Some Like It Hot

Director: Billy Wilder

1959 / 121min / DCP

Few works in film history have earned so many horselaughs through the years as has Wilder’s relentlessly zany gender-bender, featuring two of the most famous (even if fake!) beauty marks in Hollywood, courtesy Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Jack Lemmon) escaping certain doom as witnesses to mob murders in Prohibition Era Chicago by donning showgirl drag and, as Josephine and Daphne, joining a Florida-bound all-female review. Complications ensue when Jerry catches the eye of an elderly millionaire, and Joe falls head over heels for Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe, in a role that makes the most of her talent for combining pathos and comedy). Wilder brings the sexual anarchy of the Weimar Berlin cabaret into Eisenhower America, in a work which has lost nothing of its spirited exuberance and zest for life.

Part of Animal Farm: Moles