There's a select handful of movies Elizabeth and I watch ritually every year for the Halloween season. Here's one that's been a list-topper for as long as we've been married. Early in our relationship, when we were first dating, we surreptitiously checked out each other's bookshelves and movie collections to see what, if anything, we had in common. Along with the science fiction and Sherlock Holmes, the graphic novels and the P.G. Wodehouse, there was The Haunting — both the movie and its source novel — among the titles that convinced us, individually, that maybe we had a good match going on here.
Of course, get any group of veteran movie-lovers talking about Haunted House films — the childhood favorites, the best-directed, the most effectively creepy — and two minutes won't pass before someone mentions The Haunting, then others nod in enthusiastic agreement before recounting whichever scene in this 1963 benchmark most freaked the bejeezus out of them. Last October at The Daily Beast, Martin Scorsese, no slouch as a suspense-film buff, ranked The Haunting #1 on his list of 11 scariest movies.
Genre film fans who came of age cinematically during or after the 1980s may find The Haunting too traditional in its narrative, too restrained in its use of the sort of visual or editing tricks that have come to define "scary" movies since the slasher-film and CGI wave. Then again, I'm not far from that generational zone myself and yet here I am. Still, if such a corrupting blind spot exists, I'd hope that double-featuring this movie with its 1999 remake would adequately serve to catalog everything so right about the 1963 version and all that can go so wrong with the post-Freddie Krueger product. Granted, arguably that's an unfair comparison given the sharp distinction — literarily and cinematically — between terror and horror, with the 1963 version embodying the former and the 1999 thudbucket failing to do justice to the latter.
Robert Wise directed this brilliantly executed exercise in restraint and atmospherics between his two all-stops-out musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music. The contrast couldn't be more startling.
A sober, faithful interpretation of Shirley Jackson's genre-defining novel, The Haunting of Hill House, it easily ranks among the most well-regarded supernatural suspense films ever made, perhaps second only to The Innocents (1961) in its use of mood, suggestion, and not showing what's behind the door to achieve a level of creeps that slithers under your skin and stays there a while. So for me the two films are a natural pairing for a double-feature night (and for this blog, obviously).
I love the opening paragraph of Jackson's 1959 novel, three sculpturally honed sentences that Elizabeth and I have read aloud to each for the minor-key music in their quiet, vivid suggestiveness:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
"I think," wrote Stephen King in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, "there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend the sum of the parts."
From the first sentence it's established that Hill House isn't just a setting; it's a character in its own right, an entity, an "organism" with a will and plans of its own, and "not sane." Wise and screenwriter Nelson Giddin apparently knew there was no point in trying to one-up Jackson's opening, so Julie Harris's voice-over version of that passage starts the movie on a perfect note, setting the goosebumpy tone before the first minute is done.
Not coincidentally, The Haunting also bears some strong similarities to King's The Shining. It's easy to see how King drew upon Jackson's novel and Wise's film for his own story of a house that was "born bad." In Danse Macabre, King places The Haunting high on his short list of the basic coursework in gut-level fright films, and among the films that contributed something of value to the genre, with a special asterisk for being one of his personal favorites.
The story brings a group of psychic researchers to the "diseased" and "deranged" old New England mansion, a Gothic monstrosity with a sordid history and architecture that mirrors the warped soul of its builder.
A naive academic, Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), leads a hand-picked collection of amateur investigators: Luke (Russ Tamblyn), heir to the house, is a skeptical hep-cat wise-ass whose only goal is to protect his upcoming investment property. Theodora (Claire Bloom), a sleek and brassy subtexty lesbian, was chosen for her ESP prowess. We also get Lois Maxwell, James Bond's Miss Moneypenny at the time, as Markway's skeptical wife who learns to really, really regret crashing in on her husband's work.
The linchpin of the story is repressed, browbeaten Eleanor (Julie Harris), whose personal history parallels key events in Hill House's sinister past.
The four meet at Hill House to record conclusive evidence of "another world." Hill House is willing to oblige — on its own terms. Seemingly sentient and watchful, the house is particularly interested in Eleanor.
As horrific ghostly eruptions escalate — including a cryptic "help Eleanor Come Home" scrawled on a wall — she is the center of Hill House's attention. Her abusive relationship with her now-dead mother, and an interrupted mixed-signals closeness with Dr. Markway, contribute to a relationship with Hill House that anticipates that of Jack Torrance to The Shining's Overlook Hotel.
