Some Like It Hot

Hollywood sex fantasies are usually called something like "I Was A Captive Love Slave For The Amazons" and usually star Victor Mature as a social anthropologist, captured in darkest Africa by a lost tribe of lithe, fair-skinned vixens, whose only desire is that he stay and propagate the race. The scholarly but virile anthropologist always has a beautiful fiancee back at the university to whom neither love potion nor dance of the seven virgin starlets can keep him from returning.

Billy Wilder, who wrote and directed Some Like It Hot, is an ingenious man: he plays on erotic fantasies for every taste, manipulating all the tested devices of the "Amazon" movies. Imagine being a jazz musician (Jack Lemmon) who has to escape a gang of Chicago bootleggers because you inadvertantly witnessed the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Imagine that your only traveling to Florida. Finally, picture yourself on a train way out is to disguise yourself and join an all-girls band with nothing but girls, all of them in flimsy negligees, one of them Marilyn Monroe, crawling all over your Pullman berth. Just imagine.

But that's just the titillation. Imagine being Lemmon's buddy, Tony Curtis, changing from your girl's costume and convincing Marilyn Monroe--voluptuous, innocent, stupid Marilyn--that you are a rich, kindly, and impotent millionaire. Naturally, Marilyn insists on trying her hand at curing you. ("Oh, you play water polo?" she asks, batting her eyelashes. "Isn't that dangerous?" "Yes," you answer, "I've lost two ponies out from under me.")

But Mr. Wilder is not merely ingenious; he is down-right clever. And Some Like It Hot is not merely titillating, but very funny. Jack Lemmon's portrayal of the hungry little boy turned loose in a lollipop factory with his hands tied behind his back (he's got to keep pretending he's a girl) is one of his most delightful movie performances. Marilyn Monroe is perfectly cast, and she is great. And she sings, too. Tony Curtis makes one of his rare appearances as something other than a stud, and though he lacks Lemmon's and Monroe's sense of timing and their warmth, his performance has charm, especially when he plays the musician posing as a millionaire by imitating Cary Grant.

The minor parts were written by Mr. Wilder with sharp satiric bite, and they are played by just the right actors. Pat O'Brien is the loud-mouthed cop who always catches the crooks just after they've destroyed all the evidence. Joe E. Brown plays a millionaire who's hot after Lemmon, not being able to see through the disguise. And George Raft plays Spats Colombo, the dapper bootlegger, the part he's been playing since they started making gangster movies.

Billy Wilder's ingenuity and cleverness are beyond reproach. But he has more, much more; he has virtue. At the end of the movie, after what has seemed to be pure fantasy and games, he manages to include a few scenes in which Tony Curtis, who has all along been playing poor Marilyn for a sucker, discovers suddenly that deep down where it counts he loves her after all, and does the noble thing. These scenes call to mind the "Love Slave" movies in which the hero finally escapes from his immoral torturers and flees to his faithful fiancee, or The Apartment, a later and more bitter Wilder satire with the same sort of ending, guaranteed to keep people from being too disturbed by the evil thoughts the movie has engendered. Wilder has made a very funny movie, one fit, unfortunately, for the whole family.