Billy Wilder | Some Like It Hot / 1959

running wild(er)

by Douglas Messerli

 

Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (screenplay, based on a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan), Billy Wilder (director) Some Like It Hot / 1959

 

There’s not a great deal to be said about Billy Wilder’s comic masterpiece Some Like It Hot that isn’t apparent in the viewing. Nearly anyone who has a sense of humor, a basic understanding of English, and the ability to decipher farcical wit, can comprehend this film; that is the wonder of this masterpiece, its near-complete accessibility to what other filmmakers hide in ironic asides or reveal through a sometimes involuted and symbolic series of images: this is a film about murder, mayhem and all things sexual—transvestism, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, lesbianism, androgyny, impotence, and everything in between. Had Wilder tried to get away with these same issues just a few years earlier, his film might never have been made. One has only to observe the maniacal guilt of Tom Ewell’s character in Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) for even imagining a sexual rendezvous with the girl (Marilyn Monroe) upstairs, to comprehend that in the four years since that film, something had drastically changed—despite the fact that the director and producers actually skirted the issue by choosing to release the film without a certificate of approval. If The Seven Year Itch might be subtitled, “thinking wild,” Some Like It Hot is literally, as Monroe croons, “running wild.”

    Wilder based his material on a German musical comedy, Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love), from which he borrowed the cross-dressing musicians, but little else. For me the first part of the movie idles a bit while establishing the down-and-out condition of the two leads (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) and the motivation for their flight and Keystone cop-like pace of the rest of the story; the least startling aspect of this gender-bending film is their decision to dress in drag. Indeed, Curtis is such a pretty-boy throughout the first part of the film, his youthful slightly pudgy face set off by the long waves of eyelashes, that when he and Lemmon suddenly appear in women’s dress, Curtis looks right for the part and is certainly as beautiful as any German saxophonist of Cabaret’s all girl orchestra. It is Lemmon’s oversized clown-like mouth and heavy chin that truly remind us throughout the film that these two girls are actually men.

     Oddly enough, it is Lemmon’s character Jerry who is committed to their transformation right from the start, so desperate for a job that he suggests they dress in drag in front of booking agent Poliakoff:

 

We could borrow some clothes from the girls in the chorus….

We get a couple of second-hand wigs, a little padding here

and there, we call ourselves Josephine and Geraldine.

 

Joe’s reaction is predictable: “He’s got an empty stomach and it’s gone to his head.” It is only their unfortunate witnessing of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in the garage where they have come to pick up Nellie’s car that forces Joe to proceed with Jerry’s plan. Introducing themselves as the “new girls” to their employers, the mean-hearted Sweet Sue and her emasculated manager Beinstock, Jerry takes their outward disguise to a new level by suddenly declaring her name to be Daphne instead of Geraldine (the feminine version of his male self). In short, once in drag he redefines herself, becoming someone quite different; like the mythical Daphne he transforms into a new thing. And it is at that very moment when Wilder seems to come alive as a director, spinning out a yarn that plunges into a near frenzy before it comes to its logical—if unexpected—conclusion.

     While, Joe deludes himself that their transformation will soon be over—"Once we get to town, we'll blow this whole setup”—Jerry has other ideas, including swallowing up the entire train car of what his stereotypical masculine persona sees as edible beauties:

 

Jerry: When I was a kid, Joe, I used to have a dream. I was locked up overnight

in a pastry shop and there was goodies all around. There was jellyrolls and

mocha éclairs and sponge cake, and Boston crème pie and cherry tarts—

Joe: [warning] Don’t. Listen to me. No butter, no pastry. We’re on a diet!

     To play safe, Joe removes the ladder to Jerry’s train berth, disallowing any access to the women. Wilder focuses on Jerry’s transformation by continuing to have Joe (the real womanizer of the two) tear his “chests”—the padding he’s used to create the illusion of breasts. When Joe finally insists that his friend re-adjust his attitude, “Just keep telling yourself you’re a girl,” a mantra which Jerry repeats in time to the rhythm of the train’s wheels, we perceive that they will never be able to turn back and that Jerry may well permanently become one of the “girls.” And even if he can't come to the girls, they readily come to Daphne, as if she were a queen bee.

