#22 ‘Some Like It Hot’
Cross-Dressing, Cat-Calling, and the Cult of Male ‘Charm’
Some Like It Hot (1959) is Billy Wilder’s fizzy, fast-talking farce in which two men dress as women to escape the mob, infiltrate an all-female band, sexually harass Marilyn Monroe, and somehow walk away as heroes. It’s regularly voted one of the greatest comedies of all time by people who confuse gendered humiliation with progress and think putting Tony Curtis in heels is a brave act of political theater.
Let’s break it down: Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), two musicians on the run after witnessing a gangland murder, don wigs and falsies and become Josephine and Daphne. Their goal? Survival. But almost immediately, their survival turns into sport—sneaking into women's hotel rooms, groping instruments (and women), and ogling every curve that jiggles past them. It’s Tootsie meets Rear Window, only with saxophones and a bottomless pit of male entitlement.
Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Kane, the band’s singer and ukulele-playing dreamgirl, who drips vulnerability from every pore while being groped, kissed, and lied to with exhausting regularity. She’s luminous, tragic, and funny—and utterly disrespected by every character in the film, especially the ones the audience is supposed to root for. Joe, in particular, is repulsive: he impersonates a millionaire with a fake accent to seduce her, gaslights her into thinking she’s in love, and the film frames it all as a grand romantic gesture.
Sugar, of course, has no agency. She’s a damaged party girl looking for security, and the movie’s solution is to hand her over to a compulsive liar in drag. Hilarious.
Jerry’s storyline is played for laughs—he’s the one who “accidentally” gets wooed by a rich old man and starts enjoying the perks of female objectification. Isn’t it funny? A man realizing what women go through and still being the butt of the joke? Gender commentary? Barely. The film skirts any meaningful reflection in favor of pratfalls and punchlines, all while perpetuating the idea that men pretending to be women is inherently comedic, titillating, and transgressive—without ever examining why.
And let’s not forget the final line, “Nobody’s perfect,” offered after the big reveal that Daphne is a dude. It’s supposed to be a progressive mic-drop—a love-conquers-all shrug at gender expectations. But it reads more like: “We’ve lied to everyone, sexually manipulated our way into romance, and now we’re asking for applause.” Cool.
Yes, the dialogue sparkles. Yes, Monroe is electric. And yes, Wilder knew how to orchestrate chaos with surgical precision. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that this is a film where women are background noise, femininity is a costume, and manipulation is passed off as charm.
2.5 out of 5 sax solos
(One for Monroe. One for Lemmon’s comic timing. Half a star for that final line, which flirts with progress but ends up in drag.)
