Yes,
the curvaceous beauty to whom all Hollywood glamour for all time invariably gets compared.
A
PART OF me wants to pull out my copy of “Some Like It Hot” and pop it in the
DVD player.
Let’s
not forget that the film starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon was set largely
on board a passenger train and in Miami Beach. But it started in Chicago with
their two musician characters inadvertently witnessing the grisly killings.
Hence,
they have to get out of town before they’re killed off. So naturally, they
dress up as women, get hired by an all-girl band (Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators)
and wind up encountering Sugar (played by Monroe).
Yes,
it’s total nonsense. Just the other day I stumbled across a Monroe documentary
that said much of the humor of the film was in the preposterous notion that
Monroe’s character would not be immediately able to tell that “Josephine” and “Daphne”
were really men.
BUT
IT DOES put a humorous touch to that ugly day. It certainly comes across as
more entertaining than the 1967 film “The St. Valentine’s Day” massacre, which
was a slightly-fictionalized take on what supposedly happened.
But
one that got bogged down in so much factual matter that it becomes dreary at
times. It gives evidence to the old cliché, “Never let the facts get in the way
of a good story.”
That
film certainly did.
When
it comes to the latter film, what I most note is that it gave us Jason Robards
as Capone – some nine years prior to giving us the award-winning performance as
the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in “All the President’s Men.”
HE
WENT FROM playing a man who later got busted by the Internal Revenue Service to
being the man who helped take down a political hack of a president.
Interesting
material. Although I’d still rather watch Monroe – who showed us her humor as
well as her curves.
 |
| The real thing! |
Even
if it’s not, strictly speaking, a historic moment film. Although if there is a
moment in Chicago history that I’d like to see someone try to make a film out
of, it is the Chicago fire of October 1871.
I
realize that 1937’s “In Old Chicago” starring Don Ameche already gave us one
take. Yet I wonder what could be done now, with the additional knowledge we now
have that acquits the reputation of the O’Leary family and with the visual
technology that could make the burning down of nearly an entire city a true
spectacle to watch.
COME
TO THINK of it, I think I’d still rather see the interaction of Curtis and Lemmon
in “Some Like It Hot.” It has its humorous moments.
And
it also gave us what might well be the funniest ending line of a film (by
comedian Joe E. Brown) ever when Lemmon’s “Daphne” character finally whips off his wig and reveals he’s a man.
“Well,
nobody’s perfect!”
-30-
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