Summer of Marilyn: Some Like it Hot

Last week the days got away from me and I completely forgot to watch my Marilyn movie, let alone write about it.

I’m back this week, though, talking about Some Like It Hot with Marilyn, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis.

This was a crazy, hilarious, insane film that had me gasping and laughing through the entire thing. It was released in 1959 and directed by Billy Wilder.

It was something I needed as I’ve felt like my brain has been racing lately with worry and a rushed feeling.

The movie takes place in 1929 with booze being smuggled into a funeral home that is actually a speakeasy.

They are musicians – Jerry and Joe.

The speakeasy gets raided and they don’t get paid

They need money so when they hear that a band needs a couple of replacement girls they decide they need to become women – or well, sort of anyhow. Tony nixes that idea though and says they need to take another job instead but when they go to pick up the car, they witness a mob murder. Now they are forced to dress as women and get as far away from Chicago as they can, which in their case is Florida with the female band.

They buy the clothes and the wig and the makeup and board the train.

That’s when they meet Marilyn, a.k.a. Sugar.

Sugar is a bit of a drinker and they can’t help checking her out, but trying to pretend they aren’t checking her out.

Marilyn sings and dances in this one and shakes a lot which Jack and Tony very much enjoy. Jack, in fact, says he would like to have a cup of that sugar. This is the movie where Marilyn sings, “I Want to be Loved By You” with THAT dress. The one that had to be filmed partially in the dark because it sort of looks like she’s half naked, even though there is fabric there.

It is clear early on that Sugar is an alcoholic who needs her booze. At one point, she sneaks into Jack’s bed looking for booze, which, of course gets him hot under the collar. While it’s Tony that keeps reminding Jack that he is supposed to be a girl, Tony himself gets a bit attached to Sugar himself. When he learns that Sugar dreams of meeting and marrying a millionaire, he decides he’s going to find a way to be that millionaire for her.

While pretending to be a millionaire he does a hilarious impression of Cary Grant, which just cracked me up, especially when he said to Jack later something like, “Of course I’m faking it. No one really talks like that.”

On and on the craziness went on in this movie until my head was spinning with it all and with laughter.

There are a lot of sexual innuendos in the movie, including one where the band leader says,  “A reminder to all you boys out there, all my girls are virtuosos and I intend to keep it that way.”

When Tony reminds Jack that he’s a guy and not a girl, he tells him, “Jerry, there is another problem. Like what are you going to do on your honeymoon?”

That questions ends up being a bit rhetorical as Jack’s character says they haven’t decided where they will go on their honeymoon yet.

According to information online, the movie was made for $2.9 million and made $49 million. Overall since the time it was released, it has made $83 million internationally.

My husband said he read that Marilyn could not stand Jack Lemmon so I Googled to see if this was true. According to the site Slashfilm.com, it wasn’t really that she didn’t like Jack, she just didn’t like anyone at that time. She was lashing out at a lot of people and they got caught in the crosshairs. She was abusing medication at the time and dealing with depression. I guess it is fitting that her character was an alcoholic since she was one in real life at times too.

She was also pregnant during the making of the movie and later went on to have a miscarriage after filming ended. I believe she had a few during her career and I’m sure this was part of her issues during the filming.

She and Tony Curtis actually dated in 1949, which I found interesting. It was only for a couple of months, according to Curtis.

Jack said he liked Marilyn, but felt sorry for her because he could tell she was troubled. He had less scenes with her than Curtis and didn’t have to deal with her habitual lateness as much.

Wilder was completely frustrated with Marilyn through most of the filming because she often could only get through a small amount of dialogue part of the time, after showing up late, according to a couple of articles. She cost the production half a million dollars with all her delays and he made it clear to her he was not happy with her when he held a cast party when the filming was done and did not invite her. She decided she didn’t like him either and told his wife to tell him to do something very anatomically impossible for a person to do with himself.

Years later he said that he didn’t have issues with Marilyn as much as she had issues with herself. He also said that her discombobulated and erratic behavior actually led to some adlibbed moments that made the movie a classic. Still, I think he would have preferred they didn’t have to write her lines on the inside of drawers because her brain was so addled from drinking too much and taking pills.

Wilder and Marilyn did make up before she passed away, especially because he still considered her a brilliant actress despite the issues she had during filming.

A bit of trivia from IMBd:

Some people asked why Curtis was so much better at walking like a woman or having female mannerisms than Lemmon and he told an interviewer it was because he tried so hard to be a female he was very tightly wound and overthinking it. Lemmon, on the other hand, “ran out of his dressing room screaming like the Queen of the May,” kept much more of his masculine body language.”Tony later said that he asked Wilder if he could imitate Cary for his stint as the millionaire in the movie. Wilder liked it and they shot it that way. Apparently, Grant saw the parody of himself and stated, jokingly, “I don’t talk like that.”Marilyn wanted the movie to be shot in color (her contract stipulated that all her films were to be in color),but Wilder convinced her to let it be shot in black and white when costume tests revealed that the makeup that Tony and Jack wore gave their faces a green tinge.Marilyn didn’t originally didn’t want to play Sugar. She said, “I don’t want to play someone who can’t tell Daphne and Josephine are really men dressed in drag.”

Another tidbit that I pulled off Wikipedia was that this movie was made without the approval of the Hayes Code, which was a code in the “old days” that determined what could and could not be in movies. It wasn’t long after this movie was released and became a huge success that the Hayes Code was discontinued.

Oh, and I did figure out that the name for the movie comes from the music when Tony asks if Marilyn plays her music hot and she says she does and he says he likes his music slower but “Some Like It Hot.”

Have you seen Some Like It Hot? What did you think of it if you have? Let me know in the comments.

Up next I’ll be watching The Seven Year Itch.

After that I will be watching:

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits