Inflation is galloping but the best entertainment is still an affordable ride.
For sixteen diminishing dollars anyone can enjoy, in perpetuity and ultra-high definition, the hands-down best-ever screen comedy, Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” (1959).
Once reviled as tawdry, now honored as genius, taught in every film school in the nation, Wilder’s masterpiece has it all:
Q4 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Love & Death
Sex & Money
Blood & Milk
Spills & Chills
Wealth & Poverty
Power & Weakness
Cowardice & Bravery
Truth & Deception
Music & Song
Crime & Comedy
Never flags! Never stops! Never lets you feel your ass in the seat!
Filmed more than 60 years ago, set nearly a century ago, in a world very much like our own:
Inflated markets
Yawning wealth gaps
Burgeoning technology
Unbridled sexuality
Power-mad criminals
Idle-rich roués
All singing, all dancing on the precipice of a market crash, a Great Depression and another, even more disastrous, World War.
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself But It Often Rhymes”---Mark Twain
Here are just ten great lessons from “Some Like It Hot.”
Spoiler alerts apply…if you need ‘em.
1) Run For Your Life While We Laugh!
“Some Like It Hot” is a Darwinian race for life: dodging bullets, questing for love!
Blazing guns are not funny, yet comedy stars braving them are: witness Jack Lemmon’s bullet-riddled bull fiddle.
“Nothing Is More Exhilarating Than To Be Shot At And Missed”---Winston Churchill
“Fanfaren des Liebe” (1951) is a best-forgotten German comedy of two destitute musicians who pose as women to gig in an “all-girls” band.
Ex-Vienna-crime-reporter Billy Wilder and veteran screenwriter Izzy Diamond jerry-rigged that simple premise with murder, money and sex to weld butts to the seats and glue eyeballs to the screen.
The Wilder/Diamond fastball pitch:
Penniless musicians fleeing Chicago mobsters disguise in drag to join an all-girls band, hop a train to Florida and vie for the love of the most alluring would-be gold-digger on earth!
“Zowie!”---Joe E. Brown as Osgood Fielding III in “Some Like It Hot”
2) Funny Talk
English sounds funny if you can’t understand it.
A dear friend, longtime expatriate in South Germany, spoke English to her toddlers and got an earful:
“Mutti, don’t talk funny talk!”
Immigrants to our blessed nation, Izzy Diamond and Billy Wilder first heard English as cacophony, wresting meaning slowly and effortfully. And that process left them with an appreciation for the goofy sounds of our difficult language.
And what are the goofiest sounds in English?
Aah!
Oh!
Ooh!
Uh!
Say them in a mirror and watch your face!
Joe E. Brown’s “Osgood” pleads “Daphne!” and his huge mouth gapes mile-wide!
Tony Curtis as “Joe” devilishly claims to share life-saving “blood type O” with Jack Lemmon as “Jerry,” echoed as an incredulous “Oh?” by his throwaway date, Barbara Drew as “Nellie Weinmeyer,” beginning a running gag which undercuts the horrors of this very bloody comedy.
Two-timing “Toothpick Charlie’s” name resonates long after Mike Mazurki’s command invitation, “Yoo too, Tootpick!” and the wee snitch, played by veteran actor George E. Stone, trembles to his stoolie’s fate.
At the big sit-down in Miami, Nehemiah Persoff’s “Little Bonaparte” points a deadly finger at George Raft’s “Spats Colombo” who has “gotten too big for his spats,” “gone too far” and is shortly gone for good.
Spat’s parting, trademark remark: “Big joke!”
Nellie Weinmeyer’s Hupmobile is the funniest of the two thousand nascent automotive brands of the Roaring Twenties.
(Note to investors: only three have survived.)
And the mule that lugs Nellie’s remains up the Grand Canyon in Joe qua Junior’s sympathy-seeking fantasy of near-sighted romance, as empathically envisioned by a cunningly credulous Marilyn Monroe, as the delicious “Sugar Cane,” is the funniest-named load-bearing creature extant.
3) Be Funny and Multiply
Izzie Diamond won Math awards in school and practiced Applied Mathematics in “Some Like It Hot.”
Thus one old codger ogling one young lovely is creepy.
