One of the most beloved films of all time, this sizzling masterpiece by Billy Wilder set a new standard for Hollywood comedy.
After witnessing a mob hit, Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) skip town by donning drag and joining an all-female band en route to Miami. The charm of the group’s singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) leads them ever further into extravagant lies, as Joe assumes the persona of a millionaire to woo her and Jerry’s female alter ego winds up engaged to a tycoon.
With a script by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, and sparking chemistry among its finely tuned cast, Some Like It Hot is as deliriously funny and fresh today as it was when it first knocked audiences out six decades ago.

10 Sizzling Facts:

1: Double Remake
The seed that bloomed into Some Like It Hot was planted by an obscure 1951 German film, Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love), which was a remake of an older French comedy, Fanfares d’Amour (1935). Both pictures are episodic, focusing on a pair of desperate male characters doing what they can to earn a buck. One of those schemes involves dressing like women and performing in an all-female band. Wilder and Diamond both liked that particular device – and not much else.

2: Gangland Massacre Comedy
When Wilder and Diamond began writing, Wilder knew they needed to find the ironclad reason in which these two guys trapped in women’s clothing cannot just take off their wigs and say, ‘I’m a guy.’
After kicking around ideas, inspiration finally hit while Wilder was driving: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. If they set the film during the Roaring ‘20s and had their guys witness one of the era’s most brutal events, the masquerade becomes a matter, literally, of life and death. “That was the important invention that made everything else possible,” Wilder said.

3: Monroe and Sinatra
With the plot locked down, attention turned to casting. Names thrown around for the roles of Joe/Josephine and Jerry/Daphne included Danny Kaye and Bob Hope. But Wilder quickly moved to Tony Curtis for Joe, and his choice for Jerry was Frank Sinatra. Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t make it into Some Like It Hot, obviously. The reason why, though, depends on whose story you believe. Curtis said Wilder wanted Sinatra for Jerry/Daphne, “but he wasn’t sure Frank would be able to play it. Frank was a little bit cantankerous, and Billy didn’t want to take a chance on that.”
Wilder was a bit surly himself, which makes Diamond’s version of events seem more likely: “Billy made a lunch date with Sinatra, and he went and waited and sat there, and sat there, and Sinatra never showed up. He stood Billy up.” Sinatra was out, and Lemmon was in.

4: Best of Frenemies
The biggest piece of Some Like It Hot casting was, hands down, Marilyn Monroe in the role of Sugar Kane. It became one of her iconic roles, and it was a showcase for her talents as an actor, comedian, and all-around performer.
At first, Wilder thought of casting Mitzi Gaynor in the role. But when Monroe became available, Wilder jumped at working with his The Seven Year Itch star again – even if it came with some baggage.
Wilder recalled that Monroe showed up for early rehearsals and was great – when she remembered her lines, and she automatically knew where the joke was. But with the good came the bad. During production, she would show up hours late for work. Wilder would have to run 80-plus takes to get one line, like “Where’s that bourbon?” or “It’s me, Sugar.” She continually deferred to her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, in the midst of arguments with Wilder. All of this put epic strains on Wilder and the cast, especially Curtis and Lemmon, who had to be perfect on every take because Wilder would use the one where Monroe was perfect, regardless of how well they performed.
The stress led Wilder to make some disparaging remarks to the press after shooting wrapped. Wilder tried patching things up, but she died a short time later. As the years went on, he softened in his view of his experience working with her. “I had no problem with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had problems with Monroe,” Wilder said.

5: Supporting Cast
Wilder looked to actors from 1930s gangster pictures to fill out the ranks of Some Like It Hot’s cops and robbers. He cast George Raft (Scarface) as Some Like It Hot’s heavy, Spats Colombo; studio player Pat O’Brien as the chief lawman. But he didn’t stop there. Wilder also built in self-referential nods to the seminal crime movies. Near the end of the film, Spats sees a hood, flipping a coin and asks, “Where did you pick up that cheap trick?” Raft’s character Rinaldo did the same thing in Scarface. Later, in a moment of frustration, Spats goes to smash a grapefruit into one his henchman’s faces, a nod to one of the most iconic moments in The Public Enemy.

6: Glamorous
Once the actors were in place, it came time to turn to more serious matters: the costumes. Lemmon and Curtis knew that if they were to pass, convincingly, as women, they’d need to look the part. And that meant good clothes. “We were very co-operative,” Lemmon says about being put in makeup and high heels, “but we did put our feet down when we wanted better dresses. They wanted us to select off-the-rack stuff from the costume department. We said we wanted dresses done by Oscar winner Orry-Kelly, who was doing Monroe’s costumes.”

