Picture from Pretty Clever Films
We have a pile of films that we have never watched, both on DVD and video, some films among this pile will probably never watch together due to a slight difference in taste. However we do share certain films and Mandi is slightly more open to new films than I am so we watched Some Like It Hot, a film she has never seen before and I saw as a kid but couldn't remember much about. This is the only Marilyn Monroe film I have seen and I don't seem to have seen Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon in anything else that I can remember so it isn't part of some completest need to catch their work. Films aren't a big part of my cultural cache if I am honest and don't go out of my way to see new ones, going to the cinema is something I hate if I am honest.
Watching this again through adult eyes is a strange experience as I was probably a child when I first saw this film, the most amazing thing is the fact that this got released in 1959. In the 1950s standards were relaxing and the viewing public were treated to less rigid rules when it came to nudity and drug use among other things. Some Like It Hot was shocking at the time because it apparently promoted cross dressing and playing with the idea of homosexuality, we have come a long way and now the film sits alongside Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie as comedy films that involve men dressing as women. What connects the three is that the men were dressed as women to disguise themselves and pass themselves off as different people, and when you think about it in an analytical way there is that same underline situation going on. It was even spoofed in an episode of Family Guy. I basically watched and wondered how this got past a very different standard of censorship in 1959 with its gay undercurrent - Tony Curtis as a woman kissing Marilyn, Jack Lemmon announcing his engagement to Osgood before telling him he's a man to be told "nobody's perfect". None of that bothered me of course, but the biggest shock of all though, was realising that this film just wasn't all that funny. How this makes all those lists of the funniest films ever I don't know.
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