Quanto Mais Quente Melhor

There is always a thing about Classics, even before you absorb the first frame; you are burdened with huge expectations. But, Some Like It Hot is one of those jet planes where you got to tight your seat belt and forget everything else to enjoy the joyride or you would fall off your seat.

I feel casting in a movie is one of the most under discussed elements of movie making amongst general public but it plays a very significant role in the success of a movie and SLIH is the prime example of it. Apart from Jack Lemmon, none of the protagonists were known for their superior acting skills and they would not have made the cut for a Billy Wilder piece. But, in retrospect, who other than Tony Curtis who had a boyish look and at the same time possessed sharp features could have played a saxophone playing woman charmer who could cross dress to be a part of a woman band. You can only get a flawless performance from a bad actor only if he/she is playing himself/herself and that is the exact reason why Marilyn Monroe wows you in every scene of Some Like It Hot. She is playing a dumb, vivacious and vulnerable damsel who can sing, doesn't mind sleeping with a charming guy whenever she gets a chance and then dips herself in a whiskey bottle when left all alone with herself. Jack Lemmon with a broad muscular jawline was surely the one who had a better chance of getting caught as someone not in the right clothes, but that is very small price to pay, as an actor of his caliber was indispensable to the cause of SLIH. He has an amazing sense of timing when it comes to humor; he is almost chaplinesque when it comes to expressions and the confidence with which he delivers his lines puts him right at the top of stack.

I am not sure when was the concept of black humor introduced in the world of cinema, but, SLIH has to be one of the better examples from the old times where black humor is integrated in the comedy. The black humor is there only to make its presence felt and nothing more. Other than that SLIH is a fun filled journey of Gerald (Lemmon) and Joseph (Curtis), two musicians on the run from dangerous Chicago gangsters who are after their lives. They find their safe house in an all-woman band that is off to Florida for a string of performances. This is where they meet the gorgeous Sugar (Marilyn) and try their luck on flattering her. It is all about how Joseph manages to get ahead in the race and Gerald like a true friend tags along without any explaining or pleading by Joseph. This is what makes SLIH sweet. The necessary salt is added to the movie by little moments like women having a party on train, Sugar hiding whiskey in her stocking, Fielding (Joe Brown) hitting on Dalphe (Gerald disguised as a woman) and further complications that set in because of these. What makes this classical comedy special is the fact that it makes you laugh at so many occasions without being slapstick or cheap or using the chaos technique. And when it doesn't make you laugh, it makes you smile. Most importantly, the movie stays with you.

The manner in which the movie begins, it suddenly makes you wonder - that's too much of real car chasing and shooting for a black and white movie of 40's and then you realize it's done in 1959 and the movie was intentionally produced in black and white. The first scene itself is a cracker and will create a cocktail of emotions, with words like liquor, crime, party, death, music all floating around at the same time. There are plenty of scenes where the camera pans out from one object to another capturing multiple things with different moods and complexion in the same scene and that is a technique which I guess wasn't used quite frequently back then. Make-up job of Curtis and Lemmon is too good for those times and it would have been so important for that to have been correctly done as that is absolutely central to the whole plot. Marilyn's costumes are way modern and she carries them effortlessly.

Some Like It Hot is without any doubt a classic but, probably in no other movie would have the last line played such an important role as in this. The finishing frames where Joe Brown utters the unexpected leave you pleasantly surprised and I am sure it would have had far better impact on the audience 50 years back.

Why a man would want to marry another man? asks Tony Curtis, Security! Jack Lemmon replays without missing a beat. Clearly he had put the question to himself before and had arrived to a perfectly sensible conclusion. Everything in this gem of a movie had been thought so cleverly and as it turned out so prophetically, that the world of our three characters, a world of prohibition and gang wars could be today and more than likely will be tomorrow. Billy Wilder analyzes human nature with an acid eye and a glorious panache for underlining our most endearing features. Our frailties. Marilyn Monroes is at her pick, the sadness in her eyes a startling metaphor in a comedy about wanting. Tony Curtis with an Eve Arden's pout is so beautiful, so charming, imitating Cary Grant and trying to be himself that, in my mind he'll be always be in a frock. And, of course, Jack Lemmon, throwing himself into the part, body and should. Only perfection can allow to end its course with a line like "Nobody's perfect"

With Billy Wilder's steady direction, the great casting, and Wilder/Diamond's sparkling script Some Like It Hot has become one of the most enjoyed comedies of cinema history. The story itself is pure comedy gold; the unhappy jazz-musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are witness to the St. Valentine massacre in 1929 and flees from Chicago with an all-girl-band who's headed for Miami, dressed up as "Josephine" and "Daphne". Soon both are hooked on Sugar Kane (Marylin Monroe), the band's lead singer - but things gets more complicated when arrived in Miami, Daphne attracts a elderly playboy and the gangster of Chicago arrives at the Floria-hotel to have a mafia-meeting.