7: Talk like a Lady
Dressed like women, Curtis and Lemmon now needed to establish what kind of women they would be. And it was Lemmon who established the types. Curtis was reluctant leaving his dressing room first, so Lemmon took the plunge. Lemmon skipped around, talked in a high-pitched voice, and was generally bubbly and ditzy. Curtis knew the film couldn’t handle two characters like that, so he took the opposite approach: “I had to be a lady, very grand, like my mother or Grace Kelly. I held my head up, straight and high, and never went for those low-down jokes.”

8: Cary Grant
The director always wanted to work with Cary Grant, but things never came together. In Some Like It Hot, though, Curtis got Wilder as close as possible. Besides playing Joe and Josephine, Curtis has a third role, Junior, a faux millionaire heir to the Shell Oil fortune. When it came to developing how Junior would sound, Curtis brought out his Cary Grant impersonation. “Tony Curtis gave me Cary Grant,” Wilder said. Curtis was happy with the impersonation. So was Wilder. And Grant apparently liked it, too—even if he feigned the contrary.

9: Last Line
Wilder and Diamond were precise writers. But when it came time to Some Like It Hot’s punch line, they were absolutely indecisive. They got as far as Lemmon ripping off his wig and saying he can’t marry Osgood Fielding III because “I’m a man.”
What comes next? Diamond suggested “Nobody’s perfect,” and Wilder said to keep it in until they could come up with something better. “We have a whole week to think about it,” Wilder said. “We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.”
Viewers felt entirely differently. “The audience just exploded,” Wilder said. “That line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theatre. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.”

10: Oscars
The film was produced in black and white, even though colour films were increasing in popularity. Marilyn Monroe wanted the movie to be shot in colour. However Wilder convinced her to let it be shot in black and white when costume tests revealed that the makeup that Curtis and Lemmon wore gave their faces a green tinge.
Nevertheless, it instantly became a cult movie. It won three Academy Awards: Best Costume Design in Black-and-White, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Lemmon), and Best Director.

Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress, model, and singer. Famous for playing comedic “blonde bombshell” characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s and was emblematic of the era’s changing attitudes towards sexuality.
She was a top-billed actress for only a decade, but her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon.
Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (1961).
Monroe’s troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with addiction, depression, and anxiety. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicised, and both ended in divorce.
On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Los Angeles. Her death was ruled a probable suicide, although several conspiracy theories have been proposed in the decades following her death.

Tony Curtis
Anthony “Tony” Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz; June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010) was an American film actor whose career spanned six decades, achieving the height of his popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s.
He acted in more than 100 films in roles covering a wide range of genres, from light comedy to serious drama. In his later years, Curtis made numerous television appearances.
He achieved his first serious recognition as a dramatic actor in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The following year he was nominated for an Actor in The Defiant Ones (1958). Curtis then gave what could arguably be called his best performance: three interrelated roles in the comedy Some Like It Hot (1959).
Curtis played a supporting role in Spartacus opposite Kirk Douglas, which became another major hit for him. He later starred alongside Roger Moore in the ITC TV series The Persuaders!, with Curtis playing American millionaire Danny Wilde. The series ran twenty-four episodes.

Jack Lemmon
Jack Lemmon, in full John Uhler Lemmon III, (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001), American screen and stage actor who was adept at both comedy and drama and was noted for his portrayals of high-strung or neurotic characters in American films from the 1950s onward.
Two films directed by Billy Wilder helped establish Lemmon as a major star. Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960) reinforced the character type, for which he became known, that of a tense, excitable, and baffled individual who painfully progresses to a deeper understanding of the world. He received Oscar nominations for both films, as well as for Days of Wine and Roses (1962), in which he gave a harrowing portrayal of an alcoholic advertising executive.
Wilder teamed Lemmon with Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie (1966), the first of many comedies for the pair. Their most famous teaming was in The Odd Couple (1968). The film established the pattern for most of their appearances together, with a fussy neurotic (Lemmon) butting heads with a carefree scalawag (Matthau).
He garnered additional Oscar nominations for serious roles in The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1980), and Missing (1982).

Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (born Samuel Wilder, June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was an Austrian-born American film director and screenwriter whose career spanned more than five decades. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of the Hollywood Golden Age of cinema. With The Apartment, Wilder became the first person to win Academy Awards as producer, director, and screenwriter for the same film.
Wilder established his directorial reputation with an adaption of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir. Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with crime novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story, The Lost Weekend (1945), about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, as well as Stalag 17 in 1953.
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), and satires such as The Apartment (1960). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award in 1986.

Source: Source: www.criterion.com Dante A. Ciampaglia www.mentalfloss.com en.wikipedia.org