Some Like It Wilder Page 32
Wilder was interviewed some months later by Art Buchwald, a columnist for the European edition of the Herald Tribune. The irrepressible Wilder said that he had declared a truce with Monroe. When Buchwald reminded Wilder how he had earlier complained that Monroe had kept him waiting on the set for hours, Wilder retorted, “But we didn’t waste those hours. We played poker; I managed to read War and Peace and Les Miserables.”46 But the capper was probably Wilder’s remark in Time magazine around the same time. He said he was working on a script proposal about a film set in East Berlin, which was true. What was not true was that it dealt with Russian agents kidnapping an American blonde bombshell “who might be Marilyn Monroe: They take her away to brainwash her; but she beats them because she has no brain to wash.”47
Monroe was outraged that Wilder was ridiculing her in print. But her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, urged her to make peace with Wilder, since she might want to make another film with him. Monroe phoned Wilder’s home, but Audrey told her that Billy was not in. Monroe began in a vapid, girlish tone of voice, “I wanted to say that your husband”—then her voice took on a mean, sinister sound—”that he is the worst son-of-a-bitch who ever lived, and he can just go fuck himself!” Then she became sweet and amiable again: “But my very best to you, Audrey.” Audrey Wilder said that it was almost as if some demon had possessed Monroe momentarily.48
Mirisch, the executive producer, declared that Monroe’s coming to work late and being unprepared had cost the studio eighteen shooting days. As a result, “the film did go over budget, to the tune of $500,000.” The final production cost, Mirisch reported, was $2.8 million, which at the time was a very high price tag for a comedy.
During postproduction, Arthur Schmidt was busy editing the film, with Harrison and Wilder kibitzing as usual. Wilder noticed that Curtis’s voice as Josephine was a problem. “He could not maintain a high-pitched voice for Josephine during an entire take”; his voice kept slipping into a lower register. Wilder commandeered Paul Frees, an accomplished mimic, who also appeared as Mr. Provoloner, the “funeral director” of the speakeasy in the film’s opening sequence, to dub the voice of Josephine on the sound track.49
After Schmidt had completed the preliminary edit of the movie, it was ready for scoring. The lot fell to composer Adolph Deutsch, who had won three Academy Awards, including one for Oklahoma! (1955). Like many great film composers, Deutsch understood that his sole function was to help the movie, not show off his handiwork. “A film musician is like a mortician,” he said; “he can’t bring the body back to life, but he’s expected to make it look better.”50 With the assistance of music adviser Matty Malneck and Wilder, an expert on jazz, Deutsch chose songs of the period for the score, like “Running Wild” and “Stairway to the Stars,” which he adroitly incorporated into his background music.
Wilder submitted the finished print of Some Like It Hot to Geoffrey Shurlock, the industry censor. Shurlock, with the backing of his advisory board, recognized the film as suitable for mature audiences and granted it the industry’s official seal of approval. Just when Wilder thought he was home free, the Legion of Decency entered the lists by issuing a harsh statement denouncing the film: “Though Some Like It Hot purports to be a comedy,” the treatment dwelled on gross suggestiveness that was “seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency.” The dialogue contained “not only double entendre, but outright smut.”51
Monsignor Thomas Little, the legion’s director, fired off an angry letter to Shurlock on March 5, 1959, accusing him of being too easy on Some Like It Hot. The legion contended that the picture, by openly depicting “transvestism,” ran counter to the spirit of the industry’s censorship code. Shurlock responded to Little on March 18, defending his decision in favor of the movie by pointing out that men masquerading as women had been a perennial source of humor throughout theater and film history. He cited the venerable Charley’s Aunt as one of the enduring comedies in the annals of the theater. Shurlock noted that the code had been given a major overhaul in 1956, so “there are now no taboos on subject matter.”52 The legion placed Some Like It Hot in its morally objectionable category, where it had also relegated Love in the Afternoon.
Douglas Brode correctly terms Some Like It Hot a milestone in the trend toward “a racier style of comic picture,” marked by smatterings of piquant sex.53 Wilder concurred that it was a daring film for its time: “Two guys dressing up as dames,” running around in lipstick and heels—two wolves in women’s clothing. “Ten years later it could have been even bolder.”
