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.

Alternate universe movies: "The Public Enemy" with Louise Brooks instead of Jean Harlow

I do love a good Cagney movie. White Heat, Angels with Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy....

Like Bogart or Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant, James Cagney is one of those vintage Hollywood actors who compels me to stop and watch while channel-flipping, who occupy an amount of shelf space among the DVDs I dip into when I'm, say, "in the mood for a Cagney movie" the same way I get in the mood for a good burger or a familiar favorite album in my iTunes library.

Among my favorite bits in movie-ized Shakespeare is Cagney's roisterous comic turn as Bottom in Warner Bros.' 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a peculiar viewing experience if you know Cagney only from the tough-guy roles that helped make him an icon of his era. Those roles had already started by then, thanks to his head-turning breakout performance in 1931's The Public Enemy. This is the movie that made a star out of Warner contract player Cagney, who thereafter embodied no-bullshit gangster cool for generations.

Alongside '31's Little Caesar and the following year's Scarface, The Public Enemy made the pulpy tommy-gun melodramas into something, as Box Office said at the time, "absolutely serious from start to finish," something "meant to be taken seriously by the audience." The New York Times noted Warners' "laudable motive" of "apprising the audience that the hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld must be exposed and the glamour ripped from them," and the film's moral that "civilization is on her knees and inquiring loudly as to what is to be done."

Nonetheless, up until the final reel, in The Public Enemy the wages of sin are obvious: a kid street punk with an abusive dad and a talent for petty crime can grow up to be a big-shot racketeer with loads of dough, flashy cars, tailored suits, and beautiful, willing dames. (Too bad about that final reel, but it's a good one too.) The film did such an effective job of showing that, yes, Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta, its prologue and epilogue disclaimers extolling its wholesome social intentions failed to budge the delicate bluenose pressure groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the League of Decency. The Public Enemy's violent realism, scenes blatant in their sexual suggestiveness, and the snappy allure of Cagney's performance helped ring in Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code of 1934, which sanitized criminal and sexual subject matter for years.

Under the masterful guidance of director William A. "Wild Bill" Wellman, Cagney gives The Public Enemy its dynamism and rewatchability. No one else onscreen can hold a candle to him. Originally, Cagney and co-star Edward Woods (as Powers' life-long pal and partner in crime) were cast with their parts here reversed, Woods having the lead role as Powers. But after catching sight of Cagney in action in another film, studio bosses flipped the casting just before shooting began.

With Cagney in the lead, it was guaranteed that volatile mobster Tom Powers was the most attractive and captivating force on the screen. His success proved, if by then there was any doubt, that audiences will go for a charismatic lowlife over a dull hero any day of the week, a lesson Hollywood never forgot.

Cagney's body language and his ease with street-level speech — a holdover from his own youth on the streets of New York City's Hell's Kitchen — were a revelation. Tom was no cartoonish caricature of a thug, and the reviews of the day praised Cagney's naturalism as part of the film's realism. In the documentary featurette on the DVD, Martin Scorsese says that before he shot The Aviator he showed his cast The Public Enemy, and when Cagney's entrance arrived someone exclaimed "Modern screen acting begins."

Keep that "modern screen acting" thought in mind — I'm coming back to that in a moment.

The Public Enemy is, of course, the movie that gave us the most famous grapefruit in Hollywood history:



That's Mae Clarke getting the citrus in the kisser, a moment that took on a life of its own in the decades since (it has even been parodied on The Simpsons) and that has an uncertain origin story. (TCM's page on the film probably provides the best summary.) Clarke is one of several women in the life of Cagney's brutal yet magnetic gangster.

Taking second billing after Cagney is Jean Harlow as the classic bottle-blond Other Woman. Unfortunately, while the rest of the film's "girls" (among them Joan Blondell) are fine, the clanging exception is Harlow, whose line-readings sound so leaden and amateurish that not even Cagney can save her.

One of a harem's worth of Howard Hughes discoveries, Harlow was already a star thanks to Hughes' Hell's Angels the year before. Her lack of acting talent didn't go unmentioned by the critics, although Variety, in its review of Hell's Angels, wisely observed that, "It doesn't matter what degree of talent she possesses ... nobody ever starved possessing what she's got." Regarding The Public Enemy, Variety added, "Harlow better hurry and do something about her voice. She doesn't get the best of it alongside Clarke and Blondell."

I wish I could find an online video of the Harlow-Cagney scene in the image up there to the right. In it her nails-on-a-blackboard voice and unconvincing performance just drain the juice from the scene, illustrating my thesis perfectly. Still, here's the scene where Cagney and Harlow meet:



As much as I enjoy The Public Enemy, Harlow is the bug in the fruit salad for me.

However, when I listened to the DVD's thorough commentary track by author Robert Sklar, I discovered that William Wellman, who had directed actress Louise Brooks three years earlier in Beggars of Life, originally offered her the role that Harlow lead-balloons here. At first Brooks accepted the part, but then changed her mind and went to New York. That decision began the end of her too-short career, and kicked off the decades-long professional and personal downturns that followed.

