Some Like It Hot (Ashton Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, September 26) my husband Charles and I watched what amounted to a Billy Wilder double feature on Turner Classic Movies even though that’s not really what the TCM programmers intended. The first film on our program was the 1959 drag comedy Some Like It Hot, which they were showing as the second half of a double feature that also included the original 1978 French version of La Cage aux Folles even though the movies have virtually nothing in common other than they both feature men dressed as women. Some Like It Hot actually began life in 1935 as a French film called Fanfare of Love about a pair of struggling male musicians who adopt various disguises to get jobs. They dress as Hungarians to get jobs in a Gypsy band; they do blackface to get jobs in a Black band; and they dress as women to get jobs in an all-woman band. Robert Thoeren, expatriate German director who in 1933 – just before the Nazis took power, which counts as one of the worst bits of timing in film history – had just made Viktor und Viktoria, about a woman who joins a troupe of female impersonators and has to pretend to be a man pretending to be a woman, wrote the script along with Michael Logan (who like Thoeren got writing credit on Some Like It Hot) along with Pierre Prévert and René Pulpi (who didn’t). In 1958 Billy Wilder had the idea to do a remake but eliminate all the other disguises to focus on the leads playing two men who have to dress and pose as women. Wilder’s original casting for the film was Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as the cross-dressing male leads and Mitzi Gaynor as Sugar Kane, the band’s ukulele player and singer whom they both fall for. But when Wilder made that proposal to United Artists, they turned his cast down because none of the suggested leads had enough star power to carry a film. The UA “suits” said they’d finance the film if Wilder could get a more important male – Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis – for one of the leads. Wilder actually made an appointment with Sinatra to discuss the role, but Sinatra never showed up. (When La Cage aux Folles was remade in the U.S. in 1996 as The Birdcage, Sinatra was once again offered the male lead and flaked out of the meeting to discuss it.) Then Wilder got a call from Arthur Miller, the prestigious playwright who was then married to Marilyn Monroe. Miller told Wilder that Monroe had just suffered a miscarriage and needed a job immediately to get her mind off the tragedy of losing her baby. (Monroe would get pregnant again during Some Like It Hot and would once again have a miscarriage; later Monroe biographers have guessed that she couldn’t bring a pregnancy to term because she’d had too many illegal abortions during her starlet days and they’d torn up her insides.) Wilder suggested Some Like It Hot even though he’d already had a hard time working with Marilyn on their previous film together, The Seven-Year Itch (1955). Marilyn ran with it and so did the “suits” at United Artists, who told Wilder that she was such a big star that if he could get her to play Sugar Kane he could cast the two men with whomever he wanted.

Wilder and his screenwriting colleague, Isidor “I.A.L.” Diamond (the initials stood for “Interscholastic Algebra League,” in which Diamond had been a champion during his high-school days), at first were going to set Some Like It Hot in contemporary times but then decided to make it a period piece because with an old-time setting all the clothes would look a bit “off” to modern audiences. Wilder and Diamond brainstormed when they should have the film take place and finally decided on 1929 because they wanted the male leads to be in such imminent peril for their lives that they wouldn’t dare doff their drags even when they were both attracted to the woman. As Wilder explained to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse (1969), “A lot of people wondered why we used the St. Valentine’s Day massacre to start the picture. But we had to have something really powerful to force the boys to pretend to be girls, and to make it rational that, even if they were in love with Marilyn, they wouldn’t take off their clothes and say, ‘Look, I’m a man!’ So the fact that they’re threatened with machine guns supplied the reason.” The gimmick is that bassist Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) happen upon the St. Valentine’s Day massacre while in a garage to pick up a car belonging to Dolores (Beverly Wills), their agent’s secretary, to drive to a gig in Urbana. They watch gangster Spats Columbo (George Raft) and his hit people (including the great Mike Mazurki from the cast of Murder, My Sweet) rub out the rival gang of “Toothpick” Charlie (George E. Stone), only they’re noticed by the gang and flee for their lives, though not before the gangsters’ bullets carve four telltale holes in the front of Jerry’s bass. (Ironically, when the film Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, many critics questioned the rapid alternation between violence and slapstick comedy. Actually Buster Keaton had done that in his 1926 masterpiece The General, but I’ve often wondered why the critics who didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde had seemingly forgot about Some Like It Hot, which had mixed comedy and violence just eight years earlier.) They plead with their agent, Sig Poliakoff (Billy Gray), for a job, preferably out of town, but the only gig available for a saxophonist and a bass player is with “Sweet Sue (Joan Shawlee) and Her Society Syncopators.” The drag musicians – Joe calling himself “Josephine” and Jerry using the name “Daphne” after he rejects “Geraldine” – join the train carrying Sweet Sue and her band to the Seminole-Ritz Hotel in Florida, “played” by the real-life Hotel del Coronado off the coast of San Diego. (A number of imdb.com commentators have noted that the shadows in the movie are falling in the wrong direction for an East Coast location.)

