The Marilyn Monroe Movie Every Classic Film Fan Should Watch at Least Once

I grew up on classic films, the wackier the better. So, of course, I saw my share of movie musicals and high-concept comedies.

In honor of Marilyn Monroe's birthday, we're looking at one of my favorites of all time.

Some Like It Hot is the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy that topped the BBC Culture 100 Greatest Comedies of All Time poll and that the AFI ranked #1 on its list of the 100 funniest American films ever made. If you've been putting it off because it's old, black-and-white, and you're not sure it's for you, this is your sign.

In the film, two broke Chicago musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), witness a mob hit and need to disappear fast. Their solution is, of course, to dress as women and join an all-lady jazz band heading to Florida. On the train, they meet Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), the band's ukulele-playing singer, and things get considerably more complicated from there.

Here's what we can learn from the film.

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The Script Is a Clinic in Comedy

Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with I.A.L. Diamond. The pages are jam-packed with jokes. The gags come so relentlessly that it's nearly impossible to catch all of them in a single viewing.

What Wilder and Diamond create is a screwball comedy running three separate farce plots simultaneously. The mob is chasing Joe and Jerry, Joe is conning Sugar with a fake millionaire persona (and doing a heck of a Cary Grant impression to boot), and Jerry has accidentally gotten himself engaged to an actual millionaire (the wonderfully unhinged Osgood Fielding III, played by Joe E. Brown).

None of the plates drops. The script is dialogue-heavy and rapid-fire, and although it comes in at a whopping 164 pages, it never drags. Every character is big and hilarious. It's peppered with physical comedy and musical numbers as well as some engaging action. This movie has it all.

Wilder's screenwriting tips and filmmaking lessons have been written about extensively. Some Like It Hot is one of the best examples of his work.

Credit: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond

Why It's Shot in Black and White

It turns out Curtis and Lemmon don't look that convincing in drag, and although that ends up being an unspoken part of the film's central joke, the team still made some attempts to pull off their looks. Going black-and-white is famously one choice they made to, er, soften the harshness of their makeup.

Monroe actually pushed back on the black-and-white format.

Michelle Vogel tells the story in Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life.

“Though Monroe’s Fox contract stated that all of her films be shot in color, Some Like It Hot was an independent production for United Artists,” Vogel wrote (via Showbiz Cheatsheet). “Personally, she felt she photographed better in color, and she was against shooting the film in black and white.”

Wilder convinced her otherwise by showing her the color tests, which revealed that Curtis and Lemmon's drag makeup gave them a "ghoulish" appearance on color film.

So Monroe agreed to the exception. But the choice paid off not only in solving the makeup issue, but also in connecting the film visually to its screwball roots.

Monroe's Performance Is Better Than You Think

Sugar Kane could have been a throwaway character. Monroe often played the ditzy blonde, and Sugar is one of her most famous. She's a singer who could have existed just to be chased by one of the male leads. She isn't, thank goodness.

By this time, Monroe had determined to escape Hollywood and focus on her craft. She moved to New York City and joined the Actors Studio.

Her training with Strasberg added real emotional texture to the character, and many praise this part as the best of her career. However, the production was fraught, and Monroe was frequently late, sick, or nervous. She struggled with her lines. One famous story is that she required 47 takes to land "It's me, Sugar," per Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot.

As Variety puts it:

Her health issues, psychological problems and stage fright were so acute that she would keep cast and crew waiting for hours before arriving on the set, or would frequently miss shooting days, causing the production to run over schedule. When she did show up, Monroe flubbed lines, battled with Wilder over their diverging views of how to play Sugar, as well as her insistence that her acting guru Paula Strasberg hover off-camera, and required so many retakes that co-star Tony Curtis quipped that doing a love scene with her was like “kissing Hitler.”

Still, Sugar Kane remains her most accomplished performance. None of that backstage drama shows up on screen.

Some Like It Hot Credit: United Artists

It Snuck Right Past the Hays Code

Some Like It Hot was released without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code) and became a massive hit anyway.

Its cross-dressing premise, gender fluidity, and sexuality were all direct challenges to what the Code permitted. It was even banned outright in Kansas.

In March of 1959, Reverend Thomas F. Little of the Legion of Decency wrote a letter to Geoffrey Shurlock at the MPAA, listing objections to Some Like it Ho t(via Oscars.org):

"This film, though it purports to be a comedy, contains screen material elements that are judged to be seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency. Furthermore, its treatment dwells almost without relief on gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue and situations."

That didn't stop audiences from showing up.

The film's success helped accelerate the Code's collapse, paving the way for the MPAA rating system that replaced it in 1968.

The Last Line Is a Writing Lesson on Its Own

"Nobody's perfect."

It's one of the most famous closing lines in the history of cinema. In a 1996 Paris Review interview, Wilder said it was almost an accident.

"Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, 'Nobody’s perfect.' I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in 'nobody’s perfect' for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater."

The line ranked #48 on the AFI's list of top American film quotations.

Writers, this is great news. The line you dash off in a first draft can be the one that survives everything.

For more on how Wilder deployed this kind of economy throughout his work, check out our breakdown of The Apartment.