, hung it on a Chicago gangland massacre, coaxed a moving performance from a star who couldn’t act, and brought off a masterpiece of farce.” It’s difficult to imagine today, but Some Like it Hot caused controversy in its day. Many actors refused to play the roles of Joe and Gerry, including Jerry Lewis. In addition, The Catholic Legion of Decency found cross-dressing to be sinful and rated it C for condemned. Furthermore, the movie was banned in the states of Kansas.On top of which, rumours were rife about the behaviour of Marilyn Munroe on set. Legend has it that the troubled star had difficulty learning simple sections of dialogue and would sometimes refuse to leave her trailer.
'' The greatest drag act since Charlie’s Aunt — with the closing line to end all closing lines — proved a box office smash and garnered six Oscar nominations, including Best Director, Actor (Lemmon), and screenplay (Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond), but left Wilder yearning for a nervous breakdown in the wake of Monroe’s endless delays and multiple takes, while wowing unlikely set visitor Satyajit Ray.''
It was very much unlike director Wilder’s darker films Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), and was advertised with the tagline: “The movie too HOT for words” – vaguely referring to either sex, jazz, or the skimpy costumes. It was released at the end of the repressive 1950s at a time when the studio system was weakening, the advent of television was threatening, and during a time of the declining influence of the Production Code and its censorship restrictions. Director-producer Wilder challenged the system with this gender-bending and risqué comedy, filled with sly and witty sexual innuendo (the “sweet” and “fuzzy end of the lollipop” represented oral sex), unembarrassed vulgarity, free love, spoofs of sexual stereotypes (bisexuality, transvestism, androgyny, homosexuality, transsexuality, lesbianism, and impotence), sexy costuming for the well-endowed, bosomy Marilyn Monroe, an outrageous and steamy seduction scene aboard a yacht, and a mix of serious themes including abuse, alcoholism, unemployment, and murder, among others.The film is a clever combination of many threads: a spoof of 1920-30′s gangster films with period costumes and speakeasies, and romance in a quasi-screwball comedy with one central joke – entangled and deceptive identities, reversed sex roles and cross-dressing, all varnished with the unique spirit of Berlin Weimar period. In fact, one of the film’s major themes is disguise and masquerade – e.g., the drag costumes of the two male musicians, Joe’s disguise as a Cary Grant-like impotent millionaire, and Jerry’s happiness with a real wealthy, yacht-owning retiree.
Who else but Wilder, and he knew Marilyn’s childlike delivery could get away with it, would write a line like “That’s the story of my life; I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”
”Nobody’s perfect”. Possibly that is the most famous last line of any American film. Well, nobody, nothing is perfect… perhaps. ”Some Like It Hot”, the picture that closes with that line, is almost the exception to the rule. Its a bit ungrateful to call a very funny film a masterpiece of its kind; it sounds like an attempt to take it out of human circulation. Still, Billy Wilder brought it upon himself; an unfailingly well made farce that was a milestone.
A milestone in that Wilder was a European director who flourished in America. It is the the best film of perhaps the greatest sex star created by Hollywood and it was likely the last of that carefree style of American comedies that sprang up when sound came in, bloomed through the thirties, and had a revival after the Second World War.It’s also a black and white film,reminiscent of the early film era, filled with non-stop action, slapstick, and one-liners reminiscent of Marx Brothers and Mack Sennett comedies.
'' Wilder once swore he would never work with Monroe again. After making “The Seven Year Itch”, Wilder swore up and down he would not make another film with her, claiming life is too short. Yet, here he was with MM again because well, no one was like Marilyn. She was oblivious to others, not necessarily uncaring just oblivious. Lemmon and Curtis would spend hours getting ready in makeup for the roles and then would still have to wait until Marilyn came out of her trailer. Still when you saw her on the screen, it was magical. ''
Hollywood had two principal waves of European directors. The first group , including such men as Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau, were imported in the twenties by an American industry that was jealous of European artistic advances and worried about commercial competition. The second group were the political refugees of the thirties. Since then it has been very difficult for a European director to make a steady career in America. Wilder was one of the last fruits of a certain kind of cultural cross-pollination.