      By the time they reach the Seminole-Ritz Hotel (in reality the Coronado Beach Hotel near San Diego), Jerry is already attracting, as ludicrous as it seems, the admiration of males, including the wolfish geezer Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) and the undersized bellhop, who’s ready to hop into bed with sassy Daphne. Even the other women admire Daphne’s muscular girth. Before long, (s)he is tangoing with a rose between her teeth and soon after engaged to be married!

     Joe, meanwhile, who has just had perhaps his first serious conversation with a woman, Sugar Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), on the train, has other plans in mind. Intuiting his intentions, Jerry reminds his friend—in a phrase that might be at home in any old-time gay conversation—“Well, I’m your fairy godmother. And I’m gonna keep an eye on you.”

     Joe’s transformation involves another kind of cross-dressing. Costuming himself like an Ivy League-bred, bespectacled, yacht-living, millionaire playboy—a sort of bizarre mix of bisexual and homosexual figures from Fred Astaire and Cole Porter to Cary Grant—he becomes Shell Oil “Junior”—a man right out of Sugar’s fantasies.* To encourage her to seduce him, Joe-Junior claims to be impotent, a condition resulting from the death of his beloved Nellie (another word for a homosexual) during freshman year at Princeton.

 

We were standing at the highest ledge watching the sunset, when

suddenly, we got this impulse to kiss. I took off my glasses. She took

off her glasses. I took a step toward her. She took a step toward me….

 

In an attempt to revive his sexuality, Sugar insistently kisses him—the desired result—again and again until she can melt away his supposed mental complexes and relieve him of his haunted past.

     In fact, Sugar achieves precisely that! Forced to see the world from another perspective, made to look through the eyes of his previous female victims, Joe reevaluates his life and begins to fall in love with Sugar.

      But the possibility of death suddenly looms up again in the form of a mobster convention in their very hotel. To soften the blow of his necessarily quick departure, he steals Jerry’s gift from Fielding of a diamond bracelet and delivers it up to his new love.

     Once again, the two are on the run, this time through the hotel lobby and into the meeting room itself, where they hide out under the table, bowing at the feet of their would-be murderers—a position that calls up the sexual insinuations of the lifestyle of which Sugar has previously complained: the “fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

    History is repeated as they again witness a gangland murder. But this time around, Joe and Jerry are reborn not merely in new dress, but in new behavior, as they escape with Osgood Fielding, joined by Sugar, to his yacht. Joe, it is apparent, has finally fallen in love and will be married, and Jerry—despite his attempts to explain the impossibility of marrying Fielding, at least within the comic terms the film delineates—finally admitting he's not really a girl, may nonetheless marry into a life of wealth and security with Fielding with their mutual recognition that “nobody’s perfect”!

     Throughout the film there is a running gag about Joe and Jerry sharing type O blood—the blood type that is often described as the “universal donor” since it can be shared with A, B, and O blood. Universality, indeed, seems to be one of Wilder’s goals. Perhaps for the first time in history, with its hilarious multi-sexual ending, a film directly appeals equally to audiences of all sexual orientations. Kinsey has prevailed.

     How perverse to think of this film being paired with Tennessee Williams’ drama of homosexuality and cannibalism, Suddenly Last Summer—a presentation of a completely unforgiving sexual world—upon the Los Angeles premiere of Wilder’s comedy! The showing, as one might have predicted, was a disaster.

 

*For a long time, I thought Curtis’ female character looked, at moments, a lot like Eve Arden; I was delighted more recently to read Curtis himself admitted that he based his impersonation on Arden.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2008

Reprinted from My Year 2002: Love, Death, and Transfiguration (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2015).