But a dozen doddering sugar daddies rocking on the porch of a seaside luxury hotel peering past Wall Street Journals to ogle Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators is a howl, especially as the youngest—Osgood---loses his heart to Jack Lemmon’s “Daphne” in drag.
One deadly hitman isn’t funny.
But four clueless hulking hitmen exultantly chanting “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” to their wary don---neither good nor jolly---on the occasion of their collective and well-earned assassinations, are funny.
“Daphne” cuddled by Sugar in an upper berth might be too salacious for 1959, if not shortly invaded by a party of ten more blonde beauties---one proffering a formidable salami---who promptly shift the sin in the berth from forbidden lust to harmless gluttony, plus “a little bourbon.”
Blood type “O” is exponentially funnier every time it’s pronounced.
And talk about early product placement! Milk and milk products abound:
“Mr. Mozzarella”
“Buttermilk!”
Sugar “used to sell kisses for the Milk Fund!”
4) Sax is Sexy
Sugar Cane is a “pushover” for saxophonists, invoking more milky metaphors:
“I don’t know what it is, but they just curdle me. All they have to do is play eight bars of ‘Come to Me My Melancholy Baby’ – and my spine turns to custard, and I get goose-pimply all over – and I come to them.”
Long known as “the devil’s horn,” the saxophone, particularly as employed in jazz, is notoriously masculine and erotic.
In jazz it is said: the sweeter the sax, the meaner the saxophonist.
Sugar, sweet as her name for all but a moment of the film, angrily recalls the cruel, sexy saxophonists who ravish, exploit and summarily dump her.
To Sugar’s point the sweetest sax in modern jazz belonged to Stan Getz, whose “Early Autumn” solo, recorded with the Woody Herman Orchestra when Getz was just twenty-one, skyrocketed him to stardom.
You can delight in it here:
Getz is best remembered, of course, for the heartrending figures surrounding Astrud Gilberto’s iconic 1964 recording of that Brazilian anthem of unrequited love, “The Girl From Ipanema” (1962).
True to sax maxim, private Stan Getz, polyaddicted and irascible, acknowledged in a New York Times interview, not only could he be difficult, but “some said [a] monster.”
Contrariwise, for jazz’ raunchiest sax hear the refined Earl Bostic, conservatory-educated and bespectacled (memo to Sugar!) Californian, sadly burdened with an earthquake phobia that destroyed his long marriage.
Said to have outplayed even the great Charlie Parker in public, Bostic, doubly phobic, feared to record his best licks lest they be copied by competitors.
Here’s his rousingly seductive version of “You Go To My Head,” surely applicable to the Society Syncopators, were it not penned a decade later in 1938:
5) Sociopaths See What Others Miss
George Raft didn’t just play mobsters. He ran with them.
Childhood friend of Bugsy Siegel and one-time mob wheelman, Raft confessed, had he not found his calling in Hollywood, after turns as boxer and dancer, he might have joined the criminal world for good…oops, bad.
Thus Raft’s “Spats Colombo” was a creditable godfather long before “The Godfather” (1972).
Compact, perfectly proportioned, Spats is beyond dapper in coiffure, dress and demeanor. Every move, every word is quick, spare and deliberate. His barest nod determines your fate.
Spats never blinks, never breaks his stare of animal dominance—no one who experiences a mobster glance soon forgets it---and like a prey animal Spats perceives every visual cue, well before his dim-witted henchmen, Pat O’Brien as “Detective Mulligan” who tails him, and moviegoers who admire him.
Spats fingers Joe and Jerry twice---once in civvies, then in drag---figures Toothpick Charlie for a rat, knows who’s packing heat and detects Little Bonaparte’s hit just before it arrives, but neither pleads for his life nor ducks, lest it mar his majesty.
He merely murmurs his trademark, “Big joke!” as he is sprayed afresh with gunfire and dies like the don he is.
Despite his preternatural perceptiveness, Spats, surrounded by yes-men qua hit men and insulated from self-doubt, Putin-esquely overplays his hand and ends life a loser.
Similarly, in real life George Raft shunned lead roles in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and “Casablanca” (1942), awaiting “better” parts, while these star turns fell to Humphrey Bogart, who became an international icon as Raft drifted into marginality and sadly died broke.
