Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot (1959) is often called the best comedy ever made, and there is a technical reason it is in black and white. Chicago, 1929. Two musicians, Joe and Jerry, witness a mob execution. To escape they dress as women, join an all female orchestra and travel to Florida. The band has a singer called Sugar. It was meant to be in colour. Marilyn Monroe's contract required all her films to be. But in the colour tests the drag makeup on Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon took on a sickly green tint that could not be corrected. Wilder showed her the test footage and she agreed to black and white. The shoot was not easy. Much has been written about Monroe requiring dozens of takes on simple lines and the tension on set. What ended up on screen is among the best comic performances in the form. The film was released without approval from the American censorship board. The cross dressing, the ambiguity of gender and the closing line all breached the rules of the time. Its commercial success was one of the things that accelerated the collapse of those rules. The final line is among the best known closings in cinema and sums up the entire film in one sentence. It runs 123 minutes, in black and white. Good for: classic comedy, Billy Wilder, and film history. Less good for: the drag humour belongs to its period and parts of it have dated; the opening is slow.