He was born Samuel Wilder in Vienna in 1906 and was called Billy by his mother, who was madly obsessed by everything American. He worked as a journalist and in the late 1920′s went to Berlin, at that time probably the most sophisticated city in the world. He broke into films as a writer, moved to France when Hitler moved to Berlin, wrote and co-directed there for about a year, then went to Hollywood in 1934, where for four years he did very little.
''Wilder compared her screen presence to Garbo. Speaking of Monroe, there is the scene where she sings “I Wanna Be Love By Love” while wearing what amounts to a see-through gown, so carefully lit that Wilder managed to get it passed the vigilant eyes of the censors. ''
In 1938 he joined with the American writer Charles Brackett and collaborated on a number of screenplays, including Garbo’s ”Ninotchka”. In 1942 he directed his first American film, ”The Major and the Minor”, from a Wilder-Beckett script, and launched a career that included ”The Lost Weekend”, ”A Foreign Affair”, and ”Sunset Boulevard”. Through these years Wilder was acquiring a reputation for a mordantly amusing tone, a view of human behavior derived from the old-Berlin wittiness of Ernst Lubitsch and the scathing naturalism of Erich von Stroheim.
Wilder had worked for Lubitsch on ”Ninotchka, and Stroheim worked for him in ”Five Graves to Cairo” and ”Sunset Boulevard” . Aided by Ameican collaborators, Wilder was concocting his own mixture of European and domestic influences, growing more and more skilled as he refined the recipe. Another fusion lay ahead of him. Marilyn Monroe, hush-voiced, moist lipped, all made of whipped cream, burst on the world in 1950, and, retrospectively at least, it seems inevitable that her wide-eyed sexiness would some day encounter Wilder’s winking appreciation of it. In 1955 they worked together on ”Seven Year Itch” , made from a Broadway comedy. Then Wilder found a new collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond; and in 1959 the United States, in the persons of Diamond, Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis, combined with Europe, in the persons of Wilder and a man named Theoren, to create a farcical gem.
The film was originally to be shot in color, however, after some screen test of the boys dressed as girls were completed, it was decided they would be more believable in black and white. In truth, neither Lemmon nor Curtis was very convincing as women, unlike Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.”
But who was Theoren? Most references merely attribute the original idea of ”Some Like it Hot” to a story by R.Theoren and M. Logan. Wilder had no idea who Logan was but Theoren was a buddy from his Berlin days who had been a handsome actor, had co-authored a German film called ”Fanfares of Love” , had come to Hollywood as a scriptwriter, where he had prospered and urged Wilder to remake his film. Wilder was otherwise involved, but after Theoren died in the mid-fifties, an agent raised the matter again.
The German original was a heavy handed Bavarian version of ”Charlie’s Aunt” replete with lederhosen; however the central idea of two male musicians latching onto an all-girl band was compelling. Also the time Wilder and Diamond chose was perfect for the piece: the height of the prohibition era which was remote enough to be slightly romanticized, yet near enough for easy identification.
The plot concerns Joe and Jerry, a saxophone player and bass fiddler, both young and broke who witness a St. Valentine’s Day massacre in gangland Chicago in 1929. The victorious gang chief, Spats Columbo, wants the witnesses killed, but they manage to escape. Penniless, frantic to flee Chicago, they dress as girls and grab two jobs they know about, with an all-night girl band headed for a Florida hotel.
Billy Wilder
On the train they meet the luscious band vocalist, Sugar Kane, who hopes to catch a millionaire at the resort hotel. When they arrive, an aging playboy appears, named Osgood Fielding, but he falls for the disguised Jerry, now called Daphne. Meanwhile, Joe, disguised as Josephine, redisguises himself after working hours as a millionaire in order to woo Sugar. Things are progressing steadily towards conventional madness when suddenly Spats appears at the hotel for a gangland convention only to be murdered at a banquet but Joe and Jerry accidentally witness….