6) Sugar is Sweet, Marilyn is Borderline
Extensively interviewed on the bonus disc of this UHD reissue of “Some Like It Hot,” writer/director Billy Wilder recalls Marilyn Monroe flawlessly reciting two full pages of script, then flubbing two three-word lines:
“It’s me, Sugar!” and “Where’s that bourbon?”
Not just once, not twice, but for a full day’s shooting, each word on a placard in plain view.
Thus Marilyn exasperated cast and crew, wasted precious time and money and risked the goodwill of the industry.
Likewise her tardiness was legendary: Marilyn claimed she lost her way to the studio she knew so well, but declined a chauffeured ride.
Many felt the star’s behavior was willful: Marilyn was not invited to the wrap party of this, her greatest screen triumph.
But was Marilyn willful?
Or a prisoner of her own psychopathology?
Diagnosable with manic-depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, polysubstance dependence and, crucially, borderline personality disorder, Marilyn’s most intractable problem, was not yet a diagnosis in 1959.
Borderline personality is characterized by unstable moods, intense love and anger, lies and manipulation, recurrent self-harm, suicidality, impulsivity and substance abuse.
The paradox of borderline personalities is a desperate need for love coupled with intense fear of abandonment, frequently precipitated by difficult, even outrageous behavior, typically when enraged.
And the most outrageous borderline behavior is flat-out, absolute and resolute refusal to cooperate, regardless of consequence:
Behavior more typical of a horse, Nellie Weinmeyer’s fantastical mule or a two-year-old in need of a nap.
Had Billy Wilder been raised on a farm or worked in daycare, he might have better understood his very precious, fragile and contrary star.
In the entertainment world such behavior will get you shunned.
In the wider world…
7) “Great Opportunities Are Rare…Seize Them!”---Charlie Munger
“Some Like It Hot” features great stars and character actors of the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s.
But two invitees are conspicuously absent:
Frank Sinatra and Edward G. Robinson.
Frank Sinatra was the premiere entertainer of the twentieth century: singer and actor, he could even dance if he had to.
“You didn’t know I couldn’t dance.”---Frank Sinatra
But he was the least comedic of the Rat Pack he led. Dean Martin told him flat out he wasn’t funny. And Dean knew funny.
Billy Wilder invited Sinatra to lunch to discuss a lead role in “Some Like It Hot.”
Frank stood him up.
Billy ruled Frank out.
And Frank Sinatra never earned the comedy chops he longed for.
Likewise, Edward G. Robinson, iconic gangster of “Little Caesar” (1931), declined the perfect reprise as Little Bonaparte, refusing to play opposite George Raft: remnants of an ancient grudge.
By proxy it is Robinson’s son, Edward G. Robinson, Jr., as Johnny Paradise, who bursts from Spat’s death-day cake to “vulcanize” Spats & Company for all time.
8) “Ask Me The Secret of Comedy? Go Ahead, Ask Me!”
“All right, what’s the secret…”
“Timing!”
Fast is funny.
But not so fast.
Abbott and Costello had to hit the brakes for more laughs. Their first screen appearance, comedy relief in “One Night in the Tropics” (1940), was so rapid-fire audiences could barely keep pace.
So when Billy Wilder plotted Jack Lemmon’s late night reveal--- Daphne’s engagement to Sugar Daddy Osgood---Billy handed Jack a pair of maracas to punctuate the dialogue and leave time for any audience---quick-witted or not---to laugh and recover:
Jerry: “I’m engaged!”
Joe: “Congratulations! Who’s the lucky girl?”
Jerry: “I am!”
Shake-Shake!
9) “Leave The Gun, Take The Cannoli”
Long before Richard Castellano as “Peter Clemenza” uttered this classic line in “The Godfather” (1972), Wilder and Diamond melded death, dessert and family values:
In the kitchen at the big Miami sitdown, as young Johnny Paradise steps into Spat’s death-day cake, a capo delivers
the submachine gun—“Easy!”---and cautions:
“Don’t mess up the cake – I promised to bring a piece back to my kids.”
10) Sugar Is Sweet, Osgood is Good and Nobody’s Perfect
So what makes “Some Like It Hot” AFI’s perennial number 1 comedy?
Is it Marilyn Monroe?
When Marilyn is in view all eyes are on her. But even the world’s greatest star could not render any comedy a classic.
Is it jokes? Pacing? Timing?
