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Wilder thumbs his nose at all the rules, mixing slapstick and screwball, gangster film and musical into a racy, transvestite farce. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, Prohibition–era jazz musicians on the run from gangland Chicago, don 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 pain of being two of the girls. In Miami, Lemmon, still in drag, turns his attentions to lascivious millionaire Joe E. Brown, while Curtis uses impotence as a lure for the caring side of Sugar Kane. The film's homo– and heterosexual audacity seems more remarkable as the years go by. (One of the all-time great closing lines makes a stand for tolerance that Tootsie, twenty–five 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.