Some Like It Hot

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Watch for

• Jack Lemmon’s exuberant performance as Daphne, especially as his character becomes increasingly comfortable with the disguise.
• Marilyn Monroe’s portrayal of Sugar Kane, blending comedic charm with surprising emotional depth.
• Wilder’s tight comic pacing, where misunderstandings, disguises, and romantic complications constantly escalate the chaos.
• The famous final scene, whose punchline (“Nobody’s perfect.”) delivers one of the most iconic endings in film comedy.

Production notes

Some Like It Hot was Billy Wilder's third major collaboration with co-writer I.A.L. Diamond after Love in the Afternoon (1957). Wilder pitched the project — based loosely on a 1935 French film — to United Artists with the working title Not Tonight, Josephine. The screenplay locates the story in 1929 Chicago during Prohibition, with two unemployed jazz musicians witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and disguising themselves as women to flee in an all-female band. Tony Curtis played Joe (Josephine), with Jack Lemmon as Jerry (Daphne) and Marilyn Monroe as the band's lead singer Sugar Kane. Production was famously difficult — Monroe arrived late, struggled with line memorization, and required extensive coverage from Wilder; the famous '52 takes for the bourbon line' became Hollywood folklore. Cinematographer Charles Lang shot the film in black-and-white at Wilder's insistence (against United Artists's preference for color), partly to avoid the makeup looking garish on Curtis and Lemmon's drag costumes. Production cost approximately $2.9 million.

Trivia

• Marilyn Monroe was famously difficult during production — arriving hours late to set, struggling with line memorization, and reportedly requiring 47 takes to deliver a single 'It's me, Sugar' line; Wilder later said his performance with Monroe was 'painted on a moving target.'
• Tony Curtis claimed in a famous remark that kissing Monroe was 'like kissing Hitler' — a comment he later partially walked back, saying he had been frustrated by the production's chaos rather than by Monroe personally.
• The film was shot in black-and-white at Wilder's insistence against United Artists's preference for color; the studio threatened to pull funding, but Wilder argued that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon's drag makeup would look garish in Technicolor and the studio relented.
• The famous closing line — 'Well, nobody's perfect' — was originally just a placeholder; Wilder and Diamond had intended to write a better closing line but never did, and the test audience's enthusiastic response to the placeholder convinced them to keep it.
• Some Like It Hot received six Academy Award nominations and won one (Best Costume Design); Wilder and Diamond lost Best Adapted Screenplay to Pillow Talk's screenplay team in one of the more contested writing-category outcomes of the era.

Legacy

Some Like It Hot was selected by the American Film Institute as the greatest American comedy of all time in 2000 — a designation it has held against substantial competition. The film grossed approximately $25 million on its initial 1959 release, making it Wilder's biggest commercial success to date. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1989. The famous closing line 'Well, nobody's perfect' has become permanent shorthand for romantic acceptance of imperfection, embedded in popular culture across multiple languages. The film's gender-bending premise was extraordinarily ahead of its time for 1959, and its sympathetic treatment of cross-dressing and gender fluidity has earned the film increased critical attention from contemporary writers focused on LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream cinema. Marilyn Monroe's 'I Wanna Be Loved by You' performance has become one of the most-imitated and most-referenced singing performances in American film. Among comedies of the studio era, Some Like It Hot is the one most often cited as the synthesis of comic writing, comic performance, and comic direction at their highest possible level.