Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In Prohibition-era Chicago, musicians Joe and Jerry witness a mob hit, and flee the state in an all-female band disguised as Josephine and Daphne, but further complications set in.
Some Like It Hot is one of the great screwball comedies, firing on almost all cylinders. The plot is a masterwork of comic construction — the Prohibition setting, mob witness premise, and cross-dressing concealment interlock perfectly with a mounting series of complications and misunderstandings. The acting is exceptional: Lemmon and Curtis are brilliantly paired, and Monroe delivers Sugar Kane as an iconic, irreplaceable comic-romantic performance. The screenplay's timing and wit (Curtis's Cary Grant impersonation, Lemmon's tango, the final 'Nobody's perfect' punchline) are legendary. Novelty is genuinely high — despite drawing on farce traditions, Wilder and Diamond crafted something utterly singular in tone and execution, a film immediately recognizable as itself. Cinematography is solid, Charles Lang's black-and-white work is handsome, but it's functional rather than visually audacious — it serves the comedy without calling attention to itself. The ending is one of cinema's most celebrated, landing the screwball logic with perfect comic rhythm.