Some Like It Hot: Billy Wilder’s Gender-Bending Gangster Comedy

Billy Wilder’s 1959 film Some Like It Hot is an age old comedic farce often regarded as one of the best comedies of all time (Mondello, 2008). It centers on two men who, after witnessing a mob hit in prohibition era Chicago, are forced to flee south to Florida disguised as women in an all-female band, the ‘Society Syncopators’. Much of the film follows the two men, Joe – known as Josephine when in drag, and Jerry – now Daphne, as they try to hide their true identity from suitors and compete for the affections of Sugar Kane (played by Marilyn Monroe), all while staying out of the path of the gangsters. The film follows classic farce conventions, starting with an ridiculous and outlandish idea, and then building on more and more absurdity while following a strict logic. Some Like It Hot builds on Wilder’s past films such as Sabrina (1954) and The Seven Year Itch (1955), creating a film that perfectly merges the romantic comedy and the farce. The film is not only representative of Wilder’s writing and directorial style, but it also plays with traditional ideas of gender and sexuality in the fifties, helping to pave the way for later films to explore these themes more seriously.

Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in an Austrian province to a Jewish family (Phillips, 2009, p. 3). During Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930 s Wilder moved to Hollywood in 1934 and primarily worked as a screenwriter for a few years before his major directorial debut with the film The Major and the Minor (1942) (Phillips, 2009, p. 12). Most of Wilder’s early screenplays were comedies, a trend that continued as he began to direct films as well. Although he wrote and directed a handful of popular and well-received dramas and film noirs like Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), from the mid-fifties onward he made almost all comedies, primarily with his writing partner I. A. L. Diamond who also co-wrote Some Like It Hot.

Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, was based on the screenplay of an earlier French film Fanfare of Love (Richard Pottier, 1935) where two musicians don a number of disguises in order to join different music groups. Wilder saw the last story of the two men in drag as part of a female band and took off with it as the basis of a farce (Phillips, 2009, p. 212). Diamond and Wilder added dramatic stakes to the story with the witnessing of a gangland killing, set it in the 1920 s for plausibility and then Some Like It Hot emerged. The film follows strict and straightforward logic leading the two characters Joe and Jerry from one outrageous situation to another to keep the plot tight and snappy. Wilder held a very firm view on what about films he liked and what his own films should be. He once said “I don’t do cinema. I make movies” (Wilder, 1986). Wilder did not have a taste for foreign films that he felt were pretentious, or films that were more about showing off camera techniques than the actual storyline.

He wanted to make movies that he would like to see and that would appeal to the average American moviegoer, the kind of people who were Hollywood’s bread and butter. Wilder quipped that he had ten commandments for filmmaking, “the first nine are thou shalt not bore. The tenth is thou shalt have right of final cut” (Wilder). To make films that are enjoyable to watch was his primary goal and he did not hold pretentions about making cinematic ‘art’ or try to involve himself in political movements. His films were not intended to be subversive statements about hot button issues, but rather reflections and satires on human nature and their many flaws when engaging in relationships.

Wilder was very much interested in portraying the realities of American culture and their day to day life. While the outlooks of many of his films are perhaps a tad cynical, the sharply written and intelligent stories like Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch, brilliantly prod at a society obsessed with consumption and materiality (Armstrong, 2002). The writing collaboration between Wilder and Diamond was at its peak when they wrote Some Like It Hot. Like his other films the dialogue is smart and snappy, and although the film runs at two hours long, it never slows down as it jumps from visual gag to situational comedy seamlessly. One of the scenes that best shows off Wilder’s comedic mastery is after Joe and Jerry come in after a night out with their respective suitors. Jerry as Daphne had been out tango dancing with a rich man named Osgood comes in shaking maracas dreamily announces that he is engaged. As Joe and Jerry go back and forth with Joe trying to reason with Jerry that he cannot marry Osgood, Wilder instructed Jerry to shake the maracas and dance in between each line. As the hilariousness of their conversation escalates – Joe tells him there is a problem with him marrying Osgood, and Jerry replies of course there is, he needs Osgood’s mother’s approval first – the maracas and Jerry’s dreamy dancing become more than just visually funny. His musical pauses are sculpted to allow time for audience laughter after each of Jerry’s quips so as to not miss the next joke. Wilder made sure each of his punch lines would be heard, pacing the scene perfectly for the audience reaction (Phillips, 2009, p. 228). Wilder’s genius is his mastery of the American language and structure and his ability to direct the scenes for maximum impact. Wilder’s faith in his scripts made him an extremely strict director by most standards. He did not allow room for ad-libbing and changes of lines and this was sometimes detrimental to the production process. During one scene, Monroe was purportedly pilled out and kept saying “where is that bonbon” or “where is that whisky” instead of the line “where is that bottle”.

