'Tis the season for Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has just opened wide. This second outing with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in Guy Ritchie's revisionist, Gaslightpunk backspin on the Holmes and Watson mythos will be Christmas Day viewing for me and Elizabeth, as we both enjoyed the previous computer-game-redolent adventure despite being longtime aficionados of traditional Holmesiana. (In fact, I've been known to get paid for indulging in fantastical Sherlocking myself, and I scripted the "cases" and dialogue to a successful Sherlock Holmes computer game.) We all have our Holmes and Robert Downey Jr. isn't mine. That would be Jeremy Brett by a mile.

But ever since Chaplin and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I'll see Downey Jr. in anything, and I have to admit that he and Law are thoroughly enjoyable in their Holmes/Watson relationship, all anachronistic dudeness aside. Besides, I'll prep myself for this new movie the way I did for the first, by chanting my incantation while standing in the ticket line: "I'm not going to see a Sherlock Holmes movie, I'm going to see a Guy Ritchie movie." Holmes himself would agree that the right frame of mind is crucial.

Also, starting in January we're getting the second series of the BBC's Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. If it's anywhere near as good as the first series, it'll go a long way toward clinching the prize as my all-time favorite alt-Sherlock interpretation.

Like Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, cinematic adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon are vulnerable to an extra lens of critical analysis. The legions of fans, aficionados, devotees, and armchair scholars of a book-to-film's original source material must, like skeptical clerics studying the Shroud of Turin, hold up every foot and frame of the filmmaker's work to the light of the hallowed author's words and pages. And we all know what the first four letters of the word analysis are. Is the film version faithful to its revered source? Does "faithful" mean dogmatic word-for-word translation from one medium to another, or are creative and practical allowances excusable?

Like Tolkien's fantasy epic, Doyle's beloved Victorian detective stories evoke an idealized time and place that never existed except between our ears, so any attempt to visualize them onscreen is inevitably judged through filters found, as Holmes authority Vincent Starrett put it, "in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

In any case, here are a few that I'm pleased to have on my DVD shelves:


The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most-filmed tale of Doyle's famous Great Detective. Doyle's original text for The Hound of the Baskervilles concluded its serialization in The Strand Magazine in 1902, and that same year saw the complete novel published for the first time, making 2012 its 110th anniversary year.

For hardcore Sherlockians (not to mention less temperamentally scrutinizing film-lovers) the 20th Century Fox 1939 version remains a favorite screen treatment of Holmes' encounter with the supernatural hellhound. This film, which inaugurated Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in their career-defining roles as steely Holmes and trusty Watson, ranks up there as a glossy, respectful interpretation that bends and condenses the sacred text yet remains authentic to its atmosphere and spirit.

When Sir Charles Baskerville dies mysteriously outside Baskerville Hall, his friend Dr. Mortimer (Lionel Atwill) finds evidence that the centuries-old family curse, a death-dealing spectral hound, has struck once again. Before Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene) arrives in London to claim his inheritance, Mortimer enlists the aid of Sherlock Holmes (Rathbone) lest yet another Baskerville succumb to the horror stalking the desolate ancestral moors. Mortimer brings Sir Henry to 221b Baker Street and expresses his fear for the young heir's life.

Baskerville learns that along with the grand family mansion comes the too-real legend of a phantom killer canine, a secretive butler (John Carradine, one year before his Casy in The Grapes of Wrath), and colorful neighbors such as the boyishly affable Dr. Stapleton (Morton Lowry), who collects ancient skulls from the Neolithic ruins nearby; Mrs. Mortimer (Beryl Mercer), whose séances conjure up ghostly howls; and Stapleton's lovely stepsister (Wendy Barrie, goddaughter of J.M. "Peter Pan" Barrie), who is quite fetching indeed in her riding togs fit for a baroness.

Holmes, pressed with "other business," sends Dr. Watson (Bruce) to accompany Sir Henry to the dreary estate and keep a watchful eye for the mysterious goings-on Holmes anticipates. Of course, with danger afoot, Sherlock Holmes may not be so far from the scene as he lets on.

Doyle's short novel has always been difficult to bring to the screen. Not only must Holmes' brilliant yet talky intellectual detective work be combined with gothic horror trappings, but Holmes himself is absent for the entire middle third of the story. This most famous version streamlines Doyle's plot and removes some of its twists and complications, then adds more red herrings than you can shake a deerstalker at.

Director Sidney Lanfield cut his teeth on musicals and light entertainments, so he wasn't entirely up to the challenges The Hound of the Baskervilles presented. Nonetheless, he served the material well, and his sets and photography positively overflow with fogbound atmospherics. Even while avoiding the visual difficulties of Doyle's phosphorous-coated beast, Lanfield's climactic Hound attack has yet to be bested.

Nowadays the movie comes off stagy and theatrical, as much a product of the thirties as the dry-ice blowers. Yet this Hound ably shows that the miasmic Devonshire moors should be shot only in spooky black-and-white with plenty of deep shadows and craggy rocks. Purists can fault the screenplay for downplaying Holmes' clockwork scientific deductions for action-thriller plot-padding, and they'd be right. Other embellishments are an effective séance scene and a rewrite of Wendy Barrie's role from a knowing accomplice to an innocent romantic interest.

Creative license aside, this film triumphs because it belongs enduringly to Basil Rathbone. Already an established star (he was the villain in the previous year's The Adventures of Robin Hood), his perfect Holmes profile and snappy characterization stamped him irrevocably into the public's image of Doyle's detective.

Here Bruce's Watson is not quite yet the blithering comic-relief idiot he became later in the series, an image that subsequent Watsons have tried hard to yank back to Doyle's reliable ex-army surgeon and narrator. The chemistry between Rathbone and Bruce energizes one of the great Hollywood team-ups. So sure-footed is this Hound's casting, another high-profile version wasn't attempted until England's Hammer Films gave it a garishly entertaining turn twenty years later, and Rathbone's only serious competition for the definitive screen Sherlock wouldn't arrive for almost fifty years with Jeremy Brett.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

In a year chock-full of good movies, 1939 saw the first two — and the two best — movies that teamed up Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson. Hot on the heels of The Hound of the Baskervilles came an even more stylish yarn, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, pitting the Great Detective against his arch-nemesis, Prof. Moriarty (George Zucco).

Moriarty's double-bladed scheme is not merely to filch the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. He aims to distract Holmes with murderous red herrings* and thereby publicly humiliate the Crown's famous defender, thus ending the two opposing geniuses' rivalry. Involved in the convolutions is exquisite ingénue Ida Lupino, who comes to 221b Baker Street when her brother, and then she herself, is threatened by the same mysterious messages that presaged the murder of her father exactly ten years ago.

Loosely based on William Gillette's stage play from 1899, Adventures doesn't break a sweat trying to make sense of its unwieldy and pulpy plot, but gets away with it in entertaining fashion thanks to pithy dialogue ("You've a magnificent brain, Moriarty; I admire it; I'd like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society") and the strengths of everyone in front of and behind the cameras.

