Masterpiece, considered by many as the American Film Institute as the best comedy of all time, directed by Billy Wilder in 1959, with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, a sensational game of false identities. Full of anthological scenes, like that ending in which Jack Lemmon disguised as a woman takes off his disguise while he says to his lover that “no one is perfect.” Wilder creates a crazy and fast-paced comedy set in the crazy and violent twenties that marked the first collaboration between director Billy Wilder and his fetish actor Jack Lemmon. It can be seen streaming on Filmin and MGM, and for rent on Rakuten TV and Amazon
It all begins in Chicago on February 14, 1929, the famous day of the Valentine’s Day massacre with two guys who find themselves in the wrong place on the wrong day. The saxophonist Joe (Tony Curtis), irresponsible, gambler and womanizer, and the bassist Jerry (Jack Lemmon), more timid and sensible, are two musicians who play in a Chicago nightclub during the Prohibition years. Someone denounces Pat -Botines- Colombo (George Raft), owner of the premises, for selling alcoholic beverages. The police show up and proceed to arrest those who are in the establishment. In the midst of the chaos, Joe and Jerry manage to escape, but they are out of a job. After unsuccessfully trying to join various orchestras, the friends go to a garage to pick up a car that an acquaintance has lent them. It is February 14, 1929, in that garage the two musicians are involuntary witnesses of the reckoning between rival gangster gangs in the infamous St. Valentine’s Day massacre.
Frightened by the possible consequences of being the only witnesses and pursued by the Botines Colombo gangsters, they are forced to flee, and knowing that their agent is looking for two girls who play the sax and double bass for an orchestra of ladies, they they dress in women’s clothes and introduce themselves to the girls’ agent as Josephine and Daphne. With the group of girls they travel by train to Florida, on the way they meet Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), vocalist of the orchestra, and who also plays the ukulele, with which they both fall in love although neither of them can reveal their secret. . Back in Miami, however, Joe soon takes on double duty as he pretends to be an oil tycoon to win over Sugar, while Jerry is pursued by a real millionaire, Osgaood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who wants to get married. with him believing that he is, in fact, a woman. Osgood invites Daphne to a champagne dinner on her yacht. Joe convinces Jerry to, as Daphne, keep Osgood busy on land while Junior takes Sugar to the yacht as his own. Once there, Junior explains to Sugar that she is impotent as a result of psychological trauma, but that she would marry anyone who could solve her problem. Sugar tries to get some kind of sexual response from Junior, and throughout the night she starts to get it. Meanwhile, Daphne and Osgood dance until dawn. When Joe and Jerry meet back at the hotel, Jerry explains that Osgood has proposed to Daphne and that he, that is, she, has accepted, foreseeing an immediate divorce and a substantial compensation as soon as the deception is revealed, but Joe convinces her that she can’t marry Osgood. The presence of Botines Colombo and his gangsters at the same Miami hotel, to attend a meeting of the “friends of the Italian opera”, where the orchestra is staying and performing, will complicate things.
Perfect gear to situate the adventures of the transvestite couple within an endless number of hilarious situations, masterfully basting one scene after another, where Wilder offers a lesson in narrative agility showing a humorous vision of the time of the late roaring twenties, always endowed with references, whether they are political, such as prohibition, or cultural, such as quotes from the silent film idols Rodolfo Valentino and Ramón Novarro or the singer Rudy Vallee and presenting an evil vision of men from the feminine point of view. all at the pace of foxtrop. Wilder carried out an intelligent parody of a type of cinema that became so popular during the thirties, making use of the presence of one of the most emblematic interpreters of the gangster genre, George Raft, memorable in the role of Colombo Booties.
Unforgettable moments
In addition, it contains unforgettable moments in which dialogues are unnecessary, such as the one that on the beach, the billionaire Joe (Tony Curtis) tells Sugar that he collects shells, as a hint to insinuate that he is the owner of the Shell, whose logo is a shell. Marine. Or that ending, one of the great movie endings where, aboard a boat, Joe tells Sugar that he’s not what she deserves, but she loves him anyway. At the bow of the boat, Jerry, still dressed as Daphne, gives Osgood a number of reasons why he cannot marry him, from his inability to have children, to being a chain smoker, to having a dark past with a saxophonist. , that Osgood rejects them one after the other; he loves Daphne and is determined to marry her. With no other options, Jerry removes his Daphne wig and, in a masculine voice, yells, “I’m a man,” to which Osgood replies, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” In 1989, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant” by the US Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
A frame from the film.
