Admission $4.50 Single or Double Bill

Billy Wilder thumbs his nose at all the rules in this one, mixing slapstick and screwball, gangster film and musical into a racy, transvestite farce. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are two prohibition-era jazz musicians on the run from gangland Chicago. They don detailed and convincing drag, and sign on with a touring, all-woman band featuring singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe). On the train to Florida, the men experience the joy and the pain of being two of the girls. Once in Miami, however, Lemmon, still in drag, turns his attentions to lascivious millionaire Joe E. Brown, while Curtis, doing a rendition of Cary Grant that out-Grants Grant, uses impotence as a lure for the caring side of Sugar Kane. The eye-opening audacity of this film's thinly veiled sexuality, both homosexual and heterosexual, seems more and more remarkable as the years go by. (In one of the all-time great closing lines, out of the mouth of Joe E. Brown, Some Like It Hot makes a stand for tolerance that Tootsie, 25 years later, still could not afford to make.) All the principals are at their comic best, with Monroe's sweetness shining through an intelligent parody of The Blonde. (JB)