Wilder knew scriptwriting and understood the axiom that poor films can be made from good scripts and good films cannot be made from poor scripts. The film is representative of syntax and language as a form of embedded and embodied art; the dialogue is not a sequence of gags, but a temperamental use of language in the form of a filtered vernacular that informs and remains alienated the idiom of the ”chuckling temperament” . Perhaps an unconscious appropriation of Shakespearean comic dialogue mated to a non-linear structure. Diction is selected and arranged so that, while the characters speak always as themselves, the lines support and further the tone and action of the whole much as in a collage or a collection of pastiches where numerous threads weave and interweave. The triumph of the writing is that even when we don’t laugh, the dialogue remains humorous.
Again, this deft knitted use of ideas acts as a carefully crafted mash-up. Themes are stated that are played back at odd angles and at different timings and speeds; like the tape look experiments of the time of Pierre Schaeffer and his ”Musique Concrete” . When the ”girls” report for their joobs, the suspicious leader asks them their musical backgrounds, and they say they studied at the Sheboygan Conservatory, which awes the others. Later, when Sugar is trying to impress Joe-as-Millionare, she tells him that she studied at Sheboygan. Early, when Joe cajoles a booking agent’s secretary into lending him her car, its a Hupmobile. Much later, as the millionaire, when he invents a traumatic love affair to impress Sugar, it is with the daughter of the vice-president of Hupmobile; all interwoven strands where the author’s humor is employed as the character’s ingenuity.
Structurally, the script obeys and benefits by two traditional formal injunctions for farce. First, it conforms to Hebbel’s all-inclusive dictum on the secret of dramatic style: ”To present the necessary in the form of the accidental” . Second, it begins with a ridiculous but engaging premise, and then builds on this improbable premise with rigid logic. The one arguable moment in the logic of ”Some Like it Hot” is the appearance of Spats at the very hotel where the band happens to be playing. It appears more necessary than accidental. Still, the response to the first sight of those spatted shoes in the hotel doorway knows that as soon as Spats appears, the audience realizes that they wanted him to appear.
… Perhaps not coincidental, Wilder, coming from the Vienna of Sigmund Freud was almost a conduit and filter that shaped and helped evolve the comedic aesthetic. He synthesized the neurotically mobile life between the world wars which entailed a sensitive and near obsessed preoccupation with compromised protagonists. There is a teasing with Freudian repression theories seen through Wilder’s lens of interpreting the sexual component of social intercourse with a deft aplomb, complementary with his brand of racy liberalism and ability to provoke through risque suggestion.
There was a crisis in American sexual relations; a fertile ground for satire directed against middle American ethics within a broader context of a world of grey and off-white. Reworking themes of innocence, experience and deception are central to Wilder’s oeuvre, ;promise and disappointment and the dirty light between making the grade and failure to finish within Wilder’s tough minded feeling for the times. Wilder’s playoff between the pompous trumperies of silent Hollywood and ’30s social realism favored his liberal-humanist tradition. There is always something murky and implied beyond and beneath his movie’s surface sheen; the imagery of dank rooms and crumpled sheets of postwar America is never far off, a cynical modernity that celebrates Hollywood aesthetics but provokes the the audience which is sublimated by Wilder’s ear for the speech patterns and cadences of the American language which ”naturalizes” the message content.
”Some Like it Hot” is another metaphor for the culture’s infatuation with the lucky break, as ingrained in the American psyche almost as form of entitlement, or as a byproduct of a society spellbound with material consumption and a somewhat contrived and seamless reconciliation with his epoch’s exaggerated models of sexual and mental prowess with individual limitation as identified in the American myth: An endless affair in which half the country tries to con the other half and the lengths the other half would go to get their own back.
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