This hilarious comedy in a permanent state of grace is actually the American version of the French film ‘Fanfare d’amour’ (1935) with a script by Peter Thoeren and Michael Logan, adapted for the occasion by Wilder himself and IAL Diamond in which he was his first job with Wilder, who, from then on, will become one of his main screenwriters. However, its filming was very complicated.
The film began its pre-production in April 1958 when United Artists, the film’s producer, hired Marilyn Monroe for $300,000 to play Sugar Kane, plus a share of the film’s profits. Billy Wilder became the only film director to work for the second time with Monroe. Their previous film together, ‘Temptation Lives Upstairs’ (1955), had put an end to Wilder’s nerves and Marilyn’s marriage. The character of Joe was originally intended for Frank Sinatra, who dismissed him because he did not see himself in the character and also because he was a close friend of Joe DiMaggio, the actress’s previous husband, with Tony Curtis being the second option, for whom he collected $100,000, not yet knowing which of the two male leads he should play, the same amount that Jack Lemmon pocketed. With the cast closed, Wilder and IAL Diamond begin to write the script based on that of ‘Fanfare d’amour’, and adapting the dialogues to the personalities of Curtis and Lemmon.
Filming problems
The problems began on the first day of shooting: He arrived late and refused to shoot in black and white. He had not lost the 10 kilos that Wilder had asked him for. The day passed between the actress’s discussions with Wilder and with the producers, who managed to convince her by assuring her that her color seriously harmed the makeup of Curtis and Lemmon dressed as women. However, she did not compromise on losing weight, which ultimately helped the film as MM appeared ‘stuffed’ in the dresses that Orry Kelly created exclusively for her in a size smaller, looking like they were going to burst at any moment.
Marilyn arrived at the set every day late. She demanded dozens of repetitions of each take. She sometimes cried after one of them, and she needed to put on her makeup again. She was so outrageously forgetful of her lines that it took more than 50 takes to get her to say, “Where’s the bourbon?” She constantly drank vermouth that her assistant brought her in a coffee thermos. She once skipped 12 days from the shoot at a cost of $200,000 to the production company, on top of the $300,000 she had been paid for her performance. Curtis and Lemmon waited all day, in their heavy wardrobes and walking around in heels, which they hated. Curtis despaired when he had to eat a piece of chicken almost 70 times, because Marilyn was always wrong, and going so far as to affirm that kissing her was like kissing Hitler.
To top it off, the actress became pregnant during filming. She was already married to Arthur Miller, who demanded that his working hours be reduced. Wilder replied: “If she never shows up before twelve. Arthur, bring her to me at nine and you can take her away at eleven-thirty!’ Finally, Wilder had Marilyn’s lines written on note cards and pasted on hidden easels around the set so she wouldn’t forget them. The eventful filming ended on November 6. Marilyn disappeared from the sets immediately. So that she did not have to work, it was necessary to edit the publicity photos of the film using the body of another actress superimposing Marilyn’s face. In any case, in mid-December Monroe suffered a miscarriage, which she attributed to the fatigue of filming. She said that ‘With skirts and like crazy’ had cost her her baby. It was then that Wilder did not shut up: “Only after a while have I managed to look at my wife without wanting to hit her for being a woman,” he assured, and when asked if he would work with the actress again, he replied: “I have talked about that possibility with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me that I am too old and too rich to go through that again.
Different previews of the film were made with the public to test the viewers, because the producers assured that a film that began with a massacre was the enemy of any comedy. And in fact, in one of those passes, only a single spectator laughed. However, after its premiere (on March 19, 1959), the film grossed eight million dollars in its first exhibition weekend, and was nominated for the Oscars for Best Director, Best Lead Actor (Jack Lemmon), Best Screenplay. Adapted, Best Art Direction, Best Black and White Photography and Best Costume Design, only winning the statuette for the latter category. In Spain, an attempt was made to release it in the early 1960s (many websites mention the supposed release of that time), but it was prohibited by the censors who considered it ‘a fagot movie’. It was not authorized until after Franco’s death.
From this film emerged years later ‘Sugar’, a Broadway musical that premiered in 1972 at the Majestic Theater with a script by IAL Diamond himself; it ran for 505 performances, with Robert Morse, Tony Roberts and Elaine Joyce leading the cast. In Spanish, he performed in Buenos Aires with Susana Giménez and Ricardo Darín, and in Colombia with María Cecilia Botero, Luis Eduardo Arango and Bruno Diaz; He also appeared in Mexico with Enrique Guzmán, Héctor Bonilla and Sylvia Pasquel. In Spain, ‘Sugar’ premiered in Catalan at the Gaudí Theater in Barcelona in December 2015.
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