Bookshelf Battle

Put on your dress and run from the mob, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review of this classic film.

SPOILER WARNING! SPOILERS ABOUND. If you haven’t seen it yet, and you’ve only had 65 years to do so, I’d suggest seeing it first, then come back here to read and discuss.

I’ve been meaning to watch this flick for awhile now. Why? Because YouTube of all places has been telling me to. I’ve developed an interest in Broadway shows as of late and there’s a new one based on this classic film. Watching showtune clips gave way to clips of this flick that left me in hysterics and finally, I got around to watching the whole shebang on HBO Max. You can too if you have it.

The set-up? In 1929 Prohibition Era Chicago, an illegal speakeasy (i.e. a club where banned alcohol flows freely) is raided thanks to a tip by police informant Toothpick Charlie. Spats Colombo (George Raft) doesn’t take kindly to rats in his outfit, so he and his boys rub TC and his boys out.

Alas, down on their luck jazz musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) were in the wrong place in the wrong time and accidentally witnessed the entire tommy gun session. They swear they won’t tell anyone but Spats doesn’t like to leave loose ends and so a hot pursuit begins.

The Jazzsters need to get out of town and fast. The only way out? Donning wigs, makeup and dresses and joining an all-female big band on a train trip to Florida. Hilarity ensues as Joe is very uncomfortable with the get-up, opting to keep it simple and going with “Josephine” so as to not stray too far from his real name, Joe. Meanwhile, Jerry gets comically too comfortable with the situation, lets his imagination run wild and while Joe thought Jerry would call himself Geraldine (thus keeping it simple), Jerry calls himself Daphne and gets way too elaborate.

On the ride, the dudes are on sensory overload. As he ogles all the women in their underwear, Jerry remarks to Joe that he feels like his childhood dream of being a kid locked overnight in a candy store, free to feast on all the sweets without repercussion. Joe, a bit more sensible, reminds Jerry to “go on a diet” lest they get discovered, have to come out of hiding and Spats gives them a bad case of lead poisoning.

The lads meet Sugar Kane (the one and only Marilyn Monroe), a ukulele player and singer in the band. Joe is smitten but Sugar relates that her whole life, she’s has nothing but trouble dating lousy bum saxophone players. Joe as Josephine listens to Sugar’s tale and sympathizes but secretly is miffed that his true self, Joe, doesn’t stand a chance, seeing as how Sugar has sworn off bum musicians and has pledged that once she gets to Florida, she’ll only date well-respected millionaires.

Further hi-jinx ensue in sunny Florida. “Daphne” i.e. Jack Lemmon in drag, is relentlessly pursued by pervy millionaire Osgood Fielding (Joe E. Brown), who won’t take no for answer. At first, no is Daphne’s only answer until Osgood proposes and Daphne/Jerry falls in love, obviously not with Osgood but with Osgood’s money, fantasizing about bilking the old perv for a big settlement and fat alimony checks once Osgood realizes he’s been duped into marrying a dude and demands a divorce. Joe reminds Jerry that, you know, there are laws against that sort of thing. Hey, it’s a movie made in 1959 about 1929 after all.

Double meanwhile, Joe disguises himself as an eccentric billionaire, claiming to be the heir to the Shell Oil company fortune, and only referring to himself as “Shell Oil Jr.” He dons a yachtsman’s outfit complete with the hat and speaks with a phony Cary Grant accent, all to impress Sugar.

The fun climaxes when it turns out the mafia has a yearly Florida retreat under the guise of “Friends of the Italian Opera.” Jerry and Joe spot Spats and manage to hide just in time to avoid being rubbed out. Alas, the big boss of all American organized crime, Little Bonaparte (Nehemiah Persoff doing an impression of Mussolini as a mobster) thinks Spats went too far and draw too much heat on the organization when he rubbed out Toothpick Charlie back in Chicago, so he has his men rub Spats and Spats’ goons out.

And…boy, Joe and Jerry and the mob need to stop meeting like this because they just witnessed another murder! So off on the lam they go again. Jerry as Daphne accepts Osgood’s proposal just to get safe passage aboard his yacht and get the heck out of Florida. He convinces Osgood to bring Joe and Sugar along as bridesmaids.

At some earlier point, Sugar discovered Joe was a fraud but has since forgiven him, realizing that deep down he’s not such a bad guy. You do have to suspend disbelief and you know, forget the part about how he pretended to be a billionaire just to get into her pants. But anyway, the truth is out and they’re in love now and all is forgiven.