Wilder did forty-seven takes, pasting the line in multiple places on the set in order to make sure she said it properly. While this anecdote speaks to some of the more extreme consequences of Wilder’s directing (and the beginning of the decline of Monroe), it does not change the fact that Wilder achieved outstanding results from many of the actors and actresses he directed. He directed fourteen different actors that were nominated for Oscars for their performances, three of which (Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, and Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie) actually winning.

When Some Like It Hot was released in 1959, it was mostly noted for its portrayal of male crossdressing throughout the film. Gender expressions and sexualities that were outside the traditional was not talked about in the media at all. While talking about sex became more and more okay as the 50 s went on, there was no room for serious discussions of queerness in mainstream media. During the 50 s women’s roles in their home and professional lives were also expanding. While the image of the perfect obedient housewife and mother had previously dominated advertising, the 50 s saw the rise of America’s most famous and enduring sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe and her popularity open society to the idea of women being independent sexual beings. Some Like It Hot directly and indirectly addresses both of these topics, and although Wilder plays with both ideas throughout the film, it is left up to interpretation if the film actually moved mainstream society towards acceptance of queerness and new gender roles or only reduced their characters to be nothing more than comedic fodder intended to make the audience laugh.

Although gender roles for women at the time were expanding, Some Like It Hot offers a very limited view on what a woman can be. Marilyn Monroe in the role of Sugar Kane, the singer and ukulele player for the ‘Society Syncopators’ plays a sultry blonde who’s biggest goal is to marry a rich man with glasses, and whose only purpose seems to be a figure for the men on screen and the men in the theaters to lust after. Monroe herself was said to have originally turned down the role saying “she had played dumb characters before, but never this dumb” and she did not want to play someone who was so dim-witted that “she can’t tell that the two women she is becoming friends with are men in drag” (Phillips, 2009, p. 214). Although she did eventually concede to Wilder, her character Sugar is never given any agency of her own in the movie. She goes from breathless bombshell trying to escape down south and marry rich to a seductress trying to arouse any sort of physical response from a Joe pretending to be a rich but impotent heir to Shell oil.

While her vapid characterization is played up for the sake of the farcical and comedic elements, the casting of Monroe as Sugar Kane felt more like an attempt to capitalize on the fact that she was the subject of every man in America’s dream woman, and this role wanted to exploit that image she had made of herself. Maria Jesus Martinez, in her essay on gender in Some Like It Hot notes that the film was conscious of Monroe’s use and depiction and was “openly commenting on what she had come to signify and expecting the audience to see her not only as Sugar Kane… but, above all, as Marilyn Monroe, the actress and the public person” (1998). She represented all of the new attitudes towards sex and female sexuality that were emerging in the 50 s while still conceding to being nothing more than an object of desire for the protagonists and the audience members. Her entrance in the film is directly contrasted with Joe/Josephine’s and Jerry/Daphne’s own clumsy imitations of women. They may be dressed as women, but they are still men, and the camera takes on the form of their gaze as it follows Monroe as she swings her hips and sashays towards the train focusing only on her shapely lower half. She gives a high pitched little yelp when her bottom is blasted with steam from the train (recalling one of the most famous images of her pushing down her white dress as steam comes up from the subway in the film The Seven Year Itch).

Even though Joe and Jerry should have much more pressing matters to worry about, it is clear that she is the object of their desire and the conflict is now how the two of them are going to keep up their disguise while competing for Sugar’s affection. Ultimately, Sugar Kane’s role in the film (and by extension, Monroe’s) can be reduced down to the display of a “female sexuality subordinated to male pleasure” (Jesus Martinez, 1998). Yes, she possesses an innate sexuality that had not previously been celebrated in mainstream society, but Sugar is not in the film to empower herself and own her sexuality. She is ogled at and tricked and runs away with the man who tricked her in the first place because that is how she must fulfill her role as the ultimate male fantasy.

Besides Monroe’s portrayal of Sugar Kane and the issues of that character, Some Like It Hot deals primarily with themes of gender and homosexuality with the two male characters in drag for most of the film. While this theme seems very progressive for the time period, Wilder never actually intended for there to be any subversive message relayed to the audience. He certainly was not interested in expressing any sort of agenda. Crossdressing has appeared in stories since the ancient Greeks, and Wilder was only using it as an interesting narrative device. Wilder’s decision to shoot in black and white was even attributed to the fact that he thought Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis looked like “flaming fagots” in full makeup during color tests (Phillips, 2009, p. 217).

