Some like it Hot
Movie Synopsis
Some Like It Hot tells the story of two struggling musicians, Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Lemmon), who are on the run from a Chicago gang after witnessing a gang shooting in a parking garage. Spats Columbo (Raft), the gangster in charge, orders the execution of Jerry and Joe. They escape in the confusion and decide to leave town. But the only out-of-town job they can find is in an all-girl band, so they disguise themselves as women and call themselves Josephine and Daphne. They join the band and go to Florida by train. Joe and Jerry both fall for "Sugar" Kane Kowalczyk (Monroe), the band's Polish-American vocalist and ukulele player, and fight for her affection while maintaining their disguises. In Florida, Joe woos Sugar by assuming a second disguise as a millionaire (claiming to be "Junior", the heir to Shell Oil, and mimicking Cary Grant's voice), while an actual millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Brown), falls for Jerry in his Daphne guise. The mob eventually finds Joe and Jerry again, when they arrive at the same hotel for a conference honoring "Friends of Italian Opera". After several humorous chases (and witnessing yet another mob rubout), Jerry, Joe, Sugar, and Osgood escape to the millionaire's yacht.
Movie Trivia
»It was said that Tony Curtis's voice was dubbed when pretending to be
Josephine since he wasnt able to get his voice to fit a woman's voice.
» On the set, Wilder grew exasperated by Monroe's inability to remember
her lines. He had several of them written in inconspicuous spots on the
set, so she could read them. It is possible to see Monroe's eyes move
back and forth during the scene where she talks to Curtis' character on
the phone in her hotel room - she was reading from a chalkboard held
behind the camera.
» Monroe was pregnant during the film's production and had a
miscarriage the day after its first audience preview. Her pregnancy is
most notable in the famous yacht scene.
» Jack Lemmon considered a scene from this film to be the best of his
screen career. Tony Curtis enters the hotel room to find Lemmon lying
on a bed clothed in an evening dress, singing and shaking a pair of
maracas. Lemmon announces he's engaged to Joe E. Brown. After blithely
answering a string of objections - What will you do on your honeymoon?
morphs into a comparison of the French Riviera and Niagara Falls -
Lemmon admits that he plans to annul the marriage and collect alimony
as hush money.
» Wilder paid tribute to three great gangster movies of the 1930s with
subtle gags in the movie's script. The crimelord "Little Bonaparte"
stems from Little Caesar, while Spats Columbo threatens to smash a
grapefruit in the face of one of his henchmen (James Cagney's famous
scene from The Public Enemy). He then grabs a coin from the air as it
is being flipped by another gangster, a clich? that originated with
Raft's character in Howard Hawks' Scarface ?? thus making Raft's line
"Where did you pick up that cheap trick?" a bit of meta-humor.
» The film was originally planned to be filmed in full color, but after
several screen tests it had to be changed to black and white. The
reason for this was a very obvious 'green tint' around the heavy
make-up of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon when in role as Josephine and
Daphne.
» The film's title is a line in the nursery rhyme "Pease Porridge Hot."
It also occurs as dialogue in the movie when Joe, as "Junior", tells
Sugar he prefers classical music over hot jazz.
» The film's working title was "Not Tonight, Josephine".
» The passenger car used in the movie, Clover Colony, is owned by the
Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Movie Awards
The film won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White
(Orry-Kelly) and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jack
Lemmon), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, Best
Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Director and Best Writing,
Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
It won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy. Marilyn Monroe won the
Golden Globe for Best Actress in Musical or Comedy, and Jack Lemmon for
Best Actor in Musical or Comedy.
The movie has been acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest
movie comedies ever made. It ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's
list of the greatest comedies (ironically, #2 on the list is Tootsie,
also a film about a crossdesser) as well as #14 on their list of the
100 best American films. The film has also been deemed "culturally
significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for
preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2000, readers of Total
Film magazine voted it the 8th greatest comedy film of all time (see
Total Film Magazine's List of the 50 Greatest Comedy Films of All
Time).
Taken from IMBD