Ten Days, Ten Movies, Ten Images: Day 2

It was the silliest thing I had ever seen.

Had I been older I would have known that it was also one of the wisest, most daring, most risk-taking films of the era.

It was the first grown-up film I ever saw, reaching out behind my beloved Walt Disney and Warner Brothers animated tales.  I saw it in a time when Hollywood still was a place of dreams and fantasies.  This final image could not have summed up the zany story any better.

This is my choice for Day Two.

"Some Like It Hot" (1959)
Directed by Billy Wilder
Screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
Image: Joe E. Brown (“Osgood Fielding III”), Jack Lemmon (“Jerry/Daphne”)

I was seven years old, and my parents took me to a palace. It was magnificent: draped in red velvet, golden ceilings arching high above my head, and uniformed attendants showing us to our seats. 

It was Grauman's Chinese Theatre and "Some Like It Hot" is the first grownup movie I recall seeing. 

       (Photo from Alison Martino's Vintage Los Angeles)

I laughed when the men dressed up like the ladies, I liked the sweet blonde girl with the quiet voice, I hoped our heroes would get away from the bad guys - and then that old man didn't even care that his girlfriend was a guy! 

 Tony Curtis (playing Joe channeling Cary Grant) as "Shell Oil, Jr." and Marilyn Monroe as "Sugar Kane Kowalczyk"

Curtis as Joe playing "Josephine" and Lemmon as Jerry impersonating "Daphne"

Looking back, I realized what a marvel this film was: that kids and their parents could laugh together, that the laughs would build to more and more laughs until they turned to tears of delight, that it could be crazy but sweet, preposterous but believable, and subversive in a thousand ways my seven year old self would not realize for a decade or more. 

One of the reasons the film works is because the actors commit to it, never acting as though they are above their roles. Tony Curtis (both as Josephine and spoofing Cary Grant) was just brilliant, Marilyn Monroe was never more radiant, and Jack Lemmon was wonderful in this --- and in film after film, with the kind of comic AND dramatic chops that made him worthy of every accolade he received. 

Every role in "Some Like it Hot", no matter how small, was beautifully rendered.

I saw Billy Wilder speak towards the end of his career, I *think* presenting "Buddy, Buddy," and he was still making me laugh. What a brilliant, gifted writer and director he was, and I'll be forever grateful that I had a chance to hear him share stories from some of my favorite films. It's a good memory.

I met Jack Lemmon at the old Huntington Hartford Theatre when he was starring in "Tribute" and I told him I'd loved him since I was seven years old. He hugged me, signed my playbill, and then remained there in the breezeway, talking with me for ten minutes about the previous twenty years of his extraordinary career. I still have the playbill, but I wish I'd gotten a photo. Oh, well, nobody's perfect!