Billy Wilder's cross-dressing crime comedy. Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis. Widely considered the greatest American film comedy.
Chicago, February 1929. Joe and Jerry, two struggling jazz musicians, accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. To escape Capone's enforcers, they disguise themselves as women — Josephine (Joe) and Daphne (Jerry) — and join an all-female band on a train to Florida. The band's lead singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) becomes the object of Joe's romantic interest; meanwhile, a wealthy elderly man named Osgood Fielding III becomes obsessed with Daphne.
The film unfolds across roughly a week in Florida. Joe woos Sugar in a second disguise (as a Shell Oil heir, in addition to his Josephine cover). Jerry/Daphne fends off Osgood's proposals. The Chicago gangsters arrive at the Florida hotel for a 'syndicate convention'. The film closes with all four protagonists in a motorboat fleeing the gangsters, and with Osgood, on being told Daphne is actually a man, delivering the closing line: 'Well, nobody's perfect.'
Some Like It Hot was voted the greatest American film comedy by the American Film Institute in their 2000 100 Years…100 Laughs survey. The ranking has held up. Almost every subsequent survey by working comedy filmmakers places it in the genre's first tier.
What's striking is how well it holds up. Most comedies from the 1950s look dated — the gender comedy, in particular, often has not aged well. Some Like It Hot is the rare 1950s comedy whose gender material continues to land as intended. Joe and Jerry are not the joke; their attempt to perform femininity convincingly is the joke, and the film consistently treats their failure with affection rather than mockery. The film, despite its cross-dressing premise, is structurally less reactionary than most subsequent comedies on the theme.
Marilyn Monroe's performance as Sugar Kane is widely considered the best of her career. The performance has surface charm (the comic timing, the singing of I Wanna Be Loved by You and I'm Through With Love) and genuine pathos (Sugar's vulnerability is structurally important to the film's third act).
The production was, by Wilder's own subsequent accounts, difficult. Monroe was reportedly chronically late to set, often requiring dozens of takes to deliver lines, and intermittently incapacitated by personal struggles. Wilder has been documented as describing the experience in extremely critical terms in subsequent decades. The performance, however, lands. Monroe's specific qualities — the breathy delivery, the apparent fragility — are part of what makes Sugar Kane the film's emotional centre.
The final line of Some Like It Hot — Osgood Fielding III's response to Daphne's revelation that he is actually a man — is, by survey of working screenwriters, one of the most-quoted final lines in any film. 'Well, nobody's perfect.'
What the line does is refuse the conventional gender-comedy ending the audience has been trained to expect. In a more-conventional 1959 film, the cross-dressing revelation would have been the resolution: the man-pretending-to-be-a-woman would be unmasked, normalcy would be restored. Some Like It Hot refuses this. Osgood, on hearing Daphne is a man, treats it as a non-issue. The relationship is going to continue. The film closes on this acceptance, played for a laugh, but the laugh is on the conventions the film is bypassing rather than on the people inside it. The line was, in 1959, almost radical in its implications. It still holds up.