Harris's performance is the movie's spine. Eleanor, the sheltered and psychologically broken young spinster, becomes one of the most complex and well-wrought characters in the genre. Through her The Haunting takes on layers of post-Freudian nuance that drives (indeed literally) to its crunching climax.
The Haunting's hypodermic effectiveness derives from the masterful craftsmanship of director Wise. His early apprenticeship was at the feet of legendary producer Val Lewton, whose preference for atmospherics and mood over visceral shocks is visible throughout The Haunting.
In Gidding's tight screenplay, outright "Boo!" moments are few. Instead, Wise (whose creds as an editor include Citizen Kane) builds a powerful sense of dread through off-kilter angles, staccato editing, and Davis Boulton's rich, evocative black-and-white camerawork. Wise's striking compositions put every widescreen square inch to use. He shot the Hill House exteriors on infrared film to give them an unnatural look. Other than that, the movie displays only one visual-effects trick — an oak door bulges inward, like an embolism, because something is pushing against the other side.
It's the use of sound, though, that really elevates The Haunting as a technical tour de force. Two of its most unnerving scenes are all about what we, along with Eleanor, can only hear. When the unseen supernatural presence pounds, boom, Boom BOOM, closer and closer along the hall outside Eleanor and Theo's room, the scare comes from what we can't see hitting the walls and then hammering the door, even as the camera presses us mere inches from the doorknob turning by itself.
Later, in bed, Eleanor hears ghastly chanting and the cries of a child behind the wall flocking (where the decorative pattern suggests a malevolent face) — again neither Eleanor nor we can see anything other than what our imaginations show us, an effect that hits hardest when Eleanor screams, the lights come up, and she realizes that the cold hand she had been holding wasn't Theo's. It's a moment that only a select few screen ghost stories, before or since, have approached.
The current Warner Bros. DVD edition of The Haunting is an essential disc on my shelf despite being a mixed bag. The good news is that the disc presents the film in its original 2.35:1 widescreen. Plus there's a commentary track with Wise, screenwriter Gidding, and all four principal actors; they were recorded separately and the track is only marginally scene-specific, but good information and warm reminiscing are on hand.
Also added are a click-through stills gallery of pages from Wise's original screenplay plus his handwritten notes, a slide-show gallery of promo material, the endearingly overcooked theatrical trailer (in DD 2.0), and a few perfunctory words on cinematic ghost stories.
The less-good news is that the film and audio elements received minimal upgrade attention. Oh, it's a fine print marred only by minor flecks and scratches, but the contrast is boosted a bit too high, resulting in greater sharpness but diminished grayscale detail and a few overblown whites. More disappointing is the audio track, which is clean and clear but quite thin, even for its vintage, in low-fi Dolby 1.0 monaural. Expect to crank up your volume control for a satisfactory level. None of which is a show-stopper, mind you. It's just that The Haunting's complex and scarifying sound cries out for a stereo or 5.1 surround remix option. Given a mindful, expertly managed sound enhancement using its original elements, Chapter 12 — boom, Boom BOOM — all by itself would be a real pants-wetter.
Music: All the John Lennon on my iPod (a lot) on the day that would have been his 70th birthday.
Near at hand: An Advanced Reading Copy of Manu Joseph's Serious Men
With The Innocents on DVD, we can give this beautifully eerie (and eerily beautiful) British ghost story the repeated viewings it demands and deserves. We can finally match our memories against its layers of teasing images and sounds to explore its more conversation-starting elements.
In so doing, I've discovered something I hadn't noticed previously: The hands. The prayer-clutched hands in the opening credits. Deborah Kerr's prim but high-strung governess repeatedly reaching out and disrupting the roses. A ghoulish garden statue clutching a pair of broken stone hands in its own (before an insect scuttles out of its mouth).
Then finally, at the moment where the film's slowly built dread could not squeeze any tighter, a shot of a single hand wrenches everything we think we know and, perhaps, puts the film's famous central question — are the ghosts real? — to rest for good.
My vote for one of the most intelligent and evocative ghost stories ever filmed, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is cryptic in ways that force us to find clues insinuated in single lines of dialogue, or in the spaces between the lines. It's a movie that speaks in ellipses, not exclamation points. It sneaks under your skin, subtly and suggestively portraying something sinister and perverse that may exist only in the protagonist's head, but that doesn't mean it can't mess with yours. Last October at The Daily Beast, Martin Scorsese placed The Innocents on his personal list of 11 scariest movies.
