Critics reviews

[Some Like It Hot] has gracefully and daringly aged... [the film's] setup could have gone entirely wrong in lesser hands, but Wilder turns it into a smart and endlessly entertaining masterpiece... [It] remains one of the funniest gender-bending comedies ever filmed.

It never ceases to amaze that [Some Like It Hot] is just over two hours long. It's not easy for any comedy to maintain the necessary energy for that length of time, let alone one that relies on a fairly fast pace, but this film never lets up. But one of its greatest features it that it never relies too heavily on one type of humour.

Some Like It Hot is nothing short of glorious.

Nothing reveals the full extent of Monroe’s power and hints at the unexplored potential of her prodigious talent like “Some Like It Hot.” It may have been hell to shoot, but it’s a joy to watch. And that’s in no smart part thanks to Monroe.

[Some Like It Hot is] a complicated picture, bracingly ahead of its time in some ways, wincingly dated in others... It can be hard to disentangle sex appeal from exploitation, or to avoid seeing the shadow of Monroe’s profound unhappiness in Sugar’s melancholy moments.

Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, the film was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner... [Some Like It Hot is] an outrageous, hilarious, and amazingly unpretentious trip through a funhouse of sexual identities.

There's nothing not perfect about Some Like It Hot. From the incredible dialogue, to the staging, to the spot-on casting, it is the result of a confluence of remarkable talent meeting up at just the right time.

Assuming the picture is clear, the volume is turned on, and you don’t hate film, the greatness of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot will be obvious to you, completely and immediately. That’s it. Love at first sight. Because Some Like It Hot is manifestly wonderful, you will not love it more on a second viewing, and you will not love it more as you get older and wiser. It is the exact opposite of an acquired taste.

Assuming the picture is clear, the volume is turned on, and you don’t hate film, the greatness of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) will be obvious to you, completely and immediately. That’s it. Love at first sight. Because Some Like It Hot is manifestly wonderful, you will not love it more on a second viewing, and you will not love it more as you get older and wiser. It is the exact opposite of an acquired taste.

Although the comedy never quite shakes off this basic confusion in styles, it comes to life from the start... [Jack Lemmon's] is a brilliantly worked-out performance. If Tony Curtis’s cooing Josephine is by contrast a shade too real for comfort... Marilyn Monroe is charmingly herself, if a little wan.

The movie works like a charm still, and maybe even more so for this increasingly sentimental fool: I teared up during the “I’m Through With Love” scene at the end, something I’ve never done in my other three dozen or so views of the picture.

[Some Like It Hot] is structured so meticulously that it glides from moment to moment with the elegance of an Olympic figure skater, and the consummate screwball dialogue, by Wilder and IAL Diamond, is so polished that every line includes either a joke, a double meaning, or an allusion to a line elsewhere in the film.