As This Film Turns 40, Fans Still Like It: ‘Hot’

In a summer glamorized by gross-out films with all their sexual and scatological thunder, Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” quietly sneaks into town today for a five-day, 40th anniversary run at the Nuart--in a stunning new print--to remind us what great comedy really is.

While it may have lost some of its subversive gender-bending edge over the years, and its innocence may seem irrelevant to the current Shock Me generation, the film has lost none of its verbal and visual brilliance. And its conceptual daring and farcical adeptness make it one of the all-time classic comedies.

The cast is headed by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, in drag as those irrepressible musicians Josephine and Daphne, on the run from irate gangster George Raft after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. They’re joined by the irresistible Marilyn Monroe singing torch songs, playing the ukulele and showing off her legendary carnal stuff--a melancholy baby running away from the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

The plot involves one deception after another, running wild in dizzying succession: Curtis dressing up as an oil tycoon (a dead-on impersonation of Cary Grant) to seduce Monroe, who’s doing a bit of seductive play-acting herself to play in his league; Lemmon dating wacky millionaire Joe E. Brown and forgetting he’s in drag. Zowie!

“Some Like It Hot” is that rarest of Hollywood beasts these days--a smart comedy for adults. Thanks to Wilder and his late co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, there’s motivation that’s believable, construction that’s sound and economical, dialogue that crackles with the rhythm of jazz, verbal jousting, double-entendres, gags that are set up and then paid off with unexpected results.

Something Lemmon once said about doing comedy should be taken to heart by all actors and directors: Play it seriously. What’s remarkable in “Hot” is how well Curtis and Lemmon perform together as a team; there’s a synergy between them that comes out of the amusing pain the characters experience. Monroe isn’t the only one cursed by the fuzzy end of the lollipop. These two are also born losers. Curtis may be the dominant schemer, but he’s always wrong. It’s prissy and foolish Lemmon who comes up with the idea of dressing up as women.

The first glimpse of them in drag, hustling to make their train, remains one of the screen’s most hysterical moments. Amusingly, it’s Curtis who’s initially perfectly at ease with the look and the walk, and Lemmon who’s so ill at ease. Boy, will that change. The first fleshy glimpse of Monroe, though, changes the whole dynamic of the story. As Lemmon’s character says, “It’s a whole different sex.”

Despite her notorious emotional and physical problems during the shooting of the film, Monroe delivers a transcendent performance--sex laced with sadness. Perhaps there’s more Norma Jean in this performance than she had showed before.

Monroe’s Sugar Kane cries out for comfort and seduces both Lemmon and Curtis in two very different ways. Lemmon becomes her platonic friend when she hides in bed with him, and Curtis becomes her lover after feigning impotence aboard Brown’s yacht. Rather than fighting over her, Lemmon discovers a latent gold-digging tendency of his own and concentrates on Brown, the only honest character in the film. (Lemmon’s annoying Brown-like laugh is a nice touch: It anticipates their coupling.)

Farce aside, what makes “Hot” such a wonder is the depth of its love story. It’s what reverses Curtis and Lemmon’s motivations, and what enables them to discover their true identities. And the revelations come from opposite directions. For Lemmon, his all-night tango with Brown results in a marriage proposal that he refuses to reconsider later when he’s alone with Curtis and reminded once again that he’s a man. The delirious confusion is one of the film’s funniest moments.

For Curtis, the sight of Monroe singing “I’m Through With Love” at the film’s climax redeems him once and for all. And why wouldn’t it? Her pain is very convincing. As for Lemmon, deception is more fun than reality because, in the words of the film’s famous closing line, “Nobody’s perfect.”

‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Apartment’ on Lineup

Besides “Hot,” the Nuart is also playing a double-bill of two other Wilder films, “The Apartment” and “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” on Wednesday and next Thursday. MGM/UA has struck brand-new prints of these gems as well.

In a way, these films comprise the second and third parts of Wilder’s most profound love trilogy. “The Apartment,” which won a best picture Oscar in 1960, took a much darker turn than “Hot,” despite its comedic roots. It’s acknowledged as a masterpiece that gave Lemmon the chance to widen his acting range.

Nice guys and gals ultimately don’t finish last in this hard-edged romance in which Lemmon gets coerced into loaning his apartment for sexual favors to colleagues at the office. His executive rise isn’t all that he thought it would be, though, as his chronic loneliness merely intensifies. Once again, the construction is magnificent as we nervously await two painful revelations: Lemmon’s discovery that his unrequited love (elevator operator Shirley MacLaine) is the mysterious object of Fred MacMurray’s lecherous affections, and MacLaine’s discovery that Lemmon’s apartment is the site of her rendezvous with MacMurray.

The very underrated “Sherlock Holmes,” meanwhile, goes even deeper into love’s dark and private corridors. It’s Wilder and Diamond’s most melancholy collaboration. Cut by more than an hour prior to release in 1970, the film has taken on almost legendary status. Unfortunately, only bits and pieces have been retrieved, so we’ll probably never have the pleasure of viewing this magnum opus in its entirety.

And yet the familiar version that will be screened is powerfully self-contained and more than sufficient. Robert Stephens makes a forlorn Holmes in search of a challenging crime to test his extraordinary mind; he’s an artist, really, who finds himself anachronistically out of place at the end of the 19th century. Colin Blakely plays a trusting if prosaic Dr. Watson, made uneasy by his friend’s ambiguous sexuality and depressed state of mind. But they survive by their wits and, of course, double-entendres.

A beautiful and mysterious woman (Genevieve Page) comes between them, laying a bizarre trap that leads to love, betrayal and a frightening glimpse of the future in which man is superseded by machine. It’s enough to make anyone take cocaine and play the violin. If Holmes only knew “I’m Through With Love.”