Some Like it Hot breaks all the comedy rules. For one thing it is too long. Whereas most comedies are 90 minutes or less, Hot goes on for over two hours. The first 15 minutes or more is all back story and set up. The film’s real star, Marilyn Monroe, isn’t introduced until 25 minutes in. It quotes a lot of other movies, from Billy Wilder’s own Seven Year Itch and Sunset Boulevard to A Night at the Opera. Much of the film isn’t even comedy. It’s crime story, with murders, gangsters, revenge, and machine guns. And it’s amazing what this film got away with for its time. Look for the line, “Do you pluck?”
Some Like it Hot, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s highly esteemed hit from 1959 about two ’20s era Chicago jazz musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) seeking to escape the mob by joining a girl’s jazz band in disguise, began life as a 1935 French film directed by Richard Pottier called Fanfare D’Amour, itself remade in Germany in 1951 as Fanfaren Der Liebe. Wilder remembered it, and pitched the premise first to his writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, and then to his new movie producing partners, the Mirisch brothers (precursors of sorts, to the Weinsteins), who released movies through United Artists. Some Like it Hot became the second film from the Mirisch Company, and the first in a long string of hits for them by Wilder, who was still fleeing Paramount after a dispute with management over the distribution of Stalag 17.
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This ur-Hot was going to star Frank Sinatra, Mitzi Gaynor, and Tony Curtis. When Sinatra stood up Wilder for a luncheon date the director remember a good young funny actor he saw in another movie, named Jack Lemmon, and when Monroe called to tell Wilder she wanted to work with him again, Gaynor was out. (Some have said that Danny Kaye and Bob Hope were also under consideration, even Jerry Lewis, and that Anthony Perkins auditioned for the role.)
Once finished it was a hit, but over the years gained an even greater reputation as the top comedy ever, resting at No. 14 on the AFI’s best movies ever list and No. 1 on its comedy list, followed by another cross-dressing comedy, Tootsie. It has been mimicked in shows such as Bosom Buddies and the Sister Act movies, and remade a few times, most recently unofficially as Connie and Carla, experiencing a sex change of its own. Like several other of Wilder’s films, it was converted into a stage musical, in this case Sugar. Now it has emerged for the third time on DVD (this disc supersedes a dual release in May 2001, one a special edition, neither enhanced for wide screen TVs).
The first thing to be say about the new Some Like it Hot (MGM, 1959, 122 minutes, black and white, two single sided dual-layered disc, 1.66:1 (enhanced), DD stereo in English, DD 5.1, mono, original audio, and mono in French, with English and French subtitles, audio commentary track with Paul Diamond (son of Izzy), Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, and including oral history quotes from Lemmon and Curtis, plus on the second disc a new making of, “The Legacy of Some Like it Hot,” and carried over the the previous special edition, “Nostalgic Look Back,” with Tony Curtis interviewed in the Formosa by Leonard Maltin, Memories from the Sweet Sues,:” a “Virtual Hall of Memories, the original pressbook, and he trailer, animated musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection, eight page insert, post cards, dual keep case in a cardboard sheath, $24.95, released on Tuesday, July 18, 2006) is that it bears a better transfer than its predecessor. Though not perfect, it is anamorphic. Released in tandem with Wilder’s birthday, which is June 22th, and which was “celebrated” last month on TMC, the two-disc set adds a few more extras over the previous release, and though it doesn’t increase our understanding of the film (scholars are mostly left out of the extras even though several have written good books about Wilder in recent years) it’s good to have the new transfer.
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For more in depth appreciation of the film, one can turn to Some Like it Hot — the book. (Some Like it Hot, edited and annotated by Ann Castle and Dan Aulier, Taschen Books, 2001, $200 hardback, 384 pages, ISBN 3-8228-6056-5).
This Taschen book of Wilder and Diamond’s highly esteemed script comes covered in Banana yellow faux suede with red lettering and is stored in an orange box. It weighs about 11 pounds, and is shaped like a CinemaScope screen. And it is also at least the third time that the Wilder-Diamond script has been published.
There was a Signet paperback in 1959, and Premiere magazine published the script as part of a short-lived publishing venture in 1994. Do we need another iteration of Wilder and Diamond’s brilliant screenplay, especially one offered as an expensive coffee table book?
Editor Dan Aulier has an answer for that: “It’s one of the best screenplay’s I’ve ever read.” Aulier, who had already done two books on Hitchcock and who was approached by publisher Benedikt Taschen not long after Aulier published his book on Vertigo, took a year and a half to complete the volume. One of the main reasons, he says, was meeting Wilder. Admitting to some nervousness in facing the sharp-tongued director, the editor says that nevertheless that “was the principle reason for doing the book. Who would turn down a chance to talk with Billy Wilder — and to do so for eight weeks?”
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Production on Some Like it Hot, the film, began before the screenplay was done. Yet the finished movie doesn’t show any sign of incompletion or evidence of being rushed; the film’s climax is a natural extension of the beginning. Aulier accounts for that by citing “the extraordinary professionalism of both Wilder and Diamond.” On the DVD, Diamond is presented as saying that he and Wilder usually began shooting a film before the script was finished, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t know what was going to happen. The rest was just “paperwork.”