But the legion’s complaints about the picture were not the end of Wilder’s woes. The sneak previews were still to come. UA scheduled a sneak on a Friday night in December 1958 at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades, and it was a total disaster. “Nobody laughed, except one of our friends,” Wilder told me. There had been a serious picture on before the sneak: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, an adaptation of a southern gothic play by Tennessee Williams. The audience did not laugh because they apparently thought Some Like It Hot was a serious melodrama too. Jack Lemmon remembered that people were leaving in droves, muttering, “What the hell is this?” Wilder was devastated. Joseph Mankiewicz, an old friend of Wilder’s, attended the preview. He put “a consoling arm around Wilder’s shoulder” and murmured, “It’s alright, Billy; it happens to all of us.”54
The Mirisch brothers huddled with Wilder in the lobby of the theater, insisting that he must cut 10 minutes from the picture; conventional wisdom dictated that 122 minutes was too long for a farce. Wilder listened politely and assured the Mirisches that he would consider ways of shortening the movie. In an editing session held at the Goldwyn Studios, Wilder removed one scene, lasting exactly 1 minute, from the picture. It was a short scene in the sleeping car on the train, while the band is on its way to Florida. “Jerry thinks he is crawling into Sugar Kane’s bunk, but by mistake he gets in with me,” Curtis explained. “Jerry says, ‘I have a secret; I’m a man!’ And I say, ‘I know that!!’ ”55 “Billy said the scene was expendable,” Lemmon said; “it was one scene too many on the train” about the boys pretending to be girls. But, Lemmon concluded, “Billy didn’t touch the rest of the film.” Wilder was reluctant to cut a picture. A producer complaining about the length of a movie, he told me, “is like a motel manager demanding that his guests get out before midnight.”
Wilder decided to preview the film the following Friday in Westwood, an upscale section of Los Angeles where he could expect a more sophisticated audience than had attended the first preview; he hence could hope for a more positive response to the movie. This audience laughed uproariously—not because Wilder had made one small, token cut but because the audience had been alerted that the film was a comedy.
Some Like It Hot had its world premiere in New York on March 29, 1959, and collected mostly great reviews. It eventually became one of the top hits of the year, turning a profit of $15 million.
Armstrong notes that “Some Like It Hot is essentially a spoof of the vintage Hollywood gangster pictures of the early 1930s. It is a freewheeling world of hoods in shiny Packards, bathtub gin, and jazz.”56 That Wilder is parodying the old gangster films is apparent in the opening scene. A hearse is shown speeding down the street, occupied by Colombo’s thugs dressed as undertakers. Two of them are in the back of the hearse guarding the casket, which is full of bottles of illegal liquor. A squad car follows them to a speakeasy, which is decked out like a funeral parlor. Wilder gives a nod to Sunset Boulevard by having a look-alike for Erich von Stroheim playing the organ in the funeral parlor. As the plot unwinds, Inspector Mulligan raids the joint and arrests the racketeers for embalming their customers with cheap whiskey from the coffin. Colombo, who is modeled on Al Capone, has his mob rub out the members of the rival gang of Toothpick Charlie (George E. Stone) in a Chicago garage on St. Valentine’s Day 1929. Jerry and Joe, two unemployed musicians, witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre quite by accident; they must flee from Colombo,
who wants them murdered before they can squeal on him and his gang to his nemesis, Inspector Mulligan. To save their skins, they disguise themselves as females and join an all-girl dance band that is en route to a gig in Florida.
Wilder cuts immediately from Joe and Jerry deciding to tour with Sweet Sue’s orchestra to the two of them briskly walking down the train platform dressed as women. There is no montage of the guys dressing up. “We never showed where Lemmon and Curtis borrow the dresses and wigs—maybe from a girlfriend,” Wilder said. He dispensed with needless exposition and simply made a sharp cut to the boys already in drag, “and the audience started screaming.”57
Monroe then makes her first appearance in the movie, sashaying down the railway platform, carrying her ukulele case. When she saw the rushes of this scene the next day, she told Wilder that her entrance in the picture should be more memorable. Wilder assured her that he would come up with a better first look at Sugar Kane and do a retake the following day. He wanted her to know that he took her suggestions seriously. Monroe had always hoped that the time would come when a director would pay attention to her suggestions. Unfortunately, the moment may have come too late. She did not believe that Wilder planned to do a retake the next day. “I’m not going back into that fucking film until Wilder re-shoots my opening,” she declared to her assistant at the end of the day. “When Marilyn Monroe comes on the screen, nobody’s going to be looking at Tony Curtis playing Joan Crawford. They’re going to be looking at Marilyn Monroe.”58
True to his word, Wilder redid the shot the next morning. “Monroe walks alongside the train,” said Wilder, “and I let out a blast of steam from the engine right on her fanny. It was the right lead-in for the star of the picture.”59 Walter Mirisch said, “I thought when the cloud of steam blasted at Marilyn’s behind on the train platform, Billy was recalling the scene in The Seven Year Itch when the gust of air comes up through the subway grating and blows on her legs—Billy Wilder topping himself.”
