Some Like It Hot (1959)

The humor here is immediate—they're surrounded by buxom, blond-haired beauties, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're horny wolves in sheep's clothing, and Jerry hilariously has to keep reminding himself, "I'm a girl. I'm a girl. I'm a girl." The sexual predicament is amplified when they both fall for "Sugar" Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), the band's chest-heavy, pouty-lipped singer, a runaway who has a thing for sax players. To gain Sugar's affection, Joe—a sax man—dons an additional disguise as "Junior," a yacht-owning millionaire, and hijinks ensue as he scrambles to keep all of his identities straight. Meanwhile, "Daphne" receives a marriage proposal from an actual millionaire—played by the loony Joe E. Brown—and accepts, believing he can scheme his way into receiving monthly alimony checks when they inevitably divorce. Joe sees numerous problems with this plan, chiefly, "What are you gonna do on your honeymoon?" Jerry, not even considering the implications, replies, "We've been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera, but I'm kinda leaning toward Niagara Falls."

The screenplay, co-written by Wilder and his frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, crackles with these kinds of clever reversals, rich with wink- wink subtext. Where a similarly themed film today would go for broad, raunchy gags aimed at the lowest common denominator, the comedy in Some Like It Hot is both sexy and sophisticated, implicit rather than explicit. This was partially mandated by the boundaries of polite taste at the time, but Wilder also understood that it's better to keep an audience in a state of longing, to leave just enough unseen and unsaid that viewers take pleasure filling in the blanks with their imaginations.

This goes for his visual gags as well as the dialogue. When Marilyn Monroe is onstage coyly singing "I Wanna Be Loved By You," she wears a nearly see-through gossamer dress that—from a distance—looks to be barely there at all, with stitching that accentuates the anatomical details we know lie just underneath. Even more tantalizingly, Wilder throws a spotlight on her face but leaves her breasts in the shadows below, a directorial tease that's highly intentional. Later, there's a great scene where Sugar and Joe—as the millionaire "Junior"—find themselves alone together on a yacht that Joe has discretely commandeered. Lying on a couch, Joe tells Sugar about his inability to fall in love and how, when he's with a girl, "it does absolutely nothing to me." The undertone is clear; he's actually talking about impotence—performance anxiety—and I don't think you have to strain to also read hints of homosexuality into the conversation. Sugar, concerned, asks if she can "take a crack" at curing him. They share a long, slow kiss in close-up, and in the background, out of focus, we see Joe's leg rise triumphantly into the air. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Sigmund Freud once supposedly said about his ever-present, unmistakably phallic stogie, but in this case, a leg is most definitely not just a leg.

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are simply brilliant as the two cross-dressing imposters. Although his goofy Cary Grant impersonation as "Junior" has always seemed like the film's one false move, Curtis is great as the relative straight man—so to speak—to both Jerry and Sugar. Lemmon gets to let loose more—a lot more—and in his performance, which amounts to controlled comic anarchy, you can see the stylistic germ of many future comedians, most notably Steve Martin, who seems to have borrowed Lemmon's timing, physicality, and even a few facial expressions for his own career. I don't think anyone would blame him. Lemmon was one of the greats, and this was one of his best roles. Marilyn Monroe, however, is the star that gives Some Like It Hot its gravity and shine. She's perfect as "Sugar" Kane, because—and this is true in almost all of her films— she somehow exudes innocence even while she positively oozes sex. This is partly attributable to the "dumb blond" persona that Wilder helped establish in The Seven Year Itch—perpetuated here in lines like, "Real diamonds! They must be worth their weight in gold!"—but what really gives Sugar dimension is how similar she seems to the real-life Marilyn, who was also always trying to run away from her past. She's buoyant, and a little air-headed, but the character is grounded by her world-weariness. She's been emotionally abused, kicked around, abandoned by guys who leave nothing behind but "a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste all squeezed out." We want to see her make good, to see her naiveté rewarded. That Marilyn is incredibly sexy too is the icing on an already-filling cake. The name "Sugar" is apropos; Marilyn is both refined and raw, sweet and deliciously decadent.