1959 comedy, dir. Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack
Lemmon: IMDb /
allmovie. Two (male) jazz
musicians lose their jobs after the speakeasy is raided, and then
accidentally witness a gangland killing. They have to take the first
out-of-town job going. Even if that means joining a women's orchestra…
A thing about this film that's lost in isolation: the sort of
dumb blonde Marilyn Monroe portrays here is much more typical of her
earliest film career, as at this point (married to Arthur Miller) she
was mostly trying to take more serious dramatic roles. Billy Wilder
didn't expect to get a big star for his Curtis-and-Lemmon comedy
vehicle anyway; he was hoping Mitzi Gaynor, fresh off South Pacific,
or someone of that calibre would be interested. But Monroe saw the
script and insisted on the part.
There's a fine secondary cast too: George Raft, the guy to go to for
a gangster role, plays the gang boss. (And a little nod to serious
film fans: he'd popularised the gangster's coin flip in Scarface
(1932), and he comments on one of the underlings doing it here.)
Edward G. Robinson plays the assassin—no, not the Edward G.
Robinson, but rather his son. But still.
And that brings us back to Joe Brown as the millionaire who gets
interested in one of the "girls" from the band, and even if Osgood is
simply a sex pest by modern standards Brown's comic timing is perfect.
It wasn't a happy shoot. Monroe couldn't get her lines right even when
she wasn't trying to change them (her ongoing barbiturate habit can't
have helped). Nobody seems to have liked working with anyone else,
though some of them reconciled later. But thanks to the camerawork and
one assumes some thoroughly effective editing it feels like a happy
film: yeah, there's peril, but it's a comedy, and things will come
right in the end.
Is the opening another nod to the early noirs? Certainly there's a
great deal of familiar scaffolding: the running gun battle through the
streets, the speakeasy, the raid, the smooth-talking gang boss and the
detective. It's even a little shopworn—except that everyone on the set
knows it, and they play characters who know it too.
Yes, all right, one of our heroes commits a rape by deception (just as
much as it would be if he said "hey babe I'm a record producer"). And
I can't like it. But the film so clearly wants to play it for laughs,
and indeed it feeds right into Monroe's professional image as the
"easy" but good-hearted girl (part of her appeal, I think: the
presumed male viewer would know he didn't have a chance of getting
Grace Kelly into bed, but Monroe projects that image of hey, give it a
shot, you just might get lucky), that if I'm not going to condemn the
whole thing I have to ignore it and move on.
This was one of the films that put cracks in the Motion Picture
Production Code: they objected to the cross-dressing, of course, and
rather than try to cut it Wilder got the thing released without
approval, and it didn't seem to suffer by it. In a few more years the
Code would be dead.
As would Monroe.
And that perfect line at the end? It was a placeholder while the
scriptwriters tried to come up with something better. Eventually they
gave up, and a good thing too.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.