Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot
Ben van Welzen details how the Austrian filmmaker’s past informed his work and subsequently elevated American cinema.
In 1906, a boy was born in a 10-square-mile town in a country that no longer exists, about to spend the first three decades of his life in perpetual passage across Europe, fleeing the forces of hate brewing in the land; at the turn of the 21st century, the boy would spend his 10th and final decade of his illustrious life in Beverly Hills, leaving behind a singular filmography that challenged Old Hollywood at every turn and has become an invaluable piece in the puzzle of American cinema. Nevertheless, Billy Wilder’s story is not one of assimilation but one of rejection. Wilder took his tragedy and transience with him to America, and translated his fractured experience onto the silver screen with irreverence, darkness, and ultimately playfulness. At a time when the country had to reconcile the relatively new film medium with the rising geopolitical tensions, Wilder challenged every attempt to sanitize and every urge to contain. In doing so, Wilder traversed and vitalized nearly every genre of classic American film, and he continues to prove the significance of the multicultural mind — the immigrant mind — in the country’s artistic landscape.
Born to a Jewish family in Austria-Hungary, Samuel Wilder was directly placed into an American cultural headspace when at twelve his mother nicknamed him “Billie” — later “Billy” — after the titular character in the live Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show she saw in New York. From then on, Wilder was placeless, moving from Austria-Hungary to Kraków to Vienna to Berlin, and finally to California escaping the Nazi regime (Hamrah). With each displacement, Wilder became increasingly foreign to those around him: “For the Viennese, he was a Polack from the province; for the Berliners of the Weimar Republic, he was an Austrian; for the Nazis, he was a Jew; for the Parisians, he was a métèque; and in Hollywood, he was a Central European refugee from a faraway continent” (Gemünden 3). Thus, as an exiled man, Wilder was free to operate outside the cultural expectations and standards for so-called decency.
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity
Despite arriving in Hollywood the same year as the institution of the stringent Hays Code, Wilder found resourceful ways to tell his controversial narratives within the confines of this legislation. For instance, his noir film Double Indemnity (1944) famously subverts the Code, strategically inserting phallic symbols and abruptly cutting away from scenes with thick sexual tension to avoid the outlawed portrayal of adultery “presented as attractive or alluring” (“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930”). The iconic image of Marilyn Monroe’s dress blown up by a subway grate in his film The Seven Year Itch (1955) toes the line of the Code’s restrictions on costumes that reveal “the more intimate parts of the human body” (“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930”). However, Wilder does not reject the Hays Code to simply flex his cleverness for loopholes, but rather he reveals the absurdity of such restrictions on artistic expression and such attitudes in the country’s cultural mind. Of course, no film exemplifies this interrogation more than his film that didn’t even get the Hays Code seal of approval: Some Like It Hot (1959).
As fiery as its title implies, Some Like It Hot is a crackling screwball comedy following two musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who disguise themselves as women and travel with an all-female band to escape gangsters whom the two witnessed commit murder. Importantly, the film never outright ridicules the gender-bended protagonists, instead using this setup to cheekily push the gender, genre, and class conventions to their breaking point, all while maintaining a relentless position of play. Moreover, Wilder’s film harkens to his continually displaced but culturally rich upbringing, heavily drawing upon the trappings of Germany’s Weimar Cinema from the first few decades of the 20th century. Some Like It Hot, then, epitomizes the structure of Wilder’s filmography as it employs his diverse background to poke, prod, and puncture the fabric of American cinema, without ever losing the exuberant glimmer and mischievous fun.