While Joe and Jerry are disguised as women they are always in juxtaposition to the many women that surround them who are a “whole other sex” from the women that Josephine and Daphne are trying to be. By the rules of the farce, none of the other characters, friends and romantic interests alike, are able to tell that these two muscled 6-foot women are actually men. The comedic elements come from Joe and Jerry failing so spectacularly at being women to the audience’s eye, yet still being forced to go through with the whole charade as they get involved with increasingly ridiculous incidents. Even scenes that, on their own, can be viewed as subversive images, like Joe as Josephine kissing Sugar on stage in front of an audience is immediately followed by a shot of Joe’s masculine legs marching upstairs in heels he can barely walk in. In this sense the film is prompting “the audience to laugh at comic crossing, thereby affirming its allegiance to cultural norms” (Liberfeld and Sanders, 1998). Any challenge of societal expectations that might come from an image of two women kissing is immediately undercut by the following image reminding the audience that Joe is very much a man and that scene is meant to be read as funny more than anything else.

Even the men that deem Josephine and Daphne as desirable –Osgood who is a millionaire mama’s boy and had been married several times before, and a short bellhop who cannot be more than 20 – are characterized as goofy and outlandish individuals who are ridiculous in their own right, and made even more so by the fact that Joe and Jerry are the objects of their affections (Lieberfeld and Sanders, 1998). Outside of their relationships with Joe and Jerry, these two men read as unusual and odd, and their attachment to the unusual women that are Josephine and Daphne clearly marks them as the only ones who would fall for and be interested in their masquerade. No ‘normal’ man would fall for such poorly executed ruses, and so Osgood and the bellhop’s infatuation with the women is something for the audience to laugh at. The laughter that those characters provoke “becomes a policing agent of sexual norms and helps mark homosexuality and transvestism as deviant, even freakish” (Lieberfeld and Sanders, 1998). The social rules in the 50 s pervaded mainstream culture, leaving any self-expression that fell outside what was normal was left on the fringes of society and only entered conventional society as something to mock and ridicule. All aspects of the comedy invites the audience to laugh at what is happening on screen.

The situations that Joe and Jerry find themselves are meant to be funny because they are absurd, what they are doing is so outside of the societal norms, that were they not posed in comedic situations, the audience would consider them more weird than hilarious. In fact, one of the earliest screenings of the film was shown to an audience who had watched an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof immediately before. Reportedly no one in the audience laughed at all during Some Like It Hot, believing it to be a serious melodrama as well. Jack Lemmon remembered people leaving in droves saying “what the hell is this,” not understanding that the film was meant to be a comedy (Phillips, 2009, p. 224). Without the audience priming themselves for a light comedy poking fun at two men in skirts and heels, they are forced to take the picture more seriously – which garners a much less enthusiastic reaction. While they may be happy to laugh at men in drag fending off potential male suitors, the moviegoers in the 50 s still were not ready to accept the idea of homosexuality and men in drag in reality.

Even though Some Like It Hot did not actively try to subvert any societal norms, it still paved the way for similar themes to be explored more seriously in later films. The film did not receive approval from the Motion Picture Production Code due to its content and dialogue, but was released anyway and met with great success and approval by audiences and critics alike. Variety magazine called it “a whacky, clever, farcical comedy that starts off like a firecracker and keeps on throwing off lively sparks till the very end” (Variety Staff, 1959). The New York Times applauded the creators of the film for creating a “rare, rib-tickling lampoon that should keep them [and] the customers…chortling with glee” (Weiler, 1959). The Hollywood Reporter summed up their feelings neatly by writing that the film “should be a winner in any town in any state” (THR Staff, 1959). The complete commercial success of the film despite the lack of MPPC approval made it clear that the authority of the code was weakening, with some critics considering Some Like It Hot to be one of the last nails in the coffin for the code (Mondello, 2008). Shortly after Some Like It Hot was released the Motion Pictures Association began to consider a classification system to replace the hard rules of the code. In 1968 the code was finally replaced with the rating system that Hollywood uses today. One year later Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), a drama that overtly deals with prostitution and homosexuality, won the award for Best Picture at the Oscars. Filmmakers could explore ‘mature’ subject matter without having to condemn those subjects to fit within the code guidelines.

Some Like It Hot continues to hold it place as one of the best loved comedies of all time and as one of Billy Wilder’s most celebrated films. The commercial and critical success of the film speaks to the genius of Wilder and Diamond’s screenplay and Wilder’s capable directing skills. Together the two of them “developed a completely unbelievable plot into a broad farce in which authentically comic action vies with snappy and sophisticated dialogue” (Weiler, 1959). Their brilliance with dialogue can be summed up with the enduring and oft quoted final line “nobody’s perfect” which falls right in with the legacy of Wilder’s other memorable endings like “shut up and deal” from The Apartment (1960) and “I’m ready for my close up” out of Sunset Boulevard.

An intelligent and witty film from start to finish, Some Like It Hot will also be remembered for its part in ending the Motion Picture Production Code due to its popularity despite the subject and themes of the film. And while the film mostly made light of cross-dressing and potential homosexuality, the fact that it was shown on screen to audiences and was wildly successful opened the door for later movies to explore queer narratives seriously and in many different contexts, which in turn helped shift mainstream society towards acceptance as well.