Jerry is now known as Daphne, and Joe as Josephine. Initially, both men are attracted to Sugar Kane, but they are afraid to doff their disguises to tell her who they really are, because they continue to be stalked by Colombo and his mob. While Sweet Sue’s band is booked into the Seminole-Ritz Hotel in Miami, Joe continues to be much interested in Sugar, who views “Josephine” as a good friend, “a gal pal.” Sugar, we learn, is a torch singer who has the right to sing the blues. She confides to Josephine that she has been exploited by a series of unscrupulous boyfriends, all of them musicians. She complains that she always gets “the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” a remark whose phallic connotations are unmistakable. When a boyfriend deserts her, all he leaves behind is “a pair of old socks and a toothpaste tube all squeezed out.” Sugar comes across as a girl who is savvy enough to know better but not strong enough to resist deadbeat musicians.
Meanwhile, Jerry catches the roving eye of Osgood Fielding, an elderly millionaire who, of course, believes that he is courting a young lady named Daphne. For the time being, Jerry enjoys being wined and dined by a rich tycoon. While Jerry is frolicking with Fielding, Joe decides to court Sugar in yet another disguise. He doffs his dress and wig, decks himself out in a yachtsman’s outfit, and dons thick glasses. He wants to impress Sugar by posing as the heir to the Shell Oil fortune. When Wilder asked Curtis about his character masquerading as a millionaire, Curtis answered, “What would you think if I imitated Cary Grant?” Curtis had been doing impersonations of movie stars like Grant and James Cagney since he was a kid. Wilder said it would be “a wonderful plus for the picture.”60 Wilder subsequently showed the picture to Cary Grant and inquired, “How do you like that impression Tony did of you?” Grant replied, “I never talked like that!” Wilder would have liked to direct Grant in a movie, but it never happened. Hence, Curtis observes, his impersonation of Grant in Some Like It Hot was as close as Wilder ever got to “having Grant in a movie.”61
Joe persuades Jerry to go nightclubbing with Osgood one night so he can romance Sugar aboard Osgood’s yacht, the Caledonia, claiming that it is his. Monroe was aware that this love scene with Curtis was a key scene in the picture, so she made several notes in the margin of her copy of the script. When Joe and Sugar come onboard Osgood’s fabulous yacht, Sugar, who was raised on the wrong side of the tracks, is dazzled by the luxurious sitting room. Monroe wrote in the margin that Sugar feels like “Alice in Wonderland.”62
Once Joe and Sugar are sitting cozily on a couch, Joe, in the guise of the millionaire, confesses to her that he is frigid and invites her to attempt to cure him of his affliction. Falling for his ruse, “Sugar accepts the challenge, smothering the supine Joe in loving kisses” to restore his virility.63 Wilder points out that, if Joe were the aggressor in this scene and overpowered Sugar, it would be dirty. But if she is the aggressor and seduces him because she thinks he is impotent, it is funny. “And so she suggests the sex, and she fucks him!” Wilder explained.64
At first Joe tells Sugar, as he leads her on, that her kisses are “a complete washout”; they have failed to thaw the frigid tycoon. Monroe wrote in the margin next to Joe’s line that Sugar takes his remark as a “personal affront.” But Joe soon admits that he has been warmed by her kisses when his glasses steam up; Monroe accordingly wrote in the margin that Joe is “getting drunk on kisses.”65 Ebert notes, “When Monroe kisses Curtis while they’re both horizontal on the couch, notice how his shoe rises phallically in the mid-distance. Does Wilder intend this effect? Undoubtedly.”66
Actually, it was Curtis’s idea to have “my leg go up in the air when Marilyn is kissing me.” While Monroe was embracing him passionately, “she could feel that I was having an erection.” She looked at him knowingly, as if to say that, ten years after they had sex in the back seat of his green convertible, she could still turn him on. So raising his leg during the scene was his “little ad-lib,” a stand-in for his erection.67 While Joe and Sugar are making love on the yacht, Osgood and Daphne are dancing a furious tango in a nearby roadhouse. Raft, who had been a dancer on the stage before becoming an actor, was willing to coach Lemmon and Brown in the tango. As Osgood and Daphne dip and twirl around the dance floor, Daphne has a rose clenched between her teeth. Wilder is here making a reference to Charley’s Aunt, in which Jack Benny in the title role coyly has a rose in his teeth as a rich suitor proposes to him.68 Osgood likewise proposes marriage to Daphne in the course of their night on the town, as we learn in the following scene.