Consider the sequence that intercuts the film’s two romantic subplots. On the one hand, we see Joe pretending to be a rich man to woo a woman from the band named Sugar (Marilyn Monroe); on the other hand, we see Jerry — dressed as his alter ego Daphne — on a date with Osgood (Joe E. Brown), an actual rich man whom Jerry occupies for the night so that Joe may hijack Osgood’s yacht for his date. There is an immediate duality here: Joe and Jerry are in disguise, and in turn each are made to be as legitimate as the other; Jerry playing the role of the bachelorette is no less outlandish or reasonable than Joe playing the role of the magnate, and the love scene between Sugar and Joe is just as performative and ridiculous as Osgood doing a tango with Jerry. Nevertheless, when Joe and Jerry reconnect in the morning, Joe ridicules Jerry for somehow ending up engaged to Osgood, implicitly assigning more merit to his performance of wealth to seduce Sugar than Jerry’s performance of femininity that inspired a more genuine connection with him and Osgood. Indeed, in response to Jerry’s engagement news, Joe asserts that “there are laws, conventions! It’s just not being done!” Such was the marriage tradition, and such was the atmosphere in which Wilder worked. There are legislations, Hays Codes! It’s just not being done!
This duality comes to a head in the iconic final scene of the film, as the four main players escape on a boat. Joe has revealed his true identity to Sugar, and since his performance of wealth does not disrupt the “natural” order as dictated by the Code — and the country more broadly — she looks past his deception and embraces the real Joe and they get their romantic Hollywood ending. On the other hand, Jerry’s act of femininity must also come to a head with Osgood, his fiancé. In the Hays Code era, the films that subtly subverted the rules often got away with it by having the end of the film stay within the necessary framework; indeed, Wilder’s own Double Indemnity seemingly ends with the two leads being punished for their adulterous deeds. So, in keeping with this strategy, one may expect the end of Some Like It Hot to nullify the blurred gender lines, especially with the aforementioned scene sharply contrasting Joe’s class pretense with Jerry’s gender pretense. But Wilder has one more trick up his sleeve. As Jerry and Osgood sail off, Jerry lists all the shallow stereotypes that may turn a man off (“I’m not a natural blonde,” “I smoke,” “I have a terrible past,” “I can never have children”), but Osgood accepts them all with a smile, and so Jerry must admit the big lie. To end the film, Osgood responds with perhaps Wilder’s most famous line: “Well… nobody’s perfect.”
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot
Wilder also draws upon his European roots when interrogating questions of gender and performativity. According to Gerd Germünden, the film’s “playful but powerful critique of the power of appearance positions it firmly in the critical legacy of the Weimar Republic” (103), an era of German culture and film of which Wilder experienced the end when living in Berlin. In particular, Germünden argues that Some Like It Hot blends the dour themes and binary race relations of the American gangster film with the reflexive and ridiculous themes of the Weimar gender-bending comedy. Indeed, Wilder strategically implements tonal whiplash to not only maintain a playful attitude, but force the viewer to recontextualize and reevaluate the trappings of the familiar American genre. For instance, towards the end of the film, we see the dead body of a gangster wheeled through the lobby as the score blasts the low-toned horns reserved for the grim crime scenes of the film. Within seconds, though, the bottom of the sheet ruffles, and out pop the cross-dressed Joe and Jerry, fleeing the scene. In one image, Wilder’s comedy lightens the noir, and his drama legitimizes the gender-bent figures. We see how these ideas clash but, more importantly, Wilder invites us to see how they coexist.
Such is the nature of Wilder and the nature of his films, pitting orthogonal ideas and systems against each other and finding how they interact, bringing a vast collection of national identities and movements together and watching them evolve as one. It’s surprising to see such a global man with such a uniquely American catalogue (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment all being distinctly foundational to Hollywood’s progression from Old to New Hollywood), but in fact this multiculturalism is precisely what makes his films so American. Like Wim Wenders making Paris, Texas, it often takes an outsider to understand a nation in context. Only the exile can expose our failings and uplift our successes. Only the immigrant can enrich our legacies.
References
Gemünden, Gerd. A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. 1st ed., Berghahn Books, 2008. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcq5c. Accessed 13 September 2025
Hamrah, A.S. “Some like It Fraught.” Bookforum, 2022, www.bookforum.com/print/2901/how-billy-wilder-survived-the-twentieth-century-24829.
“The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930.” Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. 347–359.
Some Like It Hot will be screened at IU Cinema on September 27 as part of the Saturday Matinee Classics: Three Cheers for 100 Years series. Another Wilder/Lemmon collaboration, The Apartment, will be screened on December 13 in a new 4K restoration.