Rathbone is again pitch-perfect as Holmes, his wiry energy and avian features guaranteeing that the actor would find the role unshakable for the rest of his career. Bruce excels as the bovine Dr. Watson even as the series forces him to settle into the silly-ass buffoon that purists have come to either loathe or hate. The script hits a sour off-note early on when, in a dickish moment, Holmes dismisses Watson's help with a supercilious insult followed by a paternal pat on the shoulder, as if he's calming a blubbing child. Note, however, that it's Watson who keeps trying to steer Holmes to the business of the endangered Crown Jewels, a task Baker Street's most renowned resident pooh-poohs until it's nigh too late.

Zucco's Moriarty may be the screen's finest so far. This coolly evil Napoleon of Crime proactively manipulates the London underworld like, as Doyle put it, a spider in the center of his web. The relationship between Holmes and Moriarty is smartly crafted, like two ruthlessly competing CEOs who respect each other's acumen yet who are nonetheless determined to see each other ruined.

In terms of directing and photography, Adventures is even better than its predecessor. Director Alfred L. Werker shows off a flair for the material, and we get scenes that appear composed, lit, and shot expressly for the most evocative publicity stills. The noirish ambiance of Victorian London is beautifully rendered, with hansoms clattering down cobblestone streets in a city built from roiling fog and inky shadows.

(* Edited to add: This plot device — Moriarty distracting Holmes with red herrings so that the Professor's more dastardly plot can proceed elsewhere — gets amplified in the new Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, as does the Zucco Moriarty's affinity for horticulture, which provides a big clue to Downey Jr.'s Holmes against Jared Harris's Moriarty.)

Regrettably, after only two films 20th Century Fox discontinued the series. After Adventures, Universal snapped up the rights (and the cast) and "re-imagined" the Holmes tales in twelve enjoyably trashy B-movies such as...

Terror By Night (1946)

Alongside series high points Pearl of Death and The Spider Woman (both 1944), here's a favorite title from Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, the World War II-era thrillers that starred Basil Rathbone.

By now Rathbone had so thoroughly imprinted himself on Holmes (or was it the other way around?) that he was eager to decouple himself from Arthur Conan Doyle's unkillable mastermind. Perhaps because his servitude was nearing an end, here Rathbone gives one of his more dynamic Holmes performances. These production-line pulp yarns — Hollywood's own Bazooka Bubble Gum — couldn't have given the terrific Rathbone any sense of challenge or growth as an actor. Nor do they ask much of the viewer, but they can be undemandingly entertaining period bric-a-brac.

The Great Detective and faithful Watson (Nigel Bruce at the height of his character's nauseating boobery) attempt to guard a priceless diamond, the Star of Rhodesia. The stone is cursed ("all those who possessed it came to sudden and violent death"), placing its owners — haughty Lady Margaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes) and her fretting son, Roland (Geoffrey Steele) — in mortal peril.

Before you can say "elementary," Roland is murdered with a poisoned blowdart and the diamond stolen. With the action set on a speeding train between London and Edinburgh, Terror by Night shares a point of interest with Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. No passenger is above suspicion, and they are indeed a fishy bunch. The story doesn't rise above the expected paperback whodunit formula, and chances are you'll peg the perp long before Holmes does.

But the whole movie's only an hour long so the twists involving a trick coffin, secret disguises, a switcheroo with the gem, more murderous poison darts, and a fearsome adversary from Holmes' past aren't spread too thinly. Dennis Hoey returns for his final turn as ineffectual Inspector Lestrade. And American actress Renee Godfrey, as a young lovely caught up in events, is in the running for Hollywood's worst British accent until Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Better-than-usual pacing by series director Roy William Neill serves a by-the-numbers screenplay by pulp novelist Frank Gruber. Inconsistent stock footage suggests that the train changes engines during the journey, and the series itself is quite obviously running low on coal, though you can't fault the enduring Rathbone-Bruce chemistry or the unflagging charm of Rathbone's portrayal. After a life-or-death struggle on the train's exterior, literature's most famous sleuth returns to his compartment, slicks back his hair, and reports to Watson that he's just been "observing the landscape from the end of the corridor." Watson protests that he hadn't seen his friend there. "I was on the outside," Holmes quips, "you must try it sometime." Now we know where James Bond got it.

By the series' next and final installment, 1946's Dressed to Kill (a.k.a. Prelude to Murder), Universal's Sherlock Holmes films had degenerated to modest B-movie pulp potboilers with contemporary stock villains such as Nazis and The Scarlet Claw. After all that plus more than 200 half-hour Sherlock Holmes radio adventures with Nigel Bruce, it's understandable that Rathbone wanted to leave Holmes and Hollywood behind. Rathbone delivered a magnetic performance to the bitter end, though, and for two generations of viewers he still holds a place as the screen's all-time favorite Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

No literary characters have appeared on screen more often than Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula. So in one of life's happy little synchronicities, one of the best screen Holmes teamed up with one of the best screen Draculas in 1959, and did so in an adaptation of the most-filmed Holmes story produced by the studio that revivified Dracula for the movies. Britain's Hammer Films had already made a name for itself as a maker of lurid yet appealing adaptations of horror and suspense classics, so its colorful The Hound of the Baskervilles was a welcome inevitability.

Here's the seventh cinematic version of Doyle's novel and the 121st Holmes film. (In 1945 a copy of a German version of Hound was found in Hitler's private film library at Berchtesgaden.) This was also the first Holmes movie shot in color.

Director Terence Fisher had already teamed stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in two films that jolted Hammer to the domination of the British horror film scene: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958). Cushing was evangelical in his quest to do right by Doyle, and his Holmes is one of the greats even if it's not quite up there with the inestimable Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett for screen portrayals. Not to mention that it's peculiar to see Holmes this time surrounded by significantly taller actors.

Doyle's story has been predictably Hammerfied, but most of his plot's floorboards and furnishings are intact. Back in the 1600s, an abandoned abbey on the property of Baskerville Hall near the misty Devonshire moors was the site where evil Sir Hugo Baskerville murdered a girl who refused his favors, and in turn he immediately perished between the fangs of a gigantic spectral hound. Ever since, so the legend goes, the Baskerville family has been cursed with the monstrous beast. Holmes (Cushing) and Watson (André Morell) are brought up to date on the tale by Dr. Mortimer (Francis DeWolff), the friend and physician of Sir Charles Baskerville. Sir Charles was the most recent resident of the hall, until he was found dead of fright at the remains of the abbey — and a horrific howling has been heard in the surrounding moors.

Newly arrived from South Africa to take his place in the ancestral estate is Sir Henry Baskerville (Lee). Holmes, of course, is not convinced by ghost stories, but he senses evil afoot. Immediately after he warns Sir Henry against venturing to Baskerville Hall alone, his lordship is almost bitten by a tarantula deliberately placed to attack the new head of the manor.