Along the way they meet Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), whose real name is “Sugar Kowalczyk,” and claim to be graduates of the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music. (I once watched Some Like It Hot with my late partner John Gabrish, who’d grown up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and he assured me that no such institution existed.) Sugar announces that she’s hoping to land a millionaire sugar daddy in Florida, and obligingly Joe a.k.a. Josephine disguises himself as the heir to the Shell Oil fortune (an anachronism since there were no Shell gas stations in the U.S. until 1932) and, speaking with the voice of Cary Grant (whose first feature film, This Is the Night, was not made until 1932), invites Sugar to “his” yacht for an evening dinner and … The yacht is actually the property of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who’s fallen hard for Daphne and takes him on a date that includes dinner and dancing to a Cuban band. When “Daphne” and “Josephine” get together, Daphne announces that Osgood has proposed to him and he’s seriously considering his offer. “Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” asks “Josephine,” to which the besotted Daphne answers, “Security!” (Joe E. Brown has an unusual connection with Marilyn Monroe. Born Norma Jeane Baker, Monroe got her screen name from Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox talent scout who signed her to a studio contract in 1946. Lyon had been an actor who’d appeared with Ziegfeld stage star Marilyn Miller in the 1931 film Her Majesty, Love, and got the idea of calling Norma Jeane “Marilyn” from Marilyn Miller. Joe E. Brown had been in Marilyn Miller’s first film, the 1929 musical Sunny, and to my knowledge is the only performer who worked with both Marilyn Miller and Marilyn Monroe.) All seems to be going acceptably until Spats Columbo shows up to attend a gangsters’ convention under the cover identity “Friends of Italian Opera.” (According to Ovid Demaris, who wrote a number of true-crime books about the Mafia, this was inspired by a real-life speakeasy in Chicago in the 1920’s in which the waiters took turns singing operatic arias; Billy Wilder knew about this and decided to insert an in-joke by using “Friends of Italian Opera” as the front for his meeting of Mafiosi.)

Among the attendees is Johnny Paradise (Edward G. Robinson, Jr.), who’s ostensibly a member of Spats’s gang – he’s even shown flipping a coin the way George Raft did in his star-making role in the 1932 Scarface, and when Raft sees him do it he snarls, “Where’d ya learn that cheap trick?” – but really is the hit man hired by the head of the “Friends of Italian Opera,” “Little Bonaparte” (Nehemiah Persoff), to rub out Spats Columbo as revenge for Spats having killed “Toothpick” Charlie. Once again “Josephine” and “Daphne” are fleeing for their lives, with the four holes in “Daphne”’s bass giving them away as the two musicians who’ve now witnessed two major mob hits, though a federal agent (Pat O’Brien) is on hand to arrest the gangsters behind the hit on Spats. Our Heroes/Heroines find themselves fleeing in Osgood’s boat with Osgood and Sugar. Sugar pairs off with Joe even after she learns that he’s not only broke but also a saxophone player (she’s had bad experiences with saxophonists before), while in an audacious scene that still packs a punch even now, “Daphne” pleads with Osgood that they can’t get married. “Well, in the first place, I'm not a natural blonde,” “Daphne” protests. “Doesn't matter,” Osgood says. “I smoke! I smoke all the time!” “Daphne” says (a gag reference to a previous line in which Osgood had told “her” that his mother had objected to him marrying a woman who smoked). “I don't care,” Osgood says. “Well, I have a terrible past,” “Daphne” says. “For three years now, I've been living with a saxophone player.” “I forgive you,” Osgood replies. Then “Daphne” says, tragically, “I can never have children!” Osgood says, “We can adopt some.” Then “Daphne” pulls off his wig and says, “But you don't understand, Osgood! Ohh,” reverting to his normal Jerry voice, “I'm a man!” Osgood shrugs and says, “Well, nobody's perfect!” There are varying accounts as to how that line ended up in the movie, with Wilder insisting that it was all Diamond’s idea. There’s one account that it was just a place-holder until they could come up with something better, but they never did. When Wilder was facing death himself, he insisted that his tombstone read, “I was a writer, but nobody’s perfect.”

Wilder’s difficulties with Marilyn Monroe have become legendary; she often showed up late on set, and during the studio work in Hollywood she would get so blocked that she would blow take after take on such simple lines as, “It’s me, Sugar,” or, “Where’s that bourbon?” Later, during the location work on Coronado, Marilyn would astonish Wilder by being line-perfect through whole pages of script. I’ve long suspected that Monroe was so traumatized by having grown up in L.A. and been surrounded by the film world (her mother was a negative cutter at MGM, a job that had no creative aspect but required highly precise work lest a mistake ruin a key scene and force an expensive retake) that she was simply that much more comfortable out of town. Wilder told an interviewer shortly after he finished Some Like It Hot, “It took me six months before I could look at my wife again and not hate her for being a woman,” though in 1969 he was a good deal more understanding when he talked about the film to Higham and Greenberg. “Marilyn Monroe was very sensitive, difficult, and disorganized,” Wilder said a decade after he made the film and seven years after Monroe’s still-mysterious death. “She tried hard, but she couldn’t help herself. In some cases you had to match shots from different takes to make it seem like she was giving a performance; but there were stretches when she was absolutely phenomenal: one of the great comediennes. Once she started rolling, and that tiny kind of an inhibition disappeared, she was wonderful, as good as anyone. The metabolism had to be right with her; and if it was right, she was a marvelous thing to direct; but I was utterly dependent on her moods.”