The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Billy Wilder · a film · 1959 · about 121 minutes · written with I. A. L. Diamond
Mode
Farce of disguise and romantic comedy, driven by the machinery of a gangster picture; the screwball comedy carried into sex farce
Mythos
Flight from a city of death into a green world; disguise there, the lovers sorted, the threatening world’s return and the escape from it; the trickster caught in his own trick, and the fool who absolves
Phase
February 1929 and the weeks after, from a raid on a Chicago speakeasy to a Florida hotel and the open sea, in four movements
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 121 minutes, in one version; a city, a train and a seaside hotel, the hotel played by the Hotel del Coronado
Register
From machine guns against a garage wall to a tango with a rose passed between mouths; farce at speed, with one song of pathos in a darkened ballroom
Scale
Two musicians, one singer, one millionaire, a band on the road and a gangland convention
Governing Proposition
Two broke musicians who witness a gangland massacre in Chicago escape in women’s clothes with an all-girl band bound for Florida, where one of them puts on a second disguise to court the band’s singer and the other is courted by a millionaire. The wager of the film is that farce can carry death and desire in one plot, and that a man put into a woman’s costume learns in it what his own costume does to women: in this world everyone survives by performance, and the only real danger is to be seen as what you are.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a chase at night in Chicago, February 1929: a hearse pursued by a squad car, and the coffin in the hearse full of liquor. Death is used as a container for drink. The law of the film is stated before a word is spoken: nothing here is what it is dressed as, and the dressing is how anything survives. The hearse is bound for a funeral parlour that is a speakeasy, and the speakeasy is raided.
Two musicians who played there, Joe and Jerry, are broke and will take any job. Tony Curtis plays Joe, a saxophone player and a seducer; Jack Lemmon plays Jerry. Days later they walk into a garage on St Valentine’s Day and see men machine-gunned against a wall by the gang of Spats Colombo, played by George Raft, the gangster of the early 1930s playing on his own past. The killers have seen them. The farce now has its motor, and it is a massacre: from here on, every costume the two men put on is a matter of life and death.
Billy Wilder directed and produced the film from a screenplay he wrote with I. A. L. Diamond, from a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, and United Artists released it in March 1959. Charles Lang photographed it in black and white; Arthur P. Schmidt edited it; Adolph Deutsch wrote the music; Ted Haworth was art director; Orry-Kelly designed the costumes and won the film’s one Academy Award. It runs about 121 minutes and exists in one version.
Movement II
The only way out of the city is a job with Sweet Sue’s all-girl band, bound for Florida. Joe and Jerry take it as women, Josephine and Daphne. On the station platform two unsteady pairs of legs in heels make their way to the train, and Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, the band’s singer, played by Marilyn Monroe, walks past them in a burst of steam. The film is already rising by rhythm alone.
On the train Sugar confides in Josephine, as one woman to another. She has run with the band to get away from saxophone players, who have used her and left her with the worst of it. She is warning herself against the man she is talking to. Joe hears the account of what men like him do, dressed as the friend it is told to, and the film has set its disclosure working.
Jerry, meanwhile, is pinched in a lift and complains of it, learning in a day what women are made to endure from men. The upper-berth party, in Daphne’s bunk, runs on past its point. The two disguises are set, Sugar’s rule is told, and the trap is waiting at the far end of the line.
Movement III
The Florida hotel is played by the Hotel del Coronado, and its porch is lined with millionaires. Joe puts on a second disguise, an oil heir with Cary Grant’s voice, the opposite in every outward sign of the saxophone players Sugar has sworn off. He is now a woman by day, her confidante, and a millionaire by night, her suitor. He uses what he heard on the train to deceive her in another costume.
Osgood Fielding III, played by Joe E. Brown, an elderly millionaire, falls for Daphne. He is Daphne’s mirror of Junior: as Joe courts Sugar under a false fortune, Osgood courts Jerry under a false sex, and on one night Daphne dances with Osgood while Joe entertains Sugar on a millionaire’s yacht. The structure doubles itself, and each half shows what the other is doing.
This is the oldest pattern of comedy: flight from a city of death into a green world, Florida in winter, the sea, a millionaire’s yacht, and disguise there until the lovers are sorted. Here the pattern slackens a little, in hotel business before the yacht, and then gathers itself for its finest stretch.
Movement IV
The night of the yacht is cut in parallel. On the dance floor Daphne leads Osgood in a tango, a rose passed between their mouths. On the yacht Joe, as Junior, feigns a heart gone cold that no woman can warm, and Sugar sets out to cure it. Two seductions run side by side, one false in its sex and one false in its fortune, and the comedy lies in asking which is the true one. The cutting rises to comic grandeur by rhythm alone.
Afterwards Daphne lies in bed shaking maracas and announces that Osgood has proposed and that she has accepted. Joe, in the next bed, tries to talk sense into a man who has stopped wanting it. Jerry’s absorption into Daphne is the film’s strangest disclosure: a desire it will not name and will not punish.