Holmes sends Watson to Devonshire with Sir Henry. From there Watson, Sir Henry, and later Holmes encounter an escaped convict, the scatterbrained local bishop (Miles Malleson, glorious as always) whose tarantula is missing, and Baskerville's neighbors: Stapleton (Ewen Solon) and his seductive daughter, Cecile (Marla Landi).

Will Holmes solve the mystery and discover who or what is behind the murders? Well, of course, but not before someone else perishes at the hound's jaws, the blood-stained dagger used by Sir Hugo is back in action, and Sir Henry discovers that a local girl beneath his station has plenty to offer his lordship.

This version of the tale works better as a "Hammer film" than as a Baskervilles adaptation. And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing. Holmes purists and pedants may gnash their teeth over add-ons that augment the Hammer house style — that menacing tarantula, an unexplained sacrificial rite, Sir Henry's sudden love interest (although we must say that the movie is unique in letting Christopher Lee, of all people, kiss the girl), among other divergences and alterations. Baskervilles has always been a little over-populated with red herring characters, and this version makes no effort to be an exception. The pacing could use a boost at times and — let's shoot straight here — the "hound of hell" itself is something of a letdown.

Nonetheless, Peter Cushing nails the energy, arrogance, and mannerisms of the literary Holmes, and bears a pleasing likeness to the original Strand illustrations even without possessing the elevated physicality of Doyle's character. Cushing's incarnation achieves distinction even as he plays up the stereotyped image of Holmes that had crystallized in the zeitgeist long before '59. With a Meershaum pipe in his teeth, he sports the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape that are as associated with their owner as Superman's red cape and "S" logo. Twice the film all but winks at the audience when Cushing exclaims "Elementary, my dear Watson," a line never uttered in Doyle's stories yet which has — thanks to William Gillette's stage play mentioned above — barnacled itself onto the popular image of the Great Detective. No matter. Cushing delivers a sterling performance, and a Holmes film made strictly for Holmes purists certainly wouldn't be a Hammer production.

André Morell's no-guff, dependable Dr. Watson isn't given enough to do, yet he's miles more authentic than the wuffling comic sidekick Nigel Bruce's version imprinted on the popular imagination. He steadfastly strides forth alone into the moonlit moors, risking death by quicksand or convict or canine terror, to ably assist his companion.

Being a Hammer production, the cinematography is stylish and just gaudy enough, with that distinctive Hammer gothic plumage on display — plenty of antique tones, dark wood sets, and shadow-strewn exteriors — and the set designer obviously did fastidious research into the canonical details of 221b Baker Street.

Alterations aside, the Hammer Hound rates well on lists of favorite Doyle adaptations, though it's usually ranked below the 1939 version and the BBC's 1968 version that again featured Cushing as the Master. In 1984 Cushing played Holmes yet again, in the TV movie The Masks of Death, and wrote about Holmes for a number of books.

Christopher Lee also had his turn playing Holmes in 1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, a German-French-Italian production co-directed by Fisher, then twice more on TV, in 1991's Incident at Victoria Falls and 1992's Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady. Lee speaks about these at length in a feature interview on the DVD of our next title....

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Among my favorite Holmes pastiches is director Billy Wilder's (Some Like It Hot) most personal and ambitious serio-comedy. A box office failure of delicate grace and wit and thinly veiled melancholy, it's his most under-appreciated work. Never mind that the theatrical release print we can watch now on DVD or via digital streaming is only a portion of the entire movie that was planned and filmed by Wilder. Even so, the truncated edit that remains is among the most pleasurable of Holmes films and stands tall among the better movies of its era.

Wilder and his longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond conceived The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a 220-page screenplay ("a symphony in four movements," Wilder called it) that resulted in a 165-minute epic slated for a "roadshow" format: it would include an intermission and tour the country screening exclusively at the best movie palaces in each city it played in, charging higher admission prices and offering moviegoers souvenir programs and reserved seating. By 1970 it was a format already from a bygone era, the 1950s and '60s, that included such roadshow spectacles as West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and My Fair Lady.

Alas, Hollywood was suddenly skittish after a number of recent expensive roadshow pictures flopped before the public. So United Artists altered the release strategy, and therefore the film, after Wilder had completed his big production. Of Private Life's original four adventures (three short ones and one lengthier one), two were cut along with a flashback sequence and a more elaborate framing-story prologue that added Watson's contemporary grandson.

Contrary to popular notions of the events, the studio heads didn't "butcher" Private Life behind Billy Wilder's back or without his participation and official approval, however reluctant he may have felt about it. He possessed the right of final cut and didn't push back against UA's request for a radical trimming of the total run time. Accounts of his involvement and any later regrets vary depending on which biography or interview you read. But it seems clear that he left the actual cutting duty to his editor, Ernest Walter, and afterward wasn't happy that his Platonically ideal three-hour version wasn't up there on the screen.

Nonetheless, in my opinion The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes flows briskly and seamlessly with no ragged traces of the 40 minutes of footage that was removed. It's quite the finely cut jewel.

(While the cut material was not preserved intact, the "Deleted Sequences" feature on MGM's DVD assembles vault elements such as script excerpts, videoless audio, and stills for partial reconstructions of the cut scenes, including "The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room," "The Curious Case of the Dumbfounded Detective," and "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners.") 


This time out it's theatrical actors Robert Stephens (Maggie Smith's husband at the time) and Colin Blakely as an effete, adenoidal Holmes and a more than usually agitated Watson. Together they deliver Wilder and Diamond's traditional acerbic dry wit in a plot that takes an arch and irreverent approach to the source material (Holmes bitches about Watson's Strand magazine stories saddling him "with this improbable outfit which the public now expects me to wear") while remaining respectful to Doyle's invented world and its innate High Victorian adventure spirit.

The movie kicks off with an episode involving a Russian diva ballerina who plans to bear Holmes' child, thereby forcing Holmes to suggest that he and the infuriated ladies' man Watson are more than just friends ("Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case"). It's a slight bit of insubordinate whimsy, but the question of Holmes' sexuality glides the plot smoothly toward its more sinister components — the alluring amnesiac Madame Valladon (Genevieve Page) warming Holmes' chilly heart, bleached canaries, a vanished troupe of circus midgets, the code word "Jonah," mysterious monks, the Loch Ness Monster — to concoct a scheme that could forever change the course of the Empire. The rather anticlimactic culmination brings Holmes and Watson together with Holmes' brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee again!), who's overseeing the construction of a top-secret weapon of mass destruction, and Queen Victoria, who gets the last word in.

