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Best Picture
| THE WINNER:
Everything about William Wyler's adaptation of Ben-Hur was super-sized. You can't overlook the bravura of the sea battles, the chariot race, or the over-the-top performances by Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd and Jack Hawkins. Yet, I can't overlook the fact that outside of a few memorable scenes, the screenplay is a crushing bore. I think the academy agreed with me, Ben-Hur won 11 Oscars at the 31st Annual Academy Awards while the screenplay wasn’t even nominated. Because Billy Wilder makes such brilliant use of Marilyn Monroe’s curves, a certain steaminess hangs over Some Like It Hot. Freud would have eaten this movie for breakfast with its themes of transvestitism and sexual identities and its buried themes of homosexuality, lesbianism, oral sex (Sugar complains about always getting "the fuzzy end of the lollipop"), impotence and gender politics. Yet, although the movie is purely about sex, it comes out of a plot about other carnal lusts like greed, money and crime. |
THE WINNER:
As the movie opens, he and his best pal Joe (Tony Curtis) are musicians who are chased by mobsters after accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Boarding a train with an all-girl band, Joe and Jerry disguise themselves as girls, calling themselves Josephine and Daphne. Safely in female numbers, Jerry's voracious sexual appetites flare up, especially in the presence of the band's ukelele player, Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe). Joe pines for Sugar but Jerry finds himself wooed by a millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who gets married and divorced with alarming regularity. He makes no bones about the fact that he would like to make "Daphne" the next Mrs. Osgood Fielding. Something during Jerry's time in a dress crosses over, and he ends up stuck in a half-pipe of gender confusion. When Osgood proposes, it is not about sex but about money, about the prospect of being married to a millionaire, about the plan to marry and divorce Osgood and then live comfortably off a hefty alimony. The interesting thing about Jerry is that he is driven by two obsessions: sex and money. At the beginning, when he first sees Sugar, it's all about sex. You can practically see his libido (and his disguise) coming unglued when she climbs into his berth wearing a sexy, low-cut nightie. What does he expect to happen? Does he know that spending time with her will blow his cover? We can sense from this scene that he probably hasn't thought that far ahead. In the presence of this knock-out, what man would? Later, when Jerry (as Daphne) spends time being courted by millionaire Osgood Fielding III, it's all about the money. Osgood proposes and Jerry is giddy with joy. Having spent time in a woman's shoes, he seems to have no interest in sex but is bewildered by the prospect of material goods and having a bozo millionaire for a husband. After a night in which he is wined and dined, he meets up with Joe again (the date was a ruse so Joe could spend time with Sugar). He is giddy with delight and happily tells him "I'm engaged." "Congratulations, who's the lucky girl?" Joe asks. "I am," Jerry says. Outraged, Joe tries to reason with him "But, you're not a girl! You're a guy and why would a guy wanna marry a guy?" "Security!" Jerry says. What we come to understand from this bizarre situation is that Jerry has seen how the other half lives and finds that it suits him just fine. When we first meet him, he is all libido but once he understands what beasts men are, he understands that what is fun about being a woman (at least in his mind) isn't sex but the ability to bilk a man into being at his beck and call. He is flattered by Osgood, who introduces himself "I'm Osgood Fielding . . . the third." "I'm Cinderella . . . the second", Jerry says. Some Like It Hot is generally considered to be Marilyn Monroe's film, but personally I think it's more fun watching Jerry's strange journey as he begins with complete humiliation at his predicament at having to dress like a woman, then the near explosion of his libido when he meets Sugar, then the pure joy of the prospect of Osgood's proposal and then back around to the shame of scamming the man for an ill-gotten alimony payment. Yet, Osgood doesn't seem to mind. The film's closing is one of the most famous, and certainly the funniest. Jerry tries to convince Osgood that he isn't worth marrying by making excuses about the color of his hair and his smoking habit. "Ehhh, I'm a man," Jerry fesses up. "Well," Oswald concludes, "Nobody's perfect." |
THE WINNER:
As a result, the last actress of the decade to receive the Best Actress award was Simone Signoret in Jack Clayton's dreary, and at times creepy, melodrama Room at the Top. This is the story of a social climber (Laurence Harvey) who wants to climb out of his middle-class factory worker life and marry a wealthy woman so he can have her money. While tearing his way through several affairs, he joins a theater group where he begins a torrid affair with Alice Aisgail (Signoret), a married older woman. As you can guess, the film is a sad, depressing experience. That movie is actually just the opposite of Some Like It Hot, which is jolly and happy and a lot of fun. It comes packaged as a buddy film involving Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), two musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and go on the run from the killers on a Florida-bound train disguised as girls. The film is loaded with funny character actors but the jolly treat is Monroe. She could have been just needless eye candy, but Billy Wilder knew what he had, he knew the comic potential of having two guys dressed in drag, who have to keep their cover, then throws a temptation like Monroe right in their path. Imagine the frustration of trying to keep a man’s composure when watching Marilyn's Sugar Kane Kowalczyk on the train jiggling up and down the aisle as she plays "Runnin' Wild" on her ukulele. The addition of Monroe was a brilliant comic device. Her hourglass figure, her over-developed bosom, her boundless sexual energy, seems cosmically determined to break Joe and Jerry's cover. But what impresses me most is that her character is allowed to have ravenous hungers of her own. In most sex comedies, the women are objects who never seem to have desires but here Sugar admits that she gets turned on by saxophone players and that her most fervent desire is to marry a millionaire. That's where we get a classic scene aboard a yacht where Joe dresses in thick glasses and yachting togs and pretends to be the heir to the Shell Oil fortune (and models his mock accent after Cary Grant). As Sugar attempts to seduce him, you can practically see the steam coming out of his ears. They lie on a couch and as she kisses him, it ends in a perfectly modulated moment as his leg rises just to the right of the screen. Most of Marilyn's gifts are borne from nature. She was a jolly male fantasy, a breathtaking beauty who was blessed by God and trapped within a physical design that made her the helpless object of lust. She didn't have a lithe form but was full-figured with an hourglass shape, a jiggly walk, kewpie-doll lips and a voice that was a breathless whisper. Watching Marilyn move in Some Like It Hot, your eyes are inevitable drawn to her generous bosom. When she walked in, they arrived first. She was so striking that when she occupied a scene crowded with other actors, your eye roves unconsciously in her direction. I'm not being cute, I think by design Marilyn had such an unusually perfect physical form that many objectified her as being only a perfect physical form. Long before she came to the public eye, she appeared in the Best Picture winner of 1950, All About Eve. She has a moment when she sits on the bottom step of a staircase with nine other actors, on the bottom to the right. All of the other actors are dressed in dark clothing - Marilyn is dressed exquisitely in white with diamonds and her platinum blond hair. Was the studio grooming her in that scene? It was a brilliant idea to cast her in comedies. Marilyn Monroe, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Groucho Marx, Mae West, W.C. Fields and Dolly Parton, had looks and a persona that seemed so exaggerated that she seemed like her own caricature. She could act, she could flow into a scene and make it look effortless. She couldn't sing very well, but she had the ability to sell the lyrics as if she believed what she was saying. I never bought any of her performances in dramas, especially her last film The Misfits. She was such a bright, vibrant force of nature that watching her as a dour character makes you feel as if the director was missing the point of her. |
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