When Joe returns to their hotel room, he finds Jerry doing a reprise of his tango with Osgood as he shakes a pair of maracas to a Latin beat. “When I walked on the set,” Lemmon recalled, “Billy handed me a pair of maracas and said to me, ‘In between every line, start dancing wildly and give a shake to the maracas.’ ” Lemmon said to himself, “My God, he’s lost it!”69 Actually, the maracas were a stroke of genius. Wilder explained later that he wanted a pause after each of Lemmon’s punch lines because he did not want the audience’s laughter to drown out the next straight line spoken by Curtis, which was setting up the next joke. Wilder therefore filled the space between each gag line with Lemmon’s shaking the maracas. For example, Joe asks Jerry why he is so happy, and Jerry answers, “I’m engaged!” The gimmick with the maracas “allowed time to pass for the audience to laugh,” said Lemmon, and not lose the next straight line from Joe: “Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” Jerry replies, “Security!” When Lemmon finally saw the movie with an audience, he realized that “the manner in which Wilder had paced the scene was brilliant.” Wilder had “sculpted and edited” the scene to make room for laughs.70
For a while Jerry is mesmerized by the notion of a millionaire. He even considers contracting a marriage with Osgood—which would be unconsummated—with a view to arranging an annulment shortly thereafter and obtaining substantial alimony payments. Lemmon noted that “Jerry is from some other planet; he’s crazy. That’s why it is believable that the daffy Jerry would consider marrying Osgood: he’s nuts!”
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The climax of the film comes when Colombo and his henchmen show up at the resort hotel for a summit conference with a rival gang headed by Little Bonaparte (Nehemiah Persoff), whose character is a send-up of Edward G. Robinson’s portrayal of Little Caesar. The racketeers’ convention is billed as “The Friends of Italian Opera” and is highlighted by a ceremonial banquet. The crime syndicate’s banquet has always been part of the iconography of the gangster picture, dating back to Little Caesar.
Little Bonaparte is sore at Colombo for killing Toothpick Charlie, because he and Charlie were choirboys together. Furthermore, Little Bonaparte decides to consolidate his power in the underworld by having one of his goons mow down Colombo and his mob with a machine gun at the banquet. Once Colombo and his gang are out of the way, Jerry and Joe can at last discard their disguises. Joe immediately declares his love for Sugar, but Jerry’s situation is not so simple. When the persistent Osgood renews his offer of marriage to Daphne, Jerry sees that the jig is up and feels obligated to take off his wig and declare to Osgood that he cannot marry him under any circumstances. “Utterly unshakable in his love for Daphne, and trusting in his passionate instincts, Osgood overlooks all, including gender,” comments Doug Tomlinson.71 With a twinkle in his eye, the unfazed Osgood responds tranquilly to Jerry’s revelation that he is a man: “Nobody’s perfect.”
Wilder and Diamond hit on this closing line when they were fiddling around with the final scene. Diamond had supplied the line for Osgood in the first draft of the screenplay.72 Wilder had thought that the line was weak, though, and he was still reluctant to use it. He asked, “Do you think it’s strong enough for the tag line of the picture?” Diamond answered, “I don’t know.” Since the final scene was to be shot the following day, Wilder decided to leave this “throwaway line” in the final scene, with the hope that overnight “we will think of something better.” Diamond agreed. “It’s not chiseled in marble,” he commented.73 But “Nobody’s perfect” remained, and when the film was previewed for the press, the closing line brought down the house. It finally dawned on Wilder that “this was not a dummy line; it was a great line!”74 Wilder gave Diamond full credit for thinking of it; he said he did not even supply the exclamation point. Tomlinson calls Osgood’s declaration “a candidate for the funniest closing line in cinema history.”75