It's all sumptuously mounted with splendid period trappings and flavor. A key component is the haunting orchestral score by Miklòs Ròzsa. For years I searched to no avail for this film's soundtrack album just to own the theme music. My quest finally found satisfaction when I learned that Ròzsa had adapted it from his Violin Concerto, Op. 24, which he composed in the 1950s for violinist Jascha Heifetz. As Wilder and Diamond worked on the screenplay, Wilder played the concerto in the background as inspirational mood music. He decided that he wanted the piece in the film and hired Ròzsa to compose the score around the concerto. Ròzsa has a cameo in Private Life as the ballet conductor. (A soundtrack album has finally been released, apparently.) Ròzsa's music alone justifies for me the existence of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and I'm listening to it now as I type. It's exquisite frosting on one of my favorite cakes. 

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)

Let's follow one Wilder with another.

In his first feature as writer/director/star, Gene Wilder walks softly but carries a big shtick. I'm not recommending this one for hardcore Holmes fans, or even as a particularly good movie. But this broad comedy capitalized on Wilder's easy appeal, a cuddly likeability he'd earned in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and especially in three enduring classics directed by Mel Brooks: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Because he was a longtime fan of Universal's vintage Frankenstein films, his script for and performance in Young Frankenstein radiated his affection for the source material. This time Wilder the Sherlock Holmes fan — in this DVD's audio commentary he says he reads Conan Doyle's entire Holmes canon every couple of years — tries to again capture lightning in a bottle with a costume comedy ably abetted by Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman.

However, Wilder the director gives us less polished zaniness in a film that's pleasant but too inconsequential to make much of an impression. It's melbrooksian, alright, but without Brooks' boldness or his early talent for shaping and timing a gag or a scene.

Wilder plays low-rent sleuth Sigerson Holmes, the younger brother of the renowned Sherlock (or "Sheer Luck," as Sigerson spitefully puts it). Although "hopelessly twisted" in his famous brother's shadow, he receives a blackmail case from Sherlock, who has urgent business elsewhere. The victim is loopy music hall singer Kahn, as always supremely sexy and multitalented, who succinctly informs Holmes that she's "simultaneously funny and sad." The maguffin is a stolen government document in the hands of a villainous Caruso type (Dom DeLuise).

In real life Wilder was a fencing champion and instructor, and finally we get to see this surprising swordmaster clashing blades with none other than evil Prof. Moriarty (Leo McKern).

As the Watson figure, walleyed Feldman is in good comic form as Sigerson's associate, Sgt. Orville Sacker of Scotland Yard. (Devotees of Doyle get the in-joke: Sigerson and Sacker were the author's original first-draft names for Sherlock and Watson.)

Fans of TV Britcom will recognize Nicholas Smith from "Are You Being Served?" in a recurring walk-on. And catch Mel Brooks' unseen one-line cameo in an otherwise predictable "the lady or the tiger" gag.

From start to finish The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother looks like a first film from a skilled comic actor trying his luck as an inexperienced director. The script is flabby, Wilder doesn't display a noticeably gifted eye behind the camera, the editing needed a more surgical hand, and too many participants (especially Kern) would rather pull gurning-contest faces than act.

Fortunately, Wilder insisted that Kahn and Feldman co-star with him, and together their three-way chemistry is a many-splendored thing. The stepped-down Mel Brooks influence is obvious. The sex scene with Kahn must have a been a kick to shoot, and no other film exalts in Wilder's and Feldman's bare asses at a tuxedo ball, courtesy of a death-dealing buzzsaw. Enough of the funny stuff works so that we sit through the movie aching that the whole thing isn't better than it is. Some of the silliness feels inserted at random (Wilder's commentary says that Fox chief Alan Ladd Jr. requested the reprised "Kangaroo Hop" dance to goose up the ending), and the daisy-chain of prop gags, slide-whistle humor, and blackout sketches merge uneasily with the romantic and mystery-thriller components.

What glues it together, mostly, is the talented cast in fine form. (Who else but Madeline Kahn could make the word "winkle" sufficiently funny?) It's occasionally charming, but — as the real Great Detective might put it — it's elementary, and so slight that the next day you may not remember that you watched it at all. Wilder's follow-up, The World's Greatest Lover, makes even less of an impact.

On the DVD, the big extra is Wilder's commentary track. Anyone writing a biography of Wilder or a production history of the film won't get many data points from the track — it's mostly "I remember this scene" reminiscences — but those of us who want to take him home and thank him with a cup of cocoa can enjoy his first-person annotations. He's soft-spoken and sometimes too self-critical, often sounding an inch away from melancholy, an avuncular comic in his 70s wistfully observing his younger self and his friends who've passed away. His praise for his castmates and his crew (notably production designer Terry Marsh, who went above and beyond) is touching rather than merely obligatory. 

Murder By Decree (1979)

In the dark and fog of London, 1888, a brutal killer the papers call Jack the Ripper is slaughtering the "wretched women" of the Whitechapel slums. Although the grisly murders have created a public stir, Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) observes that the official investigators are actively hostile when he offers to take up the case. When a citizens committee of Whitechapel shopkeepers appeal to him for help — Saucy Jack is proving bad for business — Holmes and stalwart Dr. Watson (James Mason) have no choice but to pursue the mystery.

Through a Victorian London that's realized with rich, claustrophobic atmosphere, the pair follow the clues to a psychic (Donald Sutherland) who claims to "see" the murderer, an Inspector (David Hemmings) with a vital secret, the aristocratic Metropolitan Police commissioner (Anthony Quayle) who commands Holmes to steer clear of the case, and a prostitute (Susan Clark) who knows too much and thus is doomed by the nightmarish black horse-drawn coach haunting the dark streets. Genevieve Bujold makes a fine impression as a traumatized young woman whose tragic story is at the heart of matters — a heart with arteries connecting to the highest levels of English society.

1979's Murder by Decree wasn't the first Holmes-Ripper movie. A Study in Terror did it in 1965. But it is the one distinguished by lavish "A" production values and by placing Holmes within the most sensational of the "Who was the Ripper?" theories — a conspiracy involving Freemasons and the Royal family that also inspired 2001's screen adaptation of Alan Moore's From Hell. From that starting point director Bob Clark and screenwriter John Hopkins fashioned an intelligent, slow-burn drama that's one of the screen's most somberly grounded Holmes stories.

As Holmes, Plummer cuts a striking figure. His controlled, subdued performance makes the stereotyped deerstalker cap and Meerschaum pipe appear natural and unaffected. As we watch Holmes "grappling with the dark intention" behind the murders, we also witness the brittle, aesthete Great Detective overwhelmed and transformed by the sheer humanity of what he uncovers. So much so that Murder by Decree is ultimately less about the Ripper than it is about Holmes being shaken to the core by the revealed truth and by the awareness that things might have gone better if he had not gotten involved.

