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Some Like It Hot, 1958. Directed by Billy Wilder. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, George Raft, Joe E. Brown. Assuming that there actually IS such a thing, I doubt that I would count Some Like It Hot as the funniest movie ever made. Oh, it's funny alright. It is certainly one of Billy Wilder's best movies. But now it bears the mark of Kane (Citizen Kane, that is). It has been named the funniest American movie of the the twentieth century by the American Film Institute, which makes it a target. Hell, it isn't even Billy Wilder's funniest movie. For my money, that's One, Two, Three or Ninotchka (directed by Ernst Lubitsch from Wilder's screenplay). Some Like It Hot is pretty good, though. The plot follows jazz musicians Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon who are one the run from the Chicago mob. They are the only witnesses to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and have to take it on the lam, pronto. To this end, they disguise themselves as members of an all-girl band and travel, in drag, to Miami Beach. On the way, they meet Sugar Kane Kawolski (Marilyn Monroe), the bombshell lead-singer and ukelele player for the band and Curtis becomes smitten (who wouldn't?). He further disguises himself as a millionaire playboy as a means of seducing her, all the while using his insider knowledge to advantage. Meanwhile, Lemmon's character is being romanced by ACTUAL millionaire Joe Brown, who is completely smitten. Things come to a head when the mob stages their annual meeting at the very hotel where our hero(ine)s are playing. They are recognized and have to bug out in a hurry amid the chaos of a mob assassination. The various relationships in the film come to a head as they attempt to leave... The action in comedies always seems to be a little more frantic when the threat of death hangs over things. Wilder makes this explicit by staging the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in a blaze of machine gun fire. The mob is never far from our minds. The opening sequence of Some Like It Hot is brilliant, in which a high-speed shoot out mortally wounds a coffin filled with bootleg liquor. It immediately sets the scene and combines a party with death. The characters are finely drawn and given terrific dialogue, as you would expect in any film written by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond. The standouts are the supporting characters. George Raft's spat-wearing, scarfaced gangster steals every scene he's in, but he doesn't share the screen with either Marilyn Monroe or Joe E. Brown, who both do much the same thing. Curtis manages to take back the spotlight when he is parodying Cary Grant in order to impress Monroe, particularly in the beach scene when he says he likes to collect shells, and that's why he named his company after them. Jack Lemmon comes out on the fuzzy end of the lollypop in all of this. He is a gifted comic actor, but here he is simply outclassed. As usual, Billy Wilder stages all of this with a minimum of flair. Not that that's bad. He gets out of the way and lets things develop on their own. Unusually, he lets a little flamboyance creep in when he is dealing with The Mob. One wonders what kind of film--comedy or otherwise--Wilder could have made about the mob proper. He is clearly fascinated by the criminal underclass here (and elsewhere). Of course, the elements that Wilder has assembled for the movie hardly need embellishment. They are so strong that a more flamboyant director might have interfered with their effectiveness. But then, Wilder was particularly canny when it came to choosing collaborators to work on his films. The funniest movie of the century? Well, I don't think so. Some Like It Hot has too much actual plot for that and the necessity of unfolding that plot reduces the number of laughs per minute. Nor do its laughs have the immediate impact of the great silent comedians (purely visual comedy has a more direct route to the funny bone than verbal comedy does). But it's still funny enough, and when you add in its formal qualities, it surely counts as one of the great comedies. And as one of the great comedies, it is a boon to mankind. Ain't it?