The work of the three participants in center is truly great; Marylin Monroe is at her most sexy and charming, Tony Curtis' brilliant control and Jack Lemmon is truly priceless at his peak. The movie paces fantastically throughout opening scenes of Chicago, onto the train-ride (features fantastically funny moments of brilliant comedy timing) and arriving at the hotel in Florida, and the situations that occurs with the band, with playboy Osgood Fielding III, Marylin Monroe and the mafia. And Billy Wilder shows his talent with keeping such a sparkling screenplay brilliantly paced and edited, never rushing itself - and Wilder sneaks in some fine moments of noir with the Chicago-gangsters brutality and cruelness. And the movie is a altogether different experience as a comedy than anything before it, the absurdity and quirkiness of Curtis and Lemmon in a transvestite-comedy is fantastically funny, and the final dialog between Osgood Fielding and Daphne/Jerry seemingly came out of the blue, and surprised me just as much today as it did back in 1959. Some Like It Hot is nothing less than a must-see in comedy, and cinema history.

Admittedly biased, "Some Like It Hot" can certainly stand on its own merit with or without my thunderous round of applause. More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of performing both the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon roles in "Sugar," the musical adaptation of "Some Like It Hot" which originally starred Tony Roberts, Robert Morse and Elaine Joyce on Broadway in the 70s. Though it hardly compares to the film's original (how could it???), the musical nevertheless is still a big hit with live audiences. I can't remember ever having a better time on stage than I did with "Sugar," and it's all due to the irrepressible talents that instigated it all.

In the 1959 classic, Curtis and Lemmon play two ragtag musicians scraping to make ends meet in Prohibition-era Chicago during the dead of winter who accidentally eyewitness a major gangland rubout (aka the St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Barely escaping with their lives (their instruments aren't quite as lucky), our panicky twosome is forced to take it on the lam. Scared out of their shoes (sorry), the boys don heels and dresses after they connect with an all-girl orchestra tour headed for sunny Florida. Killing two birds with one stone, they figure why not go south for the winter while dodging the mob? Once they hit the coast, they'll ditch both the band and their humiliating outfits.

Enter a major detour in the form of luscious Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane, given one of the sexiest (yet innocent) entrances ever afforded a star. Snugly fit in flashy 'Jazz Age' threads, a blast from the locomotive's engine taunts her incredible hour-glass figure as she rushes to catch her train to Florida. The boys, stopped dead in their high-heeled tracks by this gorgeous vision, decide maybe the gig might not be so bad after all. As the totally unreliable but engagingly free-spirited vocalist/ukelele player for the band, Sugar gets instantly chummy with the "girls" when they cover for her after getting caught with a flask of booze. As things progress, complications naturally set in - playboy Curtis falls for Monroe but has his "Josephine" guise to contend with, while Lemmon's "Daphne" has to deal with the persistently amorous attentions of a handsy older millionaire.

What results is an uproarious Marx Brothers-like farce with mistaken identities, burlesque-styled antics, and a madcap chase finale, all under the exact supervision of director Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the script. Lemmon and Curtis pull off the silly shenanigans with customary flair and are such a great team, you almost wish THEY ended up together! Curtis does a dead-on Cary Grant imitation while posing as a Shell Oil millionaire to impress Marilyn; Lemmon induces campy hilarity in his scenes with lecherous Joe E. Brown (who also gets to deliver the film's blue-ribbon closing line). As for the immortal Monroe, she is at her zenith here as the bubbly, vacuous, zowie-looking flapper looking for love in all the wrong places. Despite her gold-digging instincts, Monroe's Sugar is cozy, vulnerable and altogether loveable, getting a lot of mileage too out of her solo singing spots, which include the kinetic "Running Wild," the torchy "I'm Through With Love," and her classic "boop-boop-a-doop" signature song, "I Wanna Be Loved by You."