The climactic reveal/confrontation fails to thrill because at no point beforehand does the screenplay offer us any direct involvement with the killer, so the whole "Whodunit?" factor feels merely incidental. Nonetheless, Holmes' impassioned speech of righteous outrage before the Prime Minister (Sir John Gielgud) strikes such a stirring populist condemnation of political elitism and class-warfare culpability that it could serve today as a manifesto for an Occupy Downing Street movement.

This British-Canadian co-production shot in London takes what could have been just a routine suspense thriller and elevates it into something else. Whether that "else" is something suitably Sherlockian depends on the expectations of the viewer. Some fans (such as yours truly) rank Murder by Decree among the very finest Holmes movies, embracing its play-it-straight, non-ostentatious approach to the Master. Others balk at Plummer's understated, emotional interpretation, which doesn't play up the literary figure's dispassionate deductive fireworks. James Mason took the role of Watson on the proviso that Clark allow him to counter the "silly ass" Nigel Bruce approach to the character. So Mason gives us a welcome no-bullshit Watson who is the empathetic counterpoint Holmes needs, although a purist can reasonably argue whether the staunch army physician would be so sensitive about his peas.

In any case, Plummer and Mason together make one of cinema's most warmly felt Holmes-Watson teams. Ripperologists will be pleased by how true the script is to historical incidents and persons involved. Frank Finlay appears as customary Holmes foil Lestrade, although the typical Lestrade involvement is mostly taken up, for plot reasons, by Hemmings' new Inspector Foxborough. And Donald Sutherland's character, despite his screen time in scenes played as if they're of supernatural importance, ultimately has little to do with the story.

Director/producer Bob Clark's career shows quirky variety, from Black Christmas to Porky's to A Christmas Story. On Anchor Bay's DVD edition, his commentary track shows him to be one of the more listenable and informative "how we did it" speakers. In his low-key manner, he covers production and directorial details, some Ripperology, and reminiscences of his stellar cast. Among the revelations: if Peter O'Toole and Sir Lawrence Olivier had had less of a "fuck you too" relationship, they would have taken the Holmes and Watson roles.

Happy New Year ... and that's a wrap

Bud sinks down happily on the couch, and Fran holds out the
deck to him.

                         FRAN
            Cut.

Bud cuts a card, but doesn't look at it.

                         BUD
            I love you, Miss Kubelik.

                         FRAN
                   (cutting a card)
            Seven --
                   (looking at Bud's card)
            -- queen.

She hands the deck to Bud.

                         BUD
            Did you hear what I said, Miss
            Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.

                         FRAN
                   (smiling)
            Shut up and deal!

Bud begins to deal, never taking his eyes off her. Fran
removes her coat, starts picking up her cards and arranging
them. Bud, a look of pure joy on his face, deals -- and
deals -- and keeps dealing.

And that's about it. Story-wise.

                                            FADE OUT.

Some Like It Hot (1959) — The sweet end of the lollipop

I read the news today, oh boy.

Tony Curtis has died. Shit.

Quoth the ABC News site: "News of the passing of legendary movie actor Tony Curtis has no doubt sent millions of film aficionados to their stash of DVDs. And they comb through the pile, most will no doubt pull out 'Some Like It Hot,' the 1959 gem directed by Billy Wilder that co-starred Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon."

Yep.

I don't have a bloggy eulogy on hand beyond saying that I've always enjoyed watching him work and some of his movies will always be on my list of rewatchable pleasures. Chief among them is Some Like It Hot, so in lieu of an all-new post I'm posting a bloggified adaptation of my Some Like It Hot feature article from back in the DVD Journal days. It's a general overview and personal rah-rah, with some info about the DVD near the end.

Within moments after I hit the Publish Post button, I'll put the DVD in the player and catch it on the big screen downstairs. Not a bad way to raise a toast and say, "Thanks, Tony."




"Movies should be like amusement parks. People should go to them to have fun." — Billy Wilder

"...a lighthearted farce with sexual tension and a lot of dirty jokes — in short, sublime but filthy.... Some Like It Hot pays a great deal of attention to penises — their presence as well as their threatening absence." — Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

"Zowie!" — Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown)

My top ten reasons why this 1959 comedy
is the still sweet end of the lollipop

10. The story
In The Legacy of "Some Like It Hot" — one of the two featurettes added to this movie's 2006 Collector's Edition DVD — Jack Lemmon says that studying how this fizzy cocktail of a screenplay works "should be mandatory for young writers." He adds, "if there were a few scripts that they should really study for dialogue, construction, etc., that would have to be number one. It's flawless, I think."

Oh fuck yes.

It's Chicago, 1929. The Jazz Age. Prohibition, bootleg hooch, gangland rub-outs. Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are jazz musicians. Broke, desperate jazz musicians. After playing a gig in a speakeasy attached to a funeral parlor run by bootlegging gangster Spats Colombo (George Raft), they escape a police raid only to witness Spats's equivalent of Al Capone's St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Suddenly on the run from every gangster in Chicago, they hop a train to Florida with Sweet Sue's Society Syncopators, an all-girl hot jazz band. How do Joe and Jerry do it? By dressing up as and pretending to be girls, of course. So Joe and Jerry become "Josephine" and "Daphne" ("I never liked the sound of 'Geraldine'") to blend in — like two frat boys at Hugh Hefner's summer barbecue. Jerry, goggle-eyed at the delights on display, says it reminds him of a favorite childhood dream in which he's locked overnight in a pastry shop with "jelly rolls and mocha éclairs and sponge cake and Boston cream pie and cherry tarts." Joe, perhaps catching that last double entendre, warns him, "We're on a diet!"

On the train they hook up (not in the modern sense) with singer and ukulele-player Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), with whom both men, decked out in eyeliner and heels and fake "chests," fall in lust. She's a sweet young thing running away from a past filled with men (usually tenor sax players like Joe) who leave her with only "a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out." As she puts it, "It's the story of my life; I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop." Sugar takes a liking to the new girls in the band, particularly Jerry — that is, Daphne — who covers for her when Sugar's bourbon flask slips from her legs in view of Sweet Sue, who has forbidden two things from her girls: booze and men.

In Florida, Sugar hopes to land a millionaire. Joe and Jerry hope to land Sugar. Joe poses as a sexually frigid tycoon to win Sugar's — well, not her heart specifically. Meanwhile real millionaire Osgood (Joe E. Brown) decides that Daphne is hot stuff and potentially wife number eight (or is it nine? Only mama's keeping score). Seductions ensue. Identities become fluid and changeable. Marilyn Monroe's breasts speak to you in a language all their own. Just when things start looking up, Spats and his goons arrive for a mobsters convention at the same hotel where the girls and the two erstwhile guys are playing.

Chases and machine gun bullets and witty lines fly by, guided by the sure hand of director (and co-writer with his frequent collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond) Billy Wilder. Joe E. Brown delivers one of the most famous curtain lines in Hollywood history.

9. SEX Sex sex
Even the narrator of the original theatrical trailer knew it: "You've never laughed so much at sex — or a picture about it."