One of filmdom's rare sui generis evocative beauties, Brooks is best known today for her starring presence as the loose-living showgirl Lulu in German director G.W. Pabst's 1929 classic, Pandora's Box. It's one of the great films of the silent era, which was by then all but subsumed by the talkies.

Pandora's Box gives us an easy dozen images that snapshot our popular impression of Louise Brooks — that exquisite face, which seems made for close-ups; that jet-black helmet-cut bob; an effortless eroticism; a delicacy that's too joyful for a femme fatale yet too knowing for a mere naif.

Pabst had been so struck by Brooks' brief role in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port that he insisted on casting her as the lead in Pandora's Box — after a two-year search for an actress to play the well-established German character Lulu (a search comparable to that for Scarlett O'Hara). Pabst created something of a national scandal when he rejected Marlene Dietrich, a bona fide German star, in favor of this minor Hollywood American player. Brooks ditched Paramount (no love lost on either side) and headed to Berlin.

Pabst treated her with a regard and respect that Hollywood had never given her, even though she irked him by relishing Berlin's "life is a cabaret" energy to a degree that would make Sally Bowles blush. (She later made it up to him by giving the director one night of what she described in her essays as her greatest sexual performance.) While in Europe she made Pandora's Box and Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl, then Prix de Beauté in France, a project begun with René Clair. Because of these films — although they were not well-received in their time and played in the U.S. and elsewhere muddled by heavily censored recuts — her eventual status as a beloved screen favorite was only waiting to be carved into our cultural marble.

Give all due credit to Pabst, but Brooksie pretty much single-handedly raises Pandora's Box above the doomed-bad-girl melodrama, the kind of one-tone moralistic parable so common in its time. Her deft, restrained performance of "tragic Lulu with no sense of sin" (as Brooks later described her) lifts the script with layers and shadings that wouldn't become common aims for years afterward. The Kansas-born actress didn't choose to play Lulu as a malevolent vamp knowingly attracting then destroying men beneath her heels (Marlene Dietrich would have fallen into that mode with one snarly look), or as some pre-War "Candy," an innocent unaware of the way men and women react to her sexually catalytic presence. Instead she walked that tightrope so tactfully that with repeat viewings we see more within her and may interpret her actions differently with every nuance. She made Lulu unfathomable, a well that always has more to give.

Brooks was not a trained actress. Despite that — or maybe because of it — she brought to the screen a performance style that's regarded as years ahead of its time in its naturalism and lack of pretense. As Brooks herself wrote,

"The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." 

In other words, film allows an actor to be not merely an animatronic puppet, but a communicator of a character's (and/or the actor's) innermost "thought and soul." In her later journals, she criticized a Garbo performance by noting that "She strains terribly... Is made to read line on top of line without pauses for mental transitions."

Watching Brooks today, we're bowled over by how modern she is, how subtle and unaffected. It's as if she intuitively understood that there's more "transmitted" power in a focused laser beam than in a wide-open spotlight.

Critics today laud Brooks' performance in Pandora's Box for the same modernity we see in Cagney's Tom Powers, and she did it two years before Cagney's entrance.

So it stabs me in the heart to learn that The Public Enemy might have teamed up Cagney and Brooks.

It's a pairing that would have changed the movie enormously, offering an altogether different heft and "reading" to the scenes between Powers and his mistress. Instead of Harlow diminishing those scenes (and the film), Brooks would have amplified and magnified them.

It's hard to imagine Brooks out-acting Cagney, but it's painfully easy to imagine the two of them together working so well that cinema might have witnessed as elemental a pairing as Bogey and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, or hydrogen and oxygen. Movies generally, and perhaps the social order, might be different today somehow.

Regrettably for us, Brooks detested Hollywood and its "play along to get along" ethos. As an actress, not to mention as an unapologetic sexual and professional maverick, she was ambitious but reckless. Cocksure but difficult to the point of self-destructive. Independent, emancipated, and willful but too damn temperamental and mercurial to commit to any situation — jobs, husbands, lovers, Hollywood studios — long enough to really get serious roots dug in. She described herself as "a born loner, who was temporarily deflected from the hermit's path by a career in the theatre and films."

It's a "What if?" that colors my viewing of The Public Enemy as I gnash my teeth through Harlow's grating performance. As with my previous Alternate Universe Movies post — "The Maltese Falcon" with Gene Tierney instead of Mary Astor — it's one of those often frustrating ponderables that emerges from the movies' long history of accidental convergences and tauntingly unfulfilled possibilities.



There's an excellent documentary about Brooks, Looking for Lulu, narrated by Shirley MacLaine and produced by Hugh Hefner for Turner Classic Movies. It used to be available on YouTube in six parts, but it's gone now. Find it if you can.

Also, there's much to see at Thomas Gladysz's Louise Brooks Society.

Music: Melody Gardot, Live from Soho
Near at hand: Balls of yarn Elizabeth has left in medias res.