Some Like It Hot

Bar open: from 4pm
Shorts & trailers: 4:40pm
Main feature: 5pm

1959 / 122 min / PG Sexual References
Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

Billy Wilder thumbs his nose at all the rules, mixing slapstick and screwball, gangster film and musical into a racy, transvestite farce. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, prohibition-era jazz musicians on the run from gangland Chicago, don drag and sign on with a touring all-woman band featuring singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe).

The film’s homo-and-heterosexual audacity seems more remarkable as the years go by. All the principals are at their comic best, with Monroe’s sweetness shining through an intelligent parody of The Blonde.

"Nobody’s perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft, it’s effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag.

A firecracker and keeps on throwing off lively sparks till the very end. The script is chockablock with one-liners for Curtis and Lemmon, but Monroe still manages to steal the scene with her sweet-but-emotionally honest portrayal of Sugar, a girl who always gets “the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”