Why does Some Like It Hot still work so well when so many of its contemporaries molder in the tin film can of history? Among other reasons, the whole affair is wound tightly around a single axis, the poles being Sex and Death, two universal constants that have been sure-fire crowd-pleasers since long before Shakespeare made a fortune with them. (Indeed, add the cross-dressing and the slyly veiled dirty jokes, and Shakespeare proved numerous times that he would have adored this script.) The thrust of the story couldn't be more fundamental: Joe and Jerry try not to get killed while simultaneously trying to get laid. Honestly now, who among us can't identify with them?

This movie runs on sexual heat. That heat is fueled by wit and laughs, and Wilder keeps the furnace stoked throughout. It's a sausage casing stuffed with subtle (and otherwise) dick jokes, ogling, pinching, risqué innuendo, and the implicit pleasures and pains of serial boinking. Marilyn Monroe spills out of her dress and into the lap of every het male with a White Knight impulse. Her cozy yet frustratingly chaste cuddling with Jerry/Daphne in the sleeper berth is turned into a fantasy/nightmare of an accidental orgy when every gorgeous gal in the band squeezes into Jerry's berth, one brandishing a salami ready for slicing.



There's Joe's shipboard seduction of Sugar (or is it the other way around?) by pretending to be a frigid (read: gay) millionaire who just needs a good lay from Sugar/Marilyn to set him straight (in every possible way). It's a cad's ploy, yes. Still, it's one that works for Joe and for us. According to Curtis in the DVD's feature interview, Monroe knew exactly how to play the scene for all it's worth, to Curtis's remembered arousal and frustration. Meanwhile, Curtis's impersonation of his long-time idol, Cary Grant, is one of the film's standout features.

Mind you, love has nothing to do with it. The word is never spoken. Male-female relationships are reduced to two primal elements: sex and money. And let's not allow an unnatural impediment like honesty get in the way, at least not until the final scene when even that too is played for laughs and proven to be immaterial. But it's all a lark and wittily rendered and effervescent good fun, so somehow there's nary an unseemly moment in the whole thing.

Ambiguous sexuality pops up time and again in Wilder's films. He repeatedly blurred the boundaries between male and female, showing the continuum in between. Lemmon has said that he worked to keep Jerry's drag act from becoming tired gay shtick. So when Jerry finds that being a girl doesn't feel so bad, we witness the most transcendent display of a nervous, uptight man getting in touch with his feminine side until Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.

One of the funniest segments is "the maracas scene" after Osgood has proposed to Jerry/Daphne — and Jerry likes it. A lot. Exclaims Joe after hearing the big news: "You're a guy! Why would a guy want to marry a guy?" Says Jerry, sensibly: "Security!" A preview audience laughed so hard during the scene that portions of dialogue were lost under the noise. So Wilder reshot the scene, adding room for laughs by giving Lemmon a pair of maracas to punctuate Jerry's ecstatic reverie.

That clinging, see-through dress Sugar wears during her solo of "I Wanna Be Loved by You" is one breath away from cinema's only Marilyn Monroe nude scene. The way Monroe uses the spotlight and her body language during the number prompted Roger Ebert to call the scene "a striptease in which nudity would have been superfluous. All the time she seems unaware of the effect, singing the song innocently, as if she thinks it's the literal truth. To experience that scene is to understand why no other actor, male or female, has more sexual chemistry with the camera than Monroe."



So naturally Kansas banned the film throughout the state after United Artists refused to cut the love scene on the yacht. (IMDB reports an additional objection that cross-dressing was "too disturbing for Kansans." And yet the costumes were so intelligently designed.) The same scene caused the Memphis censorship board, one of the most authoritarian in the country, to restrict the film as "adult entertainment."

Elsewhere, just before its release, the Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas F. Little, the Catholic Legion of Decency's executive secretary, wrote a testy letter stating that Some Like It Hot was "morally objectionable" because of "gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations.... this film has given the Legion the greatest cause for concern in its evaluation of Code Seal pictures. The subject of 'transvestitism' naturally leads to complications; in this film there seemed to us to be clear influences of homosexuality and lesbianism. The dialogue was not only 'double entendre' but outright smut."

Monsignor Little needed to get out more. Some Like It Hot, which used its "gross suggestiveness" the way Star Wars used special effects, is still a gem you can enjoy with your kids or your mother. Wilder gave his audience credit for being as smart as he was, and, boy, they don't make 'em like that anymore, but they oughtta.

8. The on-set trivia and gossip
The initial casting considerations included Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Anthony Perkins, and Wilder's buddy Frank Sinatra.

Wilder's choice for the role of Sugar was Mitzi Gaynor, not Marilyn Monroe. Monroe's interest in the role was an unexpected coup for Wilder. "We just wanted any girl, because it was not such a big part," he recalled in Cameron Crowe's Conversations With Billy Wilder. "The word came that Marilyn wanted the part. And then we had to have Marilyn. We opened every door to get Marilyn. And we got her." During filming, whether Wilder's effort to obtain the world's reigning sex symbol had been worth it was probably questioned by every member of the cast and crew at one time or another.

The late 1950s were particularly hard on Monroe. (But then, what years weren't?) Her troubled personal life was overwhelming her public/professional life. Consequently, the troubles she brought to the filming of Some Like It Hot are legendary. Some days she wouldn't show up for work at all. Other days she'd show up but not leave her dressing room. Fortunately, Wilder had the magic touch and managed to coax out Monroe's talent and put superb Monroe footage up on the screen.

Monroe required 47 takes to get "It's me, Sugar" correct, instead saying either "Sugar, it's me" or "It's Sugar, me." After take 30, Wilder had the line written on a blackboard. Another scene required Monroe to rummage through some drawers and say "Where's the bourbon?" After 40 takes of Monroe saying "Where's the whiskey?", "Where's the bottle", or "Where's the bonbon?", Wilder pasted the correct line in one of the drawers. After Monroe became confused about which drawer contained the line, Wilder had it pasted in every drawer. Fifty-nine takes were required for this scene. In one of the DVD's featurettes, The Making of "Some Like it Hot," we get Wilder's personal account of the incident.

For decades it's been repeated that after many takes of the big make-out scene on the yacht, Curtis complained that kissing Monroe was "like kissing Hitler." He ended up swallowing those words for years. In his interview with Leonard Maltin on the DVD, Curtis denies saying that. Elsewhere on the disc he claims that he might have said it, but he didn't mean it the way he sounded. In two books he tried mightily to contextualize the statement into something playful, just off-the-cuff verbal shenanigans. (To quote Roger Ebert again: "She kisses him not erotically but tenderly, sweetly, as if offering a gift and healing a wound. You remember what Curtis said but when you watch that scene, all you can think is that Hitler must have been a terrific kisser.")