The specters that Miss Giddens (Kerr) sees around the country estate might be what she insists they are, the evil shades of Miss Jessup and Peter Quint — the previous governess and her brutish lover — whose wanton sexuality had scandalized the rest of the household before they died on the property under hushed-up circumstances.
The longer she loses herself in the house's solitude, and the more she interacts with her strange and precocious charges (instant standouts Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin), the more she suspects that the dead couple are "abominations" still corrupting, even possessing, the two orphaned children who adored them.
Following a private screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before a member of the British Board of Film Classification prior to its theatrical release in 1975, producer Mark Forstater sent this letter to co-producer Michael White informing him of the changes necessary in order to attain a lower rating.
Oh, to orate this out loud as a performance piece before an audience with a two-drink minimum.
According to Davis S. Cohen in Variety, and Thomas Gladysz (founder of the Louise Brooks Society) at Examiner.com, the silent film star's private journals are being unveiled after a 25-year moratorium. Says Cohen:
Brooks kept private journals from 1956 until her death in 1985, and bequeathed them to the George Eastman House with instructions they remain sealed for 25 years.
That date passed in August, and Eastman staffers have been poring over the journals before making them available to the public.
I lived in Rochester, NY years ago, working as the planetarium Astronomer Intern at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, just a few blocks from the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. I visited the Eastman House occasionally, though not as often, or with the depth of research, that I now wish I had.
Brooks was a Rochester resident in her last years. She died years before I arrived, and I didn't even know she had lived there until well after I made my next career move to Portland, Oregon. It was there that my life-long love of early cinema broadened to embrace Brooks the first time I saw and wrote about Pandora's Box.
Her relationship with the Eastman House was more than just a casual accident of geography. As summarized in her Wikipedia biography, in 1956...
... James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982.
I have a copy of Lulu in Hollywood, of course, and can affirm her reputation as a damn fine writer, and as a candid, observant critic with a sharp eye and intellect to go along with her sharp tongue.
As evidenced by the Variety news, these newly unlocked private journals include further reviews and commentary about the Hollywood set, which she had abandoned with some disgust in 1938. For instance, after a 1957 screen of Anna Christie starring Greta Garbo (with whom the omnisexual Brooks once had a one-night affair), she wrote of Garbo's performance: "She strains terribly... Is made to read line on top of line without pauses for mental transitions."
It's an observation that shores up my own thoughts about Brooks' striking, before-its-time naturalism on screen.
I wonder what else we'll see in the journals, assuming that they're going to be published unabridged. Hers was a life packed with more private drama than you usually find outside an HBO series, and much of it wouldn't exactly make what you'd call "family reading." She was graced with beauty, smarts, and talent that seemed to flow naturally from every cell in her body, yet as I wrote in that other blog post:
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."
I'm hoping we get more of that Brooksie in these journals too. After all, the instructions to leave them sealed for 25 years suggests that there's something there besides opinions of performers and performances, right?
Although I'll always wish she'd lived long enough in Rochester for me to seek her out and meet her once I got there, I'll be looking forward to reading these journals and pretending that that's how it happened.
I'm both a movie buff and a Shakespeare fanboy, so this one hits me with both arrows in its quiver.
Taymor's Titus remains one of the boldest and, to me, most exciting and faithful (in a "purity of essence" way) adaptations of a Shakespeare play for the screen. Titus Andronicus was one of William's earliest productions for the London stage, first performed well before the Globe Theatre was even a twinkle in Richard Burbage's eye. Now Taymor applies her uniquely stylized vision to the playwright's final work as a solo author. It's also one of his very best, endlessly fantastical and rubbery and tunable to our, or any, times. (Curiously, Taymor's Across the Universe left me cold and grumpy, although it too seemed made just for me, a hardcore Beatles aficionado. Then again, its failure for me was at the story level, a problem not likely repeated here.)
Much is being made about the gender-swap of Helen Mirren playing "Prospera" rather than the original, traditionally male Prospero. Pointing out that casting choice as a significant issue just sets my eyes, to borrow a phrase, "in a fine frenzy rolling." It's much ado about bugger all. It's Shakespeare ... with Helen freakin' Mirren! Oh brave new film that has such people in't!
A few years ago a college literature textbook reprinted a novelette of mine set in Shakespeare's time. The story opened with Prospero's "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" speech. As public final bows (well, nearly) go, Shakespeare began his career's exit with a doozy.
There's a bit more about it at the fine Bardfilm blog.
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.")
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.
