Some Like It Hot Review

Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond took a French farce about two musicians, by way of its German remake, and added gangsters, which gives the drag premise a motor. Joe and Jerry are hiding from George Raft's Spats Colombo after witnessing a massacre, and he keeps turning up at the worst moment. Wilder shot in black and white because color tests made Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon look grotesque in drag, and Charles Lang's photography gives the Florida hotel, really the Hotel del Coronado, a silvery period glow.

The acting is the glory. Curtis plays Josephine and then, off duty, a Shell Oil heir who talks like Cary Grant. Lemmon's Daphne gets engaged to Joe E. Brown's Osgood Fielding III and lies in bed shaking maracas, delirious, after an all-night tango that Wilder intercuts with Joe's seduction of Sugar on the yacht. Marilyn Monroe was famously difficult, with one line needing 47 takes, yet on screen she is radiant, and her number I Wanna Be Loved by You is a small miracle of self-parody.

Its success helped finish off the Production Code, and a 2017 BBC poll of 253 critics named it the greatest comedy ever made. If anything dates, it is the gangster frame, a device rather than a world, but the closing line has never been bettered.