A good article by Barry Paris at Carnegie Online adds this about the Hitler story:

It was The Putdown Heard ’Round the World, and it “went viral”—then as now. When I asked Billy Wilder about it in 1992, he said: “I never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe, nor as utterly fabulous on the screen. She paid absolutely no attention to anybody. She never thought, ‘We’re doing 80 takes, and these guys are standing here, cramping, they’re not going to get any better—in fact, it may kind of curdle on us.’  That’s what Tony meant when he said it was like kissing Hitler....

Marilyn’s own response to the Hitler remark later surfaced in a LIFE magazine interview taped just six weeks before she died in 1962. Asked about Curtis’ comment, her angry, hurt reaction is not wholly coherent and, in retrospect, very sad: “That’s his problem ... It’s not him, it’s somebody else ... Out with him—get somebody else!” Like everyone else, she interpreted it as a vicious erotic insult.

Hollywood costume designer Orry Kelly won an Oscar for his work in Some Like It Hot. While measuring Monroe's hips, he told her that Tony Curtis's "ass is better looking than yours." Whereupon she opened her blouse. "Oh, yeah?" she replied. "Well, he doesn't have tits like these."

Monroe, her then-husband (playwright Arthur Miller), Miller's mother, and many of Monroe's fans blamed Wilder for the miscarriage she suffered twelve hours after filming her last take on Some Like It Hot. Wilder told Miller that if Miller had been her writer and director rather than her husband, he would have thrown her out "on her can." Wilder said that he (Wilder) did the braver thing — had a nervous breakdown.

Still, decades later Wilder praised Monroe's talent: "What you had, by hook or by crook, once you saw it on screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out. And she was ... an excellent dialogue actress. She knew where the laugh was." Wilder said that Monroe had had the makings of a great screen comedienne, and you can see what appears to be her natural gift for well-delivered wit as early as 1950's All About Eve.

Academy Award nominations: Best Director, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Best Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Black-and-White Art Direction/Set Decoration. That Marilyn wasn't at least nominated for Best Supporting Actress is one of the historical Hollywood fuckups. The movie's only Oscar win went to Best Black-and-White Costume Design. Why the misses? It was competing against one of the biggest take-em-all winners in Academy Award history — Ben Hur.

7. Gangsters are cool
You've seen it a hundred times: a gangster flipping a coin in the air again and again. You see it in Bugs Bunny cartoons, in Singin' in the Rain, in almost every gangster parody since the 1930s. The signature gimmick first appeared in 1932's Scarface, in which George Raft plays a small-time hood remembered for that perpetual coin toss. That role made Raft a star.

Twenty-seven years later, in Some Like It Hot Raft spoofed himself as deadpan gangland boss Spats Colombo. When Spats notices a rival boss's henchman flipping a coin, he snarls, "Where'd you pick up that cheap trick?"

Some Like It Hot is an affectionate sendup of the gangster genre. It opens with the classic guns-ablazin' car chase with the cops. It has a stoolie named Toothpick Charlie who, yes, chews a toothpick and is later rubbed out with a Tommy gun. Spats's goons, headed by Mike Mazurki, are so classic that they could appear in a Dick Tracy movie. Pat O'Brien (Angels With Dirty Faces) plays the Chicago cop on their trail. The big boss gangster is "Little Bonaparte," a nod toward Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar. There's even a quick play on Jimmy Cagney's famous grapefruit-in-the-kisser bit from The Public Enemy.

Incidentally, Raft's career as a movie mobster was possibly influenced by his associations with real-life gangsters such as Owney Madden and Bugsy Siegel. Born and raised in New York's Hell's Kitchen, Raft tried prizefighting before becoming a dancer on Broadway and in Prohibition-era nightclubs, where he got to know some of the biggest racketeers in the city. Joe Mantegna played Raft on-screen in Barry Levinson's Bugsy (1991).

6. Jack Lemmon

Some Like It Hot marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Wilder and stage & screen veteran Jack Lemmon. He was Oscar-nominated for his roles in Some Like It Hot and Wilder's next picture, The Apartment (1960), with Shirley MacLaine. He appeared opposite MacLaine again in Wilder's Irma la Douce (1963).

With a startling talent for both dramatic and comic roles, Lemmon is half of one of the great screen pairings, the other half being Walter Matthau. They made several films together, including The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981), all directed by Wilder. You could do worse than to double-feature Some Like It Hot with Lemmon's pile-driver performance in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).

5. Tony Curtis
Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, Tony Curtis was already a box-office star when Wilder signed him to Some Like It Hot. Like Lemmon, he possessed both comic and dramatic skills, although he didn't attain nearly the star status that Lemmon later acquired.

He is well remembered for a long list of work on our screens, some 60-odd films that include a hefty plateful of lesser and forgettable titles (I'm quite fond of the broad self-parodying comic romp The Great Race, again with Lemmon) plus four undeniable highpoints within a three-year span: Sweet Smell of Success ('57), Some Like It Hot, The Defiant Ones ('58, Oscar nomination), and Spartacus ('60).

He was married to Janet "Psycho shower scene" Leigh when he became Jamie Lee Curtis's pop.

Here's to ya, Bernie.

4. Marilyn Monroe
"Look at that! Look how she moves. That's just like Jell-O on springs. She must have some sort of built-in motors. I tell you, it's a whole different sex!" — Jerry

No need for me to add to the volumes of speculation, analysis, and idolatry devoted to Ms. Monroe. Except to say that Hollywood's ultimate "It" girl represents one of the great what-if mysteries: What if her personal life had been less dramatic? What if she'd cultivated a greater sense of professionalism? What if she hadn't died in 1962?

Because she was from a generation before mine (born just two months after my dad), I grew up aware of her the way a 20-year-old today might be aware of, I dunno, Madonna maybe — a vague pop-culture understanding rooted in a bygone time. Absolutely I grew up aware of her in the abstract, recognizing her signature look and voice and "type" well before I actually saw her in a movie. It wasn't until the first time I watched Some Like It Hot that I could say, "Okay, now I finally get the Marilyn mystique thing."

No matter what occurred behind the scenes, what you see onscreen is something extraordinary. Some Like It Hot, The Misfits, Bus Stop, and a few other films offer reasons for us to believe that she could have grown into something more than just another male fantasy figure. But there's no denying that being a male fantasy figure is what made her bankable.

Unlike her "sex pot" predecessors such as Jane Russell and Jean Harlow, Monroe exuded the aura of a nonthreatening "nice girl" — one who between the sheets could happily take the right man to the stars and back, and somehow she convinced many ordinary Joes that they were The Right Man. Even in poor films (such as her next one, 1960's Let's Make Love) she expressed a preternatural, and seemingly congenital and unprocessed, ability to swirl together percolating-pheromones sexuality and girlish vulnerability.

Had she lived, would that have survived the next four decades? How much of the aura that surrounds her even today comes rooted in the tragedy of her final years and early death? I don't know. What I do know is that I enjoy watching her in Some Like It Hot. No mystique need apply.

