MARILYN MONROE IN SOME LIKE IT HOT

THE STAR’S MOST ICONIC PERFORMANCE? NO QUESTION

HERE’S HOW GOOD Marilyn Monroe is in Some Like It Hot: people still labour under the delusion that she really was a dumb blonde. As ditzy and frequently tipsy singer Sugar Kane, she’s pathetic, self-aware, drop-deadgorgeous and walks like she’s on springs. She plays a mean ukulele but has all the self-control of a Taser victim. Yet every second she’s on screen is liable to make you smile — unless your heart is breaking a little for her instead. Monroe really wasn’t dumb, but she was a hell of a comedian and this, along with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ Lorelei Lee, is the role she was born to play.

Sugar’s the main draw for Sweet Sue And Her Society Syncopators, an all-girl band headed to Florida. They’re joined by two down-on-their-luck musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), hiding from the Chicago Mob in drag. ‘Josephine’ promptly, and understandably, sets his-and-her sights on Sugar. The oblivious blonde is delighted with her new friends, and even more pleased when she meets Joe’s second alter-ego, heir to the Shell Oil fortune and a guy who might finally break her losing streak of falling in love with good-fornothing saxophonists.

Monroe’s genius here is making Sugar so genuinely downhearted about her romantic history that we’re almost not sure whether we should root for Joe or not: her song ‘I’m Through With Love’ is a heartbreaker, to the extent that even the censors didn’t notice her see-through dress. It’s not that she’s a gold-digger, exactly: Joe’s rather shy and retiring Shell Oil Junior would be good for her, a guy she could trust. It’s about time, in other words, that she got something other than the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

But as she and Joe escape by boat, you wish them the best anyway. Maybe he will have learned enough empathy from his stint in a dress to treat her right: the fact that he tries to talk her out of falling in love with him suggests he might be slightly less of a rat than he was. And as Jerry/daphne and his-or-her millionaire beau Osgood (Joe E. Brown) remind us, nobody’s perfect. Except, maybe, Marilyn.