The film is dotted with fun, atmospheric characters. Pat O'Brien and George Raft both get to spoof their Warner Bros. stereotypes as cop vs. gangster, Joan Shawlee shows off a bit of her stinger as the by-the-rules bandleader Sweet Sue, Mike Mazurki overplays delightfully the archetypal dim-bulbed henchman, and, if I'm not mistaken, I think that's young Billy Gray of "Father Knows Best" fame (the role is not listed in the credits) playing a snappy, pint-sized bellhop who comes on strong with the "girls."

For those headscratchers who can't figure out why the so-called "mild" humor of "Some Like It Hot" is considered such a classic today, I can only presume that they have been brought up on, or excessively numbed by, the graphic, mindless toilet humor of present-day "comedies." There was a time when going for a laugh had subtlety and purity - it relied on wit, timing, inventiveness and suggestion - not shock or gross-out value. It's the difference between Sid Caesar and Andrew "Dice" Clay; between Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and Chris Farley and David Spade; between "I Love Lucy" and "Married With Children"; between Lemmon's novel use of maracas in the hilarious "engagement" sequence, and Cameron Diaz's use of hair gel in a scene that ANYBODY could have made funny. Jack Lemmon could do more with a pair of maracas than most actors today could do with a whole roomful of props. While "Some Like It Hot" bristles with clever sexual innuendo, today's "insult" comedies are inundated with in-your-face sexual assault which, after awhile, gets quite tiresome -- lacking any kind of finesse and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. I still have hope...

Having ultimate faith in my fellow film devotees, THAT is why "Some Like It Hot" will (and should be) considered one of THE screwball classics of all time, and why most of today's attempts will (and should be) yesterday's news.

"Movies should be like amusement parks" filmmaker Billy Wilder once said "People should go to them to have fun". So If Some Like It Hot was an amusement park: it would Thorpe Park, mixed in with Legoland, added with a dash of Disney land. Some Like It Hot is the granddaddy of comedies, the Godfather of laughs and the Mike Tyson of punch lines. Heck! Watching this film is like getting into the ring with Muhammad Ali, as you're constantly hit with fast paced gags. Even when you're least expecting it you're hit with a punch line so funny it leaves your side aching, or a piece of slapstick comedy that leaves your eyes running. Even the fade out line has been regarded as the funniest and most famous in history. Once you hear it, you'll guarantee never ever, ever to forget it. Trust me, it's hilarious!

After playing witness to a routine gangland shooting, two penniless Chicago musicians, Joe and jerry decide it is the perfect opportunity, to remain safe and get paid a easy buck when they decide to take up residence in an all girl band heading to Florida, crossed-dressed as Josephine (Tony Curtis) and Daphne (Jack Lemmon). But with the only simple aim of getting paid and avoiding the mob, things soon get a little more tricky when a ditsy singer named Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) captures the heart of' Josephine' and a eccentric playboy millionaire falls for 'Daphne'.

Some Like It Hot is one of those rare occasions, where everyone involved is at the very peak of their powers. Billy Wilder's directing is subtle but instrumental in loading every scene with comedic material ready to pop out like a wound up jack in the box. The writing is excellent, it constantly moves at a furious pace. Imagine Usain bolt on roller blades with jet pack attached to his back, and still that's not even as fast as how the dialogue rips through every scene. People may say that the comedy is too high concept, but for me that's the very reason it's so damn funny , as well a begin genius, because it means that the jokes will stand the test of time and span all generations because it's so easy to understand. Anyway who likes having jokes explained to them? No one!

But you can't talk about Some Like It Hot, without mentioning Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who were absolutely perfect for their roles, each adding a feeling of assuredness to theirs, as well as bucket full's of originality with every facial expression as well as every line. Initially I was not convinced by Marilyn Monroe, as I felt she was slightly overrated, but in her role as Sugar, she brings a lot of composure to the role adding balance to the high energy of Tony and Jack, but still getting her laughs not through straight jokes but by simply being able to deliverer every air headed line with great delivery and timing. Whilst still being able to remain sweet, helpless and innocent, even as she plunges picks into a solid cube of ice with great fury, as she talks about her weakness for Saxophone players.

Some Like It Hot it like a magician of comedy, you never know what to expect next, as with every new scene you so excitedly anticipate what piece of comedic magic it will pull out of its sleeve. For me Some Like It Hot is the funniest comedy film I have ever seen, even though it is almost 55 years old, its comedy is still so accessible and funny too!