No, the secret sauce of “Some Like It Hot” was bottled long ago, deep within our primate brains.
Game Theory Rules
Wilder and Diamond created a letter-perfect application of classical game theory, which undergirds the impeccable thematic logic of “Some Like It Hot” and makes its incredible plot credible.
Put simply, game theory teaches there are four possible human outcomes in any two-person interaction:
Win-Win
Win-Lose
Lose-Win
Lose-Lose
Only “win-win” grants happy endings.
The four lovable lovers of “Some Like It Hot”---Sugar, Joe, Jerry and Osgood---all aboard Osgood’s launch at the close of this riotous comedy---have, tragically, always played a losing game in life and love.
Joe is win-lose: short-term gain, long-term lose: broke, on the run, living out the 1928 ballad “Just a Gigolo.”
Joe exploits and abuses everyone: hapless Jerry, lonely Nellie, prissy Bienstock, charitable Osgood, adorable Sugar, and even little Junior at the beach, whose name and seashells he appropriates for his Shell Oil charade. (“Up, up, up,” Junior intones, as with present-day Shell Oil.)
Jerry is lose-win: chronically abused by Joe, asking, “Why do I listen to you?” as if expecting an honest answer from a satisfied abuser.
Sugar is lose-win as well: seduced and abandoned by every badass saxophonist she falls for, on the fast-track to bitterness despite peerless adorability.
Osgood is lose-lose: divorced too many times to count, seeking love in all the wrong places, last married to an “exotic dancer,” fated to end life a childless, orphan mama’s boy.
The Two-Hour Journey to Win-Win
In this uniquely extended comedy, so smooth it flies by in a wink, each central character achieves a win-win:
Joe’s pose as a millionaire brings forth humility and charity, displacing lust and greed. The poignancy of Sugar’s anguish at his rejection calls up the best of which he is capable, as Joe qua Josephine rushes the bandstand, embraces Sugar as she sings a heartfelt, “I’m Through With Love” (1931!), reveals his deceptions and runs for his life.
Sugar, awakened to the Junior/Josephine charades, bicycles to the pier---“Wait for Sugar!!”---hops aboard Osgood’s launch, accepts Joe’s humble confession and these two beautiful people disappear from the screen in passionate embrace.
And now Jerry, having escaped certain death through Osgood’s good graces, and always possessed of a conscience, is likewise obliged to confess his ruse, albeit in measured reveals, each of which calls forth Osgood’s love, acceptance and forgiveness.
Osgood, insulated by wealth from the uncertainties and precariousness that plague his musical companions, seeks and offers the love and acceptance that wealth never assures. An aged roué, having exhausted other romantic possibilities, he is open to any novelty. Thus when Jerry reveals his true identity---“I’m a man!”---Osgood is nonplussed, mouthing the two words that have long defined this joyous ride:
“Nobody’s Perfect!”
Addendum: Taps for Spats
The Chicago Mob springloads Joe and Jerry into the comedy adventure that is “Some Like It Hot.” But Wilder and Diamond did not omit to square the circle in the Mob subplot, which obeys game theory rules as well.
At the sitdown in Miami “CEO” Little Bonaparte reports the continuing success of the organization: it is a cooperative win-win.
But Spats’ “big noise” on St. Valentine’s Day, an unsanctioned megahit, is strictly win-lose and bodes poorly for Spats. Indeed, Spats has unwisely confided to his henchmen that Little Bonaparte and his fellow choirboy, Toothpick Charlie, may soon be “singing in the same choir again.”
Whether Spats’ intentions reached Little Bonaparte’s ears or not, we will never know. But we can assume Bonaparte did not rise to this moniker by missing cues or lacking informants. So when Spats, who wants to have his cake and eat it too, gets just desserts, the Mob subplot goes game theory perfect.
About the Author
Mark Tobak, MD, is a general adult psychiatrist in private practice. He is the former chief of inpatient geriatric psychiatry and now an attending physician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Harrison, NY. He graduated the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Columbia University School of General Studies. Dr. Tobak also has a law degree from Fordham University School of Law and was admitted to the NY State Bar. His work appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Times, and American Journal of Medicine and Pathology. He is the author of Anyone Can Be Rich! A Psychiatrist Provides the Mental Tools to Build Your Wealth, which received high praise from Warren Buffett.
