Some Like It Hot

In 1929 Chicago, Joe and Jerry, two out-of-work jazz musicians, accidently witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. With mobsters hot on their heels, they dress as women and join a women’s band headed for Miami. “Josephine” tries to put the make on the band’s singer, Sugar, while his pal(ette) “Daphne” catches the eye of millionaire Osgood Fielding III. When mob boss Spats Colombo shows up in Miami, the “girls” are forced to flee again ... This boisterous “combination of Scarface and Charley's Aunt” (Billy Wilder) has a provenance that stretches all the way back to the Weimar Republic. In 1935, co-authors Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan developed a story they had written into the screenplay for the French film Fanfare d'amour, which in turn became the basis for the 1951 West German film comedy Fanfaren der Liebe. The latter was directed by Kurt Hoffmann, who was once Reinhold Schünzel’s assistant – including during the making of Viktor und Viktoria (1933). The libertine spirit of a good erotic masquerade is everywhere present in Some like it Hot, not least of all in Osgood Fielding III’s immortal line, “Nobody’s perfect!”.