Some Like It Hot

Wilder, 1959

At first glance it is hard to grasp how the psychology responsible for such dark films as “The Lost Weekend” and “Sunset Boulevard” could have also spawned “Some Like It Hot”, a wacky rollick through the ganster-studded turf of hooch, cross-dress, and twenties swing. Yet a closer look at the structural dimensions of the early work reveals an affinity for feel-good: for all his suffering and brutishness, Don Bernam is a loveable cad who looks and charm engender sympathy, while Joe Gillis is a wry and humorous voice who’s vantage as a corpse strips the squalor from isolation and madness. These films seem content to frame and display human suffering, preserving always a slight comic disengagement and letting congenial quirks of personality displace the pathos of true failure.

In many ways the same themes are played out in this film. Superficially, the characters are perverse and twisted: Sugar a besotted floozy strung along by streams of saxophonists, Joe and Jerry indigent gamblers, Spats a ruthless killer. As in Wilder’s earlier films, it is obvious degeneracy that provides the color, the impulse and the motivation for this film, but again more as a structural device than as a point of departure for pathos: black though it be, this film is a comedy, and steers well clear of the more awkward aspects of human degeneracy. Death springs out of birthday cake, betrayal is cushioned by jewels, deceit is a mere posture cloaked in a high voice and incompetence. And the film works splendidly like this: we laugh, we cackle, we do all the things that we are supposed to do, and all the alien psychologists watching us through a magnifying glass remain convinced that this film was a comedy. It is only on the way home that we start thinking about Wilder’s earlier obra, recognizing a fundamental proclivity for tidiness and wondering if we had been mistaken in taking those earlier films so seriously.

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