"some like it hot"

Billy Wilder’s comic masterpiece is the sine qua non of movies involving men masquerading as women. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are at the top of their comic game, and Marilyn Monroe’s Actors Studio-influenced performance anchors the broadly farcical plot with a soulful vulnerability. The film treads blithely over a number of sexual situations that ordinarily would be catnip for the censor’s red pencil, such as Tony Curtis feigning impotence as a technique of seduction and Jack Lemmon reveling in his feminine role-play to the point of fantasizing a future marriage with Joe E. Brown’s befuddled millionaire. In some ways Some Like It Hot is more advanced and subversive in its sexual politics than anything commercially produced today. The film’s nonchalant attitude of acceptance of gender complexity is expressed in the classic last line, “Nobody’s perfect.” 

Chalres Busch

A hand signed limited edition lithograph of this work is available for sale.