Then Junior is gone, and in the dim ballroom Sugar sings “I’m Through with Love”, in a near-transparent gown of Orry-Kelly’s. It is the one moment of pathos in the film. Joe, still in Josephine’s clothes, crosses the floor and kisses her, and the farce touches something like grief. The man who disguised himself to deceive has been changed by what the disguise let him hear.
Movement V
The threatening city returns. The gangsters of Chicago arrive at the same hotel for a convention of the Friends of Italian Opera, with Spats among them, and the trap set on St Valentine’s Day closes. The convention’s routines, Little Bonaparte’s birthday, the spat over Spats’s spats, run long, and then a gunman steps out of a birthday cake. The killing from the cake sends the two musicians running.
Everyone flees to the water. Sugar learns the truth at last and comes with Joe; Osgood takes Daphne out in a motorboat. The disguises are dropped one by one. Jerry tells Osgood at last that he is a man.
Osgood answers: “Nobody’s perfect”. The one disguise the film refuses to resolve is left standing, and the fool of the green world turns out to be its wise man; his acceptance is the comic absolution. A lesser farce would close here. This one leaves its form open, on a marriage it blesses and does not explain, and on the water the motorboat keeps going.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the farce is built as a machine whose parts are paid. The massacre is required: it makes the drag a matter of life and death, not whim, and the same gangsters return to the Florida hotel to close the trap. The train is required: it sets both disguises and lets Sugar confide her rule about saxophone players, which Joe then exploits. Joe’s second disguise is required, because it doubles him and makes him learn from both sides what he does to her; Osgood is required as Daphne’s mirror of Junior. What gives: the upper-berth party runs past its point, hotel business slackens before the yacht, and the convention’s routines carry more gangster comedy than the design needs. Most of the length is compelled; some is only permitted.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What the film brings into the open: sex is a costume as much as a body, and a man put in a woman’s clothes learns in a day what women are made to endure from men. Jerry is pinched in a lift and complains of it. Joe, as Josephine, hears Sugar tell how saxophone players have used her and left her with the worst of it, and then uses her the same way in another costume. The plot states the disclosure: the man who disguises himself to deceive is changed by what the disguise lets him hear. A quieter, stranger disclosure lies in Jerry’s absorption into Daphne, a desire the film will not name and will not punish. Both hold; neither is articulated with the weight of a condition, and the film discloses manners and appetite more than a social order.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation here is exhilaration, and it recurs: the chase of a hearse by a squad car that opens the film; two unsteady pairs of legs in heels on a station platform; the tango, Daphne and Osgood passing a rose between their mouths, cut against Joe and Sugar on the yacht, which rises to comic grandeur by sheer rhythm; the motorboat at the close. Monroe’s “I’m Through with Love”, sung in the dim ballroom after Junior has gone, is the single moment of pathos, and the kiss Joe gives her, still in Josephine’s clothes, crosses farce with something like grief. That is the one height that is not comic. What holds the axis: the rest is delight, frequent and high, and delight does not reach the terror or grandeur of the axis’s summit.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built. The structure is the oldest pattern of comedy: flight from a city of death into a green world, Florida in winter, the sea, a millionaire’s yacht; disguise there, the lovers sorted, and the threatening world’s return, which is then escaped. Cross-dressing, from Plautus through Twelfth Night and As You Like It, is load-bearing, not cited: the disguise produces the knowledge and the marriages. The gangsters are the law of the old city, turned into a convention of the Friends of Italian Opera. Joe, a woman by day and a millionaire with Cary Grant’s voice by night, is a trickster caught in his own trick; Osgood is the fool who proves the wise man of the green world. What holds it: the patterns are worked with brilliance as comedy, not driven to a meaning beyond the genre’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the screwball comedy, the gangster picture of the early 1930s, with George Raft playing on his own coin-flipping past, and the stage tradition of the drag farce. The turns are real: a gangland massacre as the motor of a sex farce, so that death and slapstick share one plot; a drag comedy carried at feature length by two male stars without ridicule of the drag itself; a frankness in dialogue and costume that the Production Code could not pass, and a last line that blesses a marriage the Code could not contemplate. The stake was real, in black and white when colour was the prestige choice. What holds it short of the bar: the premise came from an earlier story, the comic machinery is classical, and the swerve lies in tone and daring more than in form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Farce of disguise is the instrument: only by putting Joe into two costumes at once can the film show one man as the seducer of a woman and as her confidante, and let him learn from the second what the first is doing. The crosscut of the tango and the yacht is the form thinking: two seductions, one true and one false, run in parallel, and the comedy lies in which is which. The ending is the form’s last proof: every disguise is dropped except the one the film refuses to resolve, and Osgood’s reply leaves the form open where a lesser farce would close it. Turn the farce into romance and the film loses what it knows about costume and desire; turn it into satire and it loses its absolution.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Sixty-seven years of return, and the film has kept yielding. It has been read on gender as performance, early by feminist and later by queer criticism; on Jerry’s Daphne, whether a joke, a release or an identity; on Sugar, whether a stock dumb blonde or the film’s moral centre, the one person never told the truth until the end; on Joe, whether his conversion is real. The last line is reread without end. The formal depth is real too: the timing of its doublings and crosscuts is studied in the teaching of screenwriting. What holds the axis: the questions are fewer and lighter than those the deepest films sustain, and a return to it yields more pleasure than new knowledge.