Aulier and co-editor Ann Castle, a Paris-based artist, have done a sumptuous job. Even though the volume sits as comfortably in the lap as an airplane wing, it is certainly the most supplement rich version of the script ever published. With its interviews with then-still-living participants, its array of ad slicks, posters, articles in fan magazines, publicity photos, on-set snaps, and frame enlargements, the book comes with a lot of material that augments the DVD. In fact, all that’s missing from the book is the DVD.
It’s hard to imagine who’s going to be able to read it, though. It’s doubtful that citizens will be able to check the bulky book out of a library. And with a prohibitive price tag of $200 dollars, it’s not likely to find its way to Christmas celebrations or birthday parties. Publisher Benedikt Taschen himself doesn’t even seem to care if the book recoups its expenses. In a charmingly clumsy afterward, he writes, “If it doesn’t sell, we will have great gifts to give for years to come.” This is unfortunate, because from its campy cover to its attached Billy Wilder caricature bookmark, Taschen’s Some Like it Hot is a treat.
Taschen is the prolific German photography and art book publishing house with a sideline in fetish erotica. Lately, however, it seems to have strayed into movie book publishing. Dr. Jurgen Muller’s Movies of the 90s inaugurated a whole slew of film books, that have evolved into director career summaries.
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Aulier’s book contains the complete screenplay of Some Like it Hot in facsimile form, dated November 12, 1958; interviews with Wilder, Jack Lemmon, and others; reproduced pages from the script’s first draft; the Billy Wilder bookmark, along with an illustrated Wilder filmography; an international survey of posters and lobby cards; and most interesting of all, a facsimile of Marilyn Monroe’s small prompt book, with her annotations, which recently sold at auction for $60 thousand dollars, presented here in the form of a pull out booklet tucked into the volume’s inside back cover.
Taschen is basically an art publisher, and the real raison d’être appears to be the 600-plus frame enlargements from the film. They are beautiful. Great attention has been lavish on the background of the film’s production and on the presentation of the frame enlargements in tandem with the pages from the script. The only problem with the book is that it doesn’t seem to have been made to actually be read.
At the time of publication, Aulier offered no hints as to whether Taschen would tackle another script with similar intensity, but noted that there are several movies that might qualify. “Maybe Vertigo. Citizen Kane. The films of Bunuel and Cocteau lend themselves to this kind of treatment, too.” In 2005, Taschen followed up the Wilder book with a career survey of Kubrick’s art, with material from the Kubrick archives.
On the DVD, most of the holdovers are from the previous special edition disc. The new stuff includes the edited audio commentary track, with host Paul Diamond (who says he insulted Monroe as a young tyke on the set by calling her a fat lady; Monroe was pregnant before the shooting began,but lost the baby toward the end of the shoot). He surpervises recorded oral history comments by Lemmon and Curtis, and chitchat by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The two writers are appropriately appreciative of the film, but say wrongly that it has no theme or meaning. They are good on practical comedy aspects, such as pointing out that when they change into women, Curtis holds back and Lemmon goes nuts, the reverse of their “male” identities. They also maintain that this long movie only has three acts (even Diamond says that in his archival footage) when it most clearly has the more classic four act structure. At 1:35:02, the screenwriters announce, “The third act begins.” No, in reality it is the 4th act.
Like most of Wilder’s films regardless of whom he wrote them with, Hot is about a louse who changes. Here the louse is Curtis’s Joe, a womanizing and gambling con man who uses everyone, including Jerry, who is more or less in love with him (to him Joe is “some kind of terrific”). In the tradition of Hollywood, Joe changes his ways when he falls in love with the incredibly forgiving Sugar (Monroe), and they go off together in the end. But for a louse who doesn‘t change, turn to the also recently double dipped Stalag 17 (Paramount, 1953, 120 minutes, black and white, one single sided dualred layered disc, full frame, DD restored mono in English, mono French, with English subtitles, commentary by actors Richard Erdman and Gil Stratton and co-playwright Donald Bevan, “Stalag 17: From Reality to Screen,” “The Real Heroes of Stalag XVIIB,” photo gallery, 14-chapter scene selection, keep case, $19.95, released on Tuesday, March 21, 2006). William Holden is the louse here, Sefton, a POW who traffics in whatever the market will bear. He is obviously feeding off the needs of his fellow soldiers, but has no regrets and even a cogent justification. Based on a popular stage play, Stalag 17 is mostly static and talky, but when the film returns to the main plot about who is betraying the soldiers it is precise and executed admirably. Sefton ends up acting heroically but for a louse’s reasons. He remains true to himself to the end.
This disc supersedes a bare bones platter from 1999 with some restoration work and more extras. From the yak track we learn that comic actors Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck hated each other and caused some disharmony on the set. An attempt to replace Lembeck with Cy Howard before production proved a failure. The retrospective making of features writer-director Nicholas Meyer, and Wilder biographers Bob Thomas and Ed Sikov.
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