Some Like It Hot

When the caddish Joe (Tony Curtis) along with sidekick Jerry (Jack Lemmon) first appear in drag walking down a train platform, Curtis’ pursed lips, rhythmic shoulder movements, and lithe hip sways announce this performance as a genderfuck convincing and courageous even by modern stands of transvestitism. Throughout, Curtis' mutually reinforcing swagger as both a man and a man impersonating a woman contributes a transgressive erotic charge to Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959). 

The setting is 1929 Chicago, and Joe and Jerry take on their female disguise as Josephine and Daphne, respectively, after witnessing a massacre committed by bootlegging gangsters. They join an all-girl brass band with a steady gig at a cushy resort in Florida. The lead singer and ukelele player is Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), who they both pursue. She not inaccurately and thus somewhat poignantly describes herself as "brainless." 


Lemmon is courageously unlikeable as Jerry, creating a literally hysterical portrayal of both chronic ineptitude and insatiable panic. The performance works in some moments better than others. For one, he lacks Curtis' nimbleness, expressing physical comedy with heavy, loud gestures not particularly rooted in character so much as outrageousness. Scenes already encumbered with the elaborately absurd contrivances and misunderstandings characteristic of screwball comedies, reach a volume too loud and start to distort, becoming unpalatable and shrill. 

For example, during Jerry's initial attempts at seducing Sugar, Lemmon's manic energy distracts from the stakes: his liability to develop an erection at any moment.  The tone of the scene eventually escalates to Lemmon’s panicked pitch, as Sugar’s blonde cohorts interrupt his would-be seduction and Jerry nearly suffocates under the bombardment of silky white limbs in the film's single best image; a sexual fantasy hysterically becomes a nightmare. Still, Curtis is a much more convincing female impersonator and woman than Lemmon, so the movie’s third act gay revelation begs the question: is it no accident that the man who's good at being a woman gets the woman and the man who's bad at being a woman ends up gay and emasculated? 

Eventually, the film becomes a pungent skewering of greed. To Joe, Jerry, and Sugar, sex and money are practically interchangeable bartering chips. In Some Like It Hot, the male characters are just as likely to use sex to get money as the female characters are, and just as likely to fake having wealth as they are to fake being women. While Joe pretends to be a yachting billionaire in order to seduce Sugar, he is, at the film’s start, a notorious rake more financially reliant on mooching from the women he beds than on earning an honest living. The end of the film posits Jerry’s willingness to become gay as a means to obtain wealth. Conversely, Sugar isn’t above making up a debutante background in order to get a date with the ostensibly wealthy Joe.

The scene that cross-cuts between Joe's yacht date with Sugar and Jerry's dancing date with Osgoode (Joe E. Brown) is a hilarious triumph of editing and thematic clarity, presenting the sheer pleasure Joe and Jerry obtain from escaping the dismal reality of their lives and acting out a fantasy where they have control and power of others. 

The exchange at the end of the film between Osgoode and Jerry works as both sheer absurdity and an articulate summation of the amoral culture the movie skewers. Jerry forfeits his heterosexuality for greed and Osgoode, a reckless billionaire and predatory lech, is all too happy for the exchange. The film presents a vision of people as whores, liars, perverts (in this era's warped understanding of homosexuality), predators, and alcoholics. The fact that the movie takes place in 1929 on the verge of economic collapse seems to hammer home the bleakness and desperation that underlies this surprisingly dark comedy.