Some Like It Hot (1959)

"Some of the wittiest one-liners on film.  Christopher Null, FilmCritic.com
"A dazzling screwball that holds up decades later.  Metro Weekly
"One of the greatest comedies ever.  Michael Thomson, BBC
"Arguably the best American comedy.  D.K. Holm, DVD Talk
"...a smart farce that has a high-energy pace, sparked by stunning performances by the stars.  Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews
"...a flawlessly scripted, superbly performed and endlessly witty comedy that deserves its place among the all-time greats.  James Jennings, Channel 4 Film
"Legendary. Sensational from start to finish!  Leonard Maltin
"One of the greatest comedies ever.  Michael Thomson, BBC Online
"A dazzling screwball that holds up decades later.  Randy Shulman, Metro Weekly

Editor's Note Billy Wilder's classic comedy stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as a pair of unemployed musicians who inadvertently become witnesses to the St. Valentine Day's Massacre. To escape the wrath of the gangsters, Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon) are forced to hit the road in drag, taking the only jobs available with an all-girl band bound for Miami. Enroute, both men fall for lead singer and blond bombshell Sugar Kane, (Marilyn Monroe), but are unable to fulfill their desires for fear of revealing their identity. Joe tries to get around this by adopting a third identity for seduction, that of a shy millionaire who sounds strangely like Cary Grant. Meanwhile Jerry has his own problems, fighting off the advances of Osgood E. Fielding, a real millionaire hypnotized by his/her charms.

	George Raft
	Jack Lemmon
	Marilyn Monroe
	Tony Curtis
	Adolph Deutsch - Original Music By
	Arthur P. Schmidt - Editor
	Billy Wilder - Producer
	Billy Wilder - Director
	Charles Lang - Cinematographer
	Robert Thoeren - Writer

Chicago Sun-Times
"...Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft..." 01/09/2000 p.5

Entertainment Weekly
"...[Monroe's] lighter than-air work remains a divine enhancement to one of the funniest movies ever..." 06/01/2001 p.67

Total Film
"...Elegant, sexy, energetic and side-slicingly funny, SOME LIKE IT HOT is the film all high-concept comedies want to be when they grow up..." 12/01/2000 p.109

Premiere
"Lemmon enacts one of moviedom's great comic creations." 04/01/2004 p.67

Entertainment Weekly
"Monroe's and Lemmon's finest two hours, and Curtis chip in a brutal Cary Grant impression." -- Grade: A- 07/21/2006 p.57

Empire
5 stars out of 5 -- "Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are enormously enjoyable....While Marilyn Monroe is a vision as wide-eyed love interest, Sugar." 09/01/2007 p.158

Wall Street Journal
"This was the film Marilyn Monroe made immediately after THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, and the artistic apex of her career." 11/25/2011

Reel.com 10 of 10
When acting great Jack Lemmon passed away recently, the outpouring of admiration and accolades for his 50-plus years on stage and screen was immediate. And, rightly so, for the Everyman was as comfortable in drama (Days of Wine and Roses, Save the Tiger, Glengarry Glen Ross) as the comedies upon which he first made his reputation (It Should Happen to You, Mister Roberts). ABC even pre-empted its scheduled programming a few days after Lemmon's death to reprise his final Emmy-winning performance in Tuesdays with Morrie. And while that role does offer a fine example of Lemmon's latter-day twinkling, to see Lemmon at his best, try, instead, Some Like It Hot. The American Film Institute named the Billy Wilder screwball comedy the number one comedy of the 20th century... - Pam Grady

Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
What a work of art and nature is Marilyn Monroe. She hasn't aged into an icon, some citizen of the past, but still seems to be inventing herself as we watch her. She has the gift of appearing to hit on her lines of dialogue by happy inspiration, and there are passages in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" where she and Tony Curtis exchange one-liners like hot potatoes. Poured into a dress that offers her breasts like jolly treats for needy boys, she seems totally oblivious to sex while at the same time melting men into helpless desire. "Look at that!" Jack Lemmon tells Curtis as he watches her adoringly. "Look how she moves. Like Jell-O on springs. She must have some sort of built-in motor. I tell you, it's a whole different sex."...Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft, a movie that's about nothing but sex and yet pretends it's about crime and greed. It is underwired with Wilder's cheerful cynicism, so that no time is lost to soppiness and everyone behaves according to basic Darwinian drives. When sincere emotion strikes these characters, it blindsides them: Curtis thinks he wants only sex, Monroe thinks she wants only money, and they are as astonished as delighted to find they want only each other...The plot is classic screwball. Curtis and Lemmon play Chicago musicians who disguise themselves as women to avoid being rubbed out after they witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre...The movie has been compared to Marx Brothers classics, especially in the slapstick chases as gangsters pursue the heroes through hotel corridors. The weak points in many Marx Brothers films are the musical interludes--not Harpo's solos, but the romantic duets involving insipid supporting characters. "Some Like It Hot" has no problems with its musical numbers because the singer is Monroe, who didn't have a great singing voice but was as good as Frank Sinatra at selling the lyrics. - Roger Ebert

Apollo Movie Guide 9 of 10
By the 1950s, Hollywood's own 'production code' had dominated American cinema for nearly two decades. The code was created to protect the industry by controlling the content of films. It set out stringent, and by today's standards, laughable, limits on what could be portrayed or even discussed in film, and for many year's, Hollywood's control of American movie houses meant that films not approved under the code simply would not be shown...This began to break down in the 1950s. As they lost control of theatres, the studios began to see foreign films and the first few major independent domestic productions that ignored the code doing well at the box office...Some Like It Hot is the product of the declining years of the production code. German emigre director Billy Wilder had been on the cutting edge of commercial film for some time when it was made in 1959. His The Seven Year Itch (1955) had been a biting and successful comedic swipe at sexual mores, and Some Like it Hot built on that earlier effort, with murder and mayhem, drinking, cross-dressing and seduction, set in the roaring '20s and presented at a frenetic and hilarious pace...Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two musicians who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, pursued by Chicago mobsters after they witness a gangland execution. Their solution? Dress in drag and hop on a Florida-bound train with an all-woman band. The band's vocalist is Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe...The cast is uniformly good, with Curtis and Lemmon working well together and Monroe being at her naughty best. But this is one case where the whole is clearly much greater than the sum of its parts. Wilder's mastery of the art of direction is evident throughout, and you'll have a hard time finding a faster paced comedy, nor one that delivers it all so flawlessly. - Brian Webster