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1959, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force: the film brought the sex farce to its highest finish in American film and made gender disguise a subject rather than a gag; it reorganised less what film could do than what Hollywood comedy could say. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its frankness added to the pressure on the Production Code in the decade that followed; the drag comedy that came after, Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire among many, descends from it, mostly at a lower level; its comic writing is a model for screenwriters; and it is commonly placed at the head of lists of American comedies. What holds it: strong reach, and a moderate reorganisation of the medium’s means.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, with nothing lost, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous for sixty-seven years: exhibition, television, every home format, revival screenings, teaching, the National Film Registry in its first year, and Monroe’s performance and image in constant circulation; it is about as wide as a film of its decade reaches. Black and white has kept the fabric from dating as colour would have. The one charge is on the surface: some of its jokes about gender and some of its gangster turns read as period, and parts of its audience now watch the drag with different eyes. Survival is credited nearly in full, short of the widest by that small charge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The Wilder and Diamond screenplay is close to faultless as comic construction: every setup is paid, often twice, the saxophone, the yacht, Spats’s spats, the bellhop, the bracelet Daphne earns, and the dialogue does its work in lines of a few words. Lemmon’s Daphne is comic invention of the highest order, sustained without a false note; Curtis carries three voices; Monroe gives the film its pathos in a song and two scenes. Lang’s black and white is clean and lit for faces; the tango and yacht crosscut is cut with exact timing; Orry-Kelly’s costumes bear on the plot. What holds it below the top: the camera is serviceable rather than load-bearing, and the Florida middle loosens.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the garage massacre, men machine-gunned against a wall, and Osgood’s reply at the end. One law governs both: in this world everyone survives by performance, and the only real danger is to be seen as what you are. The gangsters perform too, a speakeasy behind a funeral parlour, a convention of opera lovers, a birthday cake with a gunman in it; the band performs a femininity its two new members do not feel; Sugar performs a refinement she does not have; Joe performs a millionaire. Death and slapstick obey the one law, and the range is wide, from killing to romance to a joke about a man’s marriage. The strain: the gangsters’ comedy sits apart in tone from the love plot at moments, and the massacre’s violence is treated as caper.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a farce of about 121 minutes holds. Labour enters in two broke musicians who will take any job and an all-girl band on the road; crime and the state in Prohibition, gangland and a police raid; class and money in millionaires on a hotel porch and an heir’s yacht; sex, gender and marriage; love and its deceits. They are held in one structure, not listed, since money, sex and survival drive the same plot. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred, history beyond period colour, the family and the natural order are absent or decorative, and the film’s world is a hotel and a train. A comedy of this compass describes its form, and the figure says what that form holds.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Inner Law at 8.5. A screenplay in which every setup is paid, often twice, carried by Lemmon’s invention, Curtis’s three voices, Monroe’s pathos and exact cutting; sixty-seven years of wide presence in the film’s one version; and one law, that everyone survives by performance, from a massacre against a garage wall to a millionaire’s reply in a motorboat.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: labour, crime, money, sex and marriage are held in one plot, but the sacred, history beyond period colour, the family and the natural order are absent or decorative, in a world of a hotel and a train. Above it, The Sublime at 7.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.0: an elevation of delight with one height of pathos, and a disclosure of manners and appetite that is real but lightly articulated.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Unconcealment at 8.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, on four of its five axes, and by its aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.7, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Some Like It Hot as released by United Artists in March 1959, a Mirisch Company and Ashton production, in its one version, about 121 minutes, in black and white, from the hearse in the Chicago night to the motorboat at sea: directed and produced by Billy Wilder from a screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, from a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, photographed by Charles Lang, edited by Arthur P. Schmidt, with art direction by Ted Haworth, costumes by Orry-Kelly and music by Adolph Deutsch; with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Brown, George Raft, Pat O’Brien, Joan Shawlee and Nehemiah Persoff. Monroe sings “Runnin’ Wild”, “I Wanna Be Loved by You” and “I’m Through with Love”. There is no competing cut, so nothing turns on the choice of version; restorations are weighed only as repair. The film entered the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line of dialogue is quoted, and its words are certain; the rest is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the earlier films made from the same story, the reasons for shooting in black and white, the aspect ratio, the arrangers of the period songs, the Academy nominations, and the film’s standing with the Production Code administration at its release, are not given.