3. Billy Wilder

It's been said that one reason Billy Wilder's scripts were so perfectly crafted was that this Austrian immigrant knew no English when he arrived in Hollywood. He was a fast learner, though, and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment) he was able to break into American films.

Book-length treatises have been written about this iconoclastic writer and director's work, with special attention given to the art and craft he demonstrated in Some Like It Hot. Anybody who can give us such a variety as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Witness for the Prosecution, and The Apartment can't be less than one of the most talented and versatile writers and directors to ever move a lens.

He was at the top of his comedic form in Some Like It Hot, and although it's now trite to say that a particular film is by itself "a film school course," I'll reach into my old toolbox and say without apology that pretty much every scene here is a Making Movies 101 essay in How To Do It Right.

2. The "Collector's Edition" DVD

In terms of presentation, quantity and quality of extras, and most importantly the film itself, 2006's Collector's Edition DVD significantly improves on the non-anamorphic, letterboxed, single-disc Special Edition from 2001.

First of all, we get an anamorphic image (1.66:1 OAR) that's cleaner than any previous edition's. This Collector's Edition removes most of the 2001 disc's visible wear, flecks, and scratches. There's been no frame-by-frame restoration to remove every speck and spot, so the print isn't quite "pristine," but it's close. Charles Lang's lovely black-and-white cinematography looks better too, with deeper black tones, broader grayscale, and a generally smoother appearance throughout. All that plus a digital transfer that rubs out the artifacting visible on the previous disc.

Like the 2001 edition, the audio comes in your choice of two flavors: the original monaural (DD 2.0) and the default DD 5.1 remix. Both options are crisp and clean and free from distortion, fuzz, or drop-outs. Not surprisingly, the 5.1 provides the richer experience and more dynamic soundspace. The 5.1 mix is thorough but modest, and does well by this fine '59 vintage soundtrack. Most dialogue is firmly centered while the music spreads to the surrounds without artificial stereo separation. Sound effects (such as gunfire and squealing tires during the beginning's police chase) and general background ambience get pulled into the room without being intrusive or showy. In comparison, the mono track sounds awfully thin. The only alternate language track is French DD 1.0.

The extras

Here's what's new to this edition:

• Full-length commentary featuring interviews with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and more — It's nice to have, but it's a lackluster effort that adds little to the more informative and entertaining new featurettes on Disc Two. Chief voices here are I.A.L. Diamond's son and the screenwriting team Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Splash, Parenthood, A League of Their Own, Night Shift, and more). They give us their personal appreciation of the scene-by-scene action, and that's not enough to hook us into the whole thing. Edited among them are archival interludes from Lemmon and Curtis. It does no harm, but it only occasionally rises a bit beyond the ordinary.

• Documentary The Making of "Some Like It Hot" (26 minutes) — Here's a casual, well-made thumbnail history assembled from new and archival materials that chronicle the film's writing (including good moments spent on Joe E. Brown's closing line) and production. On hand are Curtis, Lemmon, and Wilder, with I.A.L. Diamond's widow, Barbara Diamond. So we get the production history told by first-person reminiscences and anecdotes from the participants. At last we get some oft-told tales, such as Monroe's troubled "bourbon" and "It's me, Sugar" scenes, straight from the source. Monroe is lauded but doesn't receive the kid-glove treatment from her co-stars or, especially, Wilder. Otherwise it's clear that their memories of the experience are fond ones.

• Documentary The Legacy of "Some Like It Hot" (20 mins.) — An even more nostalgic and warmly felt companion piece to The Making of..., this one adds Hugh Hefner, UCLA cinema professor Harold Suber, producer Walter Mirisch, and director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) to Lemmon, Curtis, Wilder, and Mrs. Diamond. Hanson tours us through the studio lot where Wilder's writing office existed before a fire gutted it. Monroe gets a more generous treatment this time, and we get color footage from the shoot at San Diego's Hotel Del Coronado. Also probed is the film's position as a sexual envelope-pusher straddling the pathologically conservative 1950s and the liberating openness of the oncoming '60s. When Hugh Hefner, in his red silk jim-jams, calls your film sexually revolutionary, that's something you can hang your wig on.

• New inserts within the case are an 8-page liner notes booklet and four postcards (a poster and three Hirschfeld-like caricatures of Monroe, Lemmon, and Curtis.)

• Nostalgic Look Back (31 mins.) — An interview with Tony Curtis by Leonard Maltin. While it's entertaining to hear Curtis's generous behind-the-scenes memories of working with Monroe and Wilder and Lemmon, he's also unctuous and self-congratulatory as he regales us with accounts of his clever inventiveness on set. He remains likable in an insufferable sort of way, but there's a whiff of greater interest in his own image. Maltin's lapdog approach to the interview and Curtis's apparent patronage of the William Shatner Hair Club For Men don't help. When they get into how neato it is that they're recording this interview for a DVD that we are now watching, that just sucks up allotted time with the most obvious point they could make.

• Memories from the Sweet Sues — This 12-minute retrospective interviews four of the bit-part actresses who played members of the all-girl jazz band. More interesting than I would have thought, the actresses in this pleasant photo-album reminiscence genially recall being on the set, and of course most of the talk revolves around Monroe. They praise her charms while also adding more stories about the star's tardiness and unpredictability. Wilder, Curtis, and Lemmon also get some props, and the featurette feels like a homey reunion of sorority sisters bringing back the good times.

• Interactive 3-D Hall of Memories — A grandiose name for a 21-minute montage of stills, scene snippets, and "Never-Before-Seen" photos devoted to Monroe, Curtis, Lemmon, Wilder, and Behind The Scenes. The ornate gold museum frame surrounding it all is more than a little annoying.

• The original pressbook gallery offers a click-through collection of original press materials. You can click red dots for close-ups of particular sections.

• The original theatrical trailer. It hasn't been restored, so its wear and washed-out contrast remind us that it's been around the block a few times. Accompanying it are promos for The Princess Bride Collector's Edition DVD and the West Side Story Special Edition DVD.

1. It's not the fuzzy end
In the words of Sugar Kane, Some Like It Hot is "the sweet end of the lollipop."

This raucous and ribald movie emerges from one of the great Hollywood scripts, full of laugh-out-loud quotable lines, crisp pacing, and Wilder's precise tone and timing, which slip so gracefully between farce and romance and action. Like Casablanca, Some Like It Hot is one of the small handful of perfect Hollywood movies. To change one jot of any scene would be a diminishment.

The American Film Institute ranked Some Like It Hot #14 on its list of the 100 greatest Hollywood movies, and #1 on its list of Hollywood comedies. Arguable, for sure. Few things are more subjective than comedy, and sex is one of them. But if you've never seen Some Like It Hot, you owe it to your soul to see the masters at play.

And what Marilyn does for award-winning costumes isn't half bad either.