Coming to a screen near youFlickr: Ralph Hogaboom

This Sunday the 20th of July the wonderful Arts Picturehouse here in Cambridge is showing the 1959 cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.  As my knowledge of classic comedies is rather slight, I took the liberty of Netflixing to see whether I’d want to fork out some hard-earned ticket money to see it on the big screen.

Some Like It Hot stars Curtis and Lemmon as Joe and Jerry, two itinerant musicians who have to high-tail it out of prohibition-era Chicago after inadvertently witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  Penniless and having long since exhausted the goodwill of their assorted acquaintances, the pair’s only option to escape the pursuing mobsters is to dress up and join an all-female band on its way to Miami.  On the train, they struggle to maintain their covers, particularly when they spy the band’s glamorous vocalist, Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe).  Jerry’s initial jubilation at being on a train full of attractive women quickly turns into something akin to the punishment of Tantalus as he is surrounded by opportunities he cannot indulge in.  Uncharacteristically, Joe is the more cautious of the two, until Sugar confides in him about her troubles with life in general (and men in particular), whereupon he also starts to fall for her.  Once in Miami, Joe starts to woo Sugar while poorly disguised as a playboy oil tycoon, much to the consternation of Jerry, who has problems of “her” own involving an ossified (but creepily persistent) millionaire called Osgood.  Hi-jinks and mayhem ensue as Joe and Jerry attempt to fend off their various suitors while seducing the lovely Sugar and avoiding death by mobster.

So, is this film any good for modern audiences?  Going by a sample size of one (me), I would say yes - I was expecting something silly and generally harmless, so I was surprised by how risqué some of the humour was.  The antagonists are mildly comedic but mostly wantonly vicious (as gangsters normally are in movies that aren’t wacky cross-dressing capers).  Curtis and Lemmon exercise their formidable comic chops, and doe-eyed bombshell Monroe is certainly spectacular enough to cause plenty of friction between them. 

The humour of the film still holds up pretty well 55 years later – you’ll see most of the “man dressed as woman” jokes coming a mile off, but these jokes probably weren’t as clichéd half a century ago.  (Besides, the latest cross-dressing comedy I can recall involves the execrable Adam Sandler, who may have tainted the genre for decades to come.)  The gender politics of the film weren’t as bad as I feared either; Joe and Jerry’s realisations about the difficulties faced by the opposite sex are presented sincerely despite being played for comic effect.  The male cast comes across worse in the film, comprising almost entirely of violent criminals or unprincipled horndogs.  Curtis’ desperate improvisations as his rich alter-ego would seem more manipulative if Sugar wasn’t equally desperate to believe after a hard life, but she’s more assertive than a lot of heroines I’ve seen in lesser modern rom-coms.

Even if you’re sick of being told that you simply must see Casablanca or something else from before your parents were born, go to see Some Like It Hot on the big screen if you have the afternoon free on Sunday.  You’ll probably like it, and if not, you can pretend you did to make yourself feel better among your less artsy friends.  That might seem petty, but well, nobody’s perfect.