Some Like It Hot is a 1959 American crime comedy film directed, produced and co-written by Billy Wilder. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, with George Raft, Pat O'Brien, Joe E. Brown, Joan Shawlee and Nehemiah Persoff in supporting roles. The screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond is based on a screenplay by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan from the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love. The film is about two musicians who disguise themselves by dressing as women to escape from mafia gangsters whom they witnessed committing a crime.
Some Like It Hot opened to critical and commercial success and is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. The film received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, winning for Best Costume Design. In 1989, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the first 25 films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The film was produced without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) because it features cross-dressing. The code had been gradually weakening in its scope since the early 1950s, owing to greater social tolerance for taboo topics in film, but it was enforced until the mid-1960s. The overwhelming success of Some Like It Hot is considered one of the reasons behind the retirement of the Hays Code.
Cast
Tony Curtis as "Shell Oil Junior" and Marilyn Monroe as Sugar
Marilyn Monroe as Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk, a ukulele player and singer
Tony Curtis as Joe/"Josephine"/"Shell Oil Junior", a saxophone player
Jack Lemmon as Jerry/"Jerraldine" and later "Daphne", a double bass player
Joe E. Brown as Osgood Fielding III
George Raft as "Spats" Colombo, a mobster from Chicago
Pat O'Brien as Agent Mulligan
Nehemiah Persoff as "Little Bonaparte", a mobster and leader of the "Friends of Italian Opera Society"
Joan Shawlee as Sweet Sue, the bandleader of "Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators"
Dave Barry as Mister Bienstock, the band manager for "Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators"
Billy Gray as Sig Poliakoff, Joe and Jerry's agent in Chicago
Barbara Drew as Nellie Weinmeyer, Poliakoff's secretary
Grace Lee Whitney as Rosella (Fiddle)[citation needed]
George E. Stone as "Toothpick" Charlie, a gangster who is killed by "Spats" Colombo
Mike Mazurki as Spats's henchman
Harry Wilson as Spats's henchman
Edward G. Robinson Jr. as Johnny Paradise, a gangster who kills "Spats" Colombo
Beverly Wills as Dolores, a trombone player, and Sugar's apartment friend
Al Breneman as the bellboy (uncredited)
Critical response
Some Like It Hot received widespread acclaim from critics and is considered among the best films of all time. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 70 critics have given the film a positive review, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Some Like It Hot: A spry, quick-witted farce that never drags." According to Metacritic, another review aggregator which calculated a weighted average score of 98 out of 100 based on 19 critics, the film received "universal acclaim". Chicago Sun-Times's Roger Ebert wrote, "Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft." Ebert gave the film four stars out of four and included it in his Great Movies list. John McCarten of The New Yorker referred to the film as "a jolly, carefree enterprise". Richard Roud, writing for The Guardian in 1967, said with this film Wilder comes "close to perfection".
In 1989, the film became one of the first 25 inducted into the United States National Film Registry.
Some Like It Hot was voted as the top comedy film by the American Film Institute on their list on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs poll in 2000, and was selected as the best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017. In 2005, the British Film Institute included this film on its list of "Top fifty films for children up to the age of 14". The 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll ranked it as the 38th greatest film of all time, tied with Rear Window and a bout de souffle. The 2022 Sight & Sound directors' poll ranked it 62nd, tied with nine other films. In the earlier 2012 Sight & Sound polls, it was ranked the 42nd-greatest film ever made in the critics' poll and 37th in the directors' poll. The 2002 Sight & Sound polls the film ranked 37th among critics and 24th among directors. In 2010, The Guardian considered it the third-best comedy film of all time. In 2015, the film ranked 30th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world. It was included in The New York Times's "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" list in 2002. In 2005, it was included on Time's All-Time 100 best movies list.