Movie Monday: Film Recommendations By Our Contributors
With Blonde set for release on Netflix this week, I revisited a childhood favourite film and one of Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic roles. Revisiting a film as an adult that you loved as a child is a singular experience. You might discover that your favourite Pixar animation is punctuated with previously imperceptible sexual innuendos intended to your stop parents from falling asleep in the cinema, like a shrill whistle that only a dog can hear. When I last watched Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, I felt the same joy that I felt during first viewing, but I noticed new elements to the comedy and additional layers to the plot. With more experienced eyes, I could see that for the standards of a work from the late 1950s, Some Like It Hot ridicules the male gaze, challenges gender norms, and questions antiquated homophobic tendencies through a sleek comedic lens. Chef’s kiss!
Released in 1959, Some Like It Hot does what it says on the tin. It is a sleazy, sparkly black-and-white romp set against the backdrop of 1929 prohibition America. It is both a gender-bending romcom and a gateway gangster movie, littered with sexual trickery and overflowing with illegal moonshine and whipsmart one-liners. Jack Lemmon plays the ever-anxious, ever-willing bass player Jerry, yin to Tony Curtis’s yang; the gambling, lady-killing, saxophone-playing Joe. After being accidentally privy to a mob hit—a bloody nod to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—Joe and Jerry must flee Chicago in order to escape Spats (played by George Raft, a former gangster, no less!) and his entourage of stereotypically large yet monosyllabic henchmen. Joe and Jerry—now Josephine and Daphne, respectively—disguise themselves in drag to form the last two missing members of an unsuspecting all-female band heading for Florida. The journey is unexpectedly raucous and boozy, which can be partially accredited to lead singer and ukulele player Sugar Kane, played perfectly by Monroe, just three years before her death in 1962. When Joe’s infatuation for Sugar grows, he must covertly switch from female to male clothes (and back again) in order to simultaneously spend time with Sugar as a man and uphold the female charade. So I ask, what’s not to like?
For centuries, our mums, older sisters and Lauryn Hill have taught us to be endlessly wary of those guys that are only about that thing. The actor Warren Beatty has allegedly accrued just under 13,000 notches on his bedpost, whilst Castro claimed 35,000. The sexually fluid Roman Emperor Elagabalus took five wives in four years (and possibly a husband, too), and during this time opened the palace baths to the public in order to window shop for an endless supply of male sexual partners. The collective noun for this specific breed of bloke has been revised and reformed ad infinitum through generations, cultures and subgroups; lothario, bachelor, womaniser—you know the rest. He is a male as old as time and very much looks his age.
Some Like It Hot offers such a man a new title; the saxophone player. When Sugar laments to Joe (thinking he is Josephine, her new female confidant) her unfortunate taste in saxophone players who “all just want one thing” and habitually leave her “with the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” he is forced to understand the weight of his own transgressions and respond from a female perspective. Plus, art neatly imitates life in these moments as Tony Curtis himself had six wives and was known to be a notorious ‘saxophone player’ on and off screen. Some Like It Hot chisels the male gaze into the female auricle, leaving sexual attraction at the door and thus rendering the former momentarily futile.
The male gaze is depicted continually and in as many ways as necessary to self-ridicule; man dressed as woman objectifying woman, man objectifying man dressed as woman. Within seconds of assuming their female alter egos, Jerry hisses “I feel like everyone’s staring at me,” before both do the same to Monroe’s character whilst still dressed as women, an irony which shines a light on the everyday female experience of unwillingly surrendering agency to the male beholder. This is reiterated when the band arrives in Florida and a line of white-haired men on the hotel veranda lower their papers and lean forward to ogle the young talent in an act of synchronised perversion.
However, the most effective way in which Wilder studies the male gaze is through the men who gaze upon Joe and Jerry in drag. The hotel porter, half Tony Curtis’ height and breadth, still manages to make him feel uncomfortable with suggestive remarks and over-familiarity. After his first encounter with sleazy millionaire Osgood Fielding, Daphne/Jerry bemoans getting “pinched in the elevator.” “Now you know how the other half live!” Joe retorts. Well, quite.
Some Like It Hot should be viewed primarily to marvel at Monroe as she radiates from the monochrome. It seems fitting that Blonde should also be in black and white, since any questions one might ask about Wilder’s rejection of glorious Technicolor in Some Like It Hot will be answered in the ethereal, other-worldly quality this gives to Sugar as she warbles wistfully in ‘I’m Through With Love.’ The film should also be appreciated as something revolutionary; a rejection of the stale heteronormative narratives so synonymous with films of that time and much, much later.
Some Like It Hot is essential viewing for those who have been played like a saxophone and for whom watching Bridget Jones’ Diary for the hundredth time just won’t cut it. Some like it hot—and some like their comedies with a side of subliminal activism! And whilst that may not be the strongest tagline, I really don’t see how watching two horny heterosexual men dressed in drag and playing keepy-uppy with their life will do anything but improve yours.
Words by Katie Ross
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