Safe on the launch boat and on the way to the yacht, Daphne/Jerry has a heart and realizes he doesn’t really want to defraud Osgood for his cash. He comes up with a series of excuses as to why he and Osgood can’t get married, hoping that Osgood will dump him/her and be the bad guy. I smoke, I’ve been living with a saxophone player, I can never have children, the list of excuses goes on and on while Osgood, each time, says he doesn’t care and will accept Daphne.

Finally, Jerry removes his wig, drops the girl voice and says in his regular voice, “I’m a man” and Osgood ends the film on a humdinger of a line – “Nobody’s perfect.”

It’s funny on so many levels, especially when you consider this movie was released in 1959. It’s funny if you’ve ever been in a situation where you want out of a relationship, but you want to let the other person down easily, so you come up with all these criticisms of yourself, but they won’t take the bait, and Osgood’s that hard up that he won’t let Daphne go even upon realizing that she is a he.

But then when you REALLY think about it, yeah, it becomes obvious that Osgood knew Daphne was a dude all along and was totally into it. The movie ends with a befuddled Jack Lemmon mumbling to himself in confusion, trying to make sense of what is happening, trying to figure out why this dude won’t let him go even after learning that he is a dude and being shocked to realize that, you know, this probably means that Osgood is totally gay.

Big for 1959. I’m surprised they got away with it.

So, there you have it. I gave the whole movie away but in my defense, I did give a spoiler warning.

Tony Curtis is great as the brains of the duo, the guy that keeps reminding his partner to commit to character lest they get shot by pursuing mafiosos. Jack Lemmon, who was nominated for an academy award for this role, is hilarious as he commits way too much, at times forgetting that he’s a dude. The scene where he dances about the hotel room, periodically stopping to shake a pair of maracas (he’d just come in from a long night of salsa dancing) and tells Joe about his plan to marry and divorce Osgood for a pile of money had test audiences laughing so hard that they stuck the maracas in so Lemmon could shake them for a few beats between lines to give everyone a chance to laugh as he moved from line to line (so I read online).

And Marilyn? What can we say about dear, sweet Marilyn. How sad she died so soon. I have to believe she was chosen for this film because there was some underlying message that while some dudes might like to dress up like ladies, nothing beats the real thing. As Jerry fumbles about in a dress and in heels, he constantly complains about the draft on his undercarriage, how he feels like he’s constantly about to fall over – how do women put up with it all? How do they do it? Women move “like jello on springs” i.e. there’s a gracefully sashaying to it all that men can’t replicate. Add to that Jerry/Daphne gets unwanted gropes and advancements and complains about having to fend off Osgood’s undesired perversions and you’d think this movie was made in 2024 with how it puts men in women’s shoes and asks them to sympathize with what the fairer sex has to go through.

Marilyn really was more than a dumb, blonde bimbo. She was the heart of this picture and really brought it home. The underlying theme is Joe and Jerry put on dresses and wigs and sort of got a glimpse about what its like to be a woman, but Sugar has to live with it daily – all the hopes, dreams, disappointments that go along with it. It was woke before anyone knew what woke was.

I have yet to see the Broadway remake so I’ll reserve judgment. I can already tell based on previews that at least one of the dudes comes to embrace drag as in “Oh wow having to put on this dress because the mafia was chasing me helped me to discover I was really a chick in a dude’s body all along.” I guess its 2024 so the showrunners feel they have to do that but I don’t know…there’s a lot of humor in the original with Joe and Jerry not really wanting to dress up like chicks at all. Yes, true, Jerry got a little too comfortable with it but no, he never wanted to bang Osgood. He just wanted his money, but then had a heart and decided not to put the old coot through that.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. This movie has inspired me to start watching other Marilyn Monroe movies, so I’ll let you 3.5 readers know how this goes. And I’m not sure what praise from this blog is worth, but praise to Billy Wilder who made this and several comedies like this in that era.

SIDENOTE: As I watched this, I couldn’t help but see it as an early roadmap to many of the zany comedies we know and love today. Many a comedic film finds the protagonists having to embrace some ridiculous premise. From Weekend at Bernie’s, where the dudes had to pretend like their dead boss was alive, to Me, Myself and Irene where Renee Zellwegger had to go on the run with schizophrenic Jim Carrey – humor is found when characters have to put up with something comically stupid but there’s no way out but through so they just keep putting up with X absurd premise until its conclusion. I don’t know that Some Like It Hot was the first comedic film to do this but it was definitely an early adopter that paved the way and made it popular.

Double sidenote – After watching this movie and googling, I learned Tony Curtis is Jamie Lee Curtis’ father. IDK how I was a movie fan all these years and didn’t know that.