Before we begin looking at a specific aspect of this film, notice that like our last film, Double Indemnity (1944), Some Like It Hot (1959) is directed by Billy Wilder. Now, the two films are vastly different – one’s a dark, cynical noirist drama, one’s a comedy; one’s a product of the war years, one’s from the boom era after the war; one tweaks our moral sense although good triumphs over evil in the end, one seems to conform to our moral sense although the end is humorously ambiguous – but it is worth asking yourself, what qualities does the director bring to both movies?
Billy Wilder is one of America’s greatest directors (he would win a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writer/ Screenplay award for The Apartment in 1960). What, as you reflect on two of his better films, are his identifying traits? What makes him a good director? What kind of story does he like to tell? How does he tell it differently than another director might? Let us know what you come up with.
That said (or asked), let’s take a moment to look at what’s at the heart of this comedy – cross-dressing. Drag. Guys dressed up as women. In this case, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, on the run from the mob after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, dressed up as 1920s flappers in order to pass themselves off as musicians in an all-girl band. Quick, make a list of the films in which this gimmick provides the centerpiece of the plot. Okay. Pencils down. How many of you had: Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Mama’s House, White Chicks, Nuns on the Run, I Was a Male War Bride? (Give yourself extra credit if you got more.) The question here is: why is this so funny?
First, a simple answer: Guys look hilarious when they’re dressed up as women. If you look closely, you’ll realize it’s never the point to make them completely feminine. Often the opposite is true. They stumble around on high heels. They walk like men. They struggle keeping their voices from being “manly.” They’re forced to adjust their bras, and girdles, and hosiery at inopportune times. Quickly we’ve descended into the comic irony – by watching men dressed as women we’re celebrating how NOT-women they are.
Which leads us to an even bigger irony. The men-in-drag technique is a particularly enjoyable form of dramatic irony. We know those guys are men, but many of the onscreen characters don’t. Consequently we hear the men’s lines two ways – the way the other characters do (a “female voice”) and the way we know it really is (the “male voice”). In Some Like It Hot, both Lemmon and Curtis try to find ways to insinuate themselves with Marilyn Monroe. So we combine this dual voicing with a lot of sexual innuendo, both ironic and otherwise, and the result is pretty comic.
One of the more interesting paradoxes of men in drag is whether it reinforces typical gender roles (men should be men, and if they try not to be they look silly and are funny) or blows them up (cross-dressing men appeals to some inner sense of desire we have, and we only drape it in comic styling to shield ourselves from our non-conformist ideas). You work it out. In the meantime, enjoy Some Like It Hot, one of Hollywood’s classic comedies.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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