12 Movies Challenge: 'Some Like It Hot' (1959)

by Julian Spivey

Photo: United Artists

My final movie selection for 2025 from the highest-ranked films on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time that I hadn’t previously seen was 1959’s “Some Like It Hot,” from one of my favorite directors, Billy Wilder.

Wilder is one of the greatest directors in film history, but everything I’d seen from his filmography before this had been dark dramas like “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Ace in the Hole” and “The Lost Weekend,” with the first three being among my all-time favorite films.

“Some Like It Hot” is quite a bit different than those films in that it’s a comedy, but not only that, it’s quite slapstick too, with its cross-dressing humor and all, some of which I was surprised the film got away with in the 1950s.

“Some Like It Hot” stars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as musicians in Prohibition-era Chicago who make a living playing jazz in the city’s speakeasies. When they witness a mob massacre and escape the mobsters, they are forced to dress like women and join an all-girl traveling band to Miami. Curtis’s Joe becomes Josephine and Lemmon’s Jerry becomes Daphne, because he didn’t quite like the way Geraldine sounded.   

The two sort of fight over Marilyn Monroe’s singer/ukulele player Sugar Kane, though they must play it cool because they can’t give up their true identities. This leads Curtis to take another fake identity as a British oil magnate, whose accent makes me wonder whether Michael Caine got his naturally or just by mimicking this character.  

Meanwhile, Lemmon’s Daphne gets stuck with a genuine rich guy in Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III. A lot of the film’s best humor comes from this oddball relationship.

Surprisingly, “Some Like It Hot” didn’t seem as outdated in 2025 as one might expect, with much of its plot and humor of said plot coming from two men being forced to cross-dress. The film contains one of the absolute greatest final lines of dialogue in cinematic history. However, if you’re like me and waited this long to watch the movie, you’ve probably known it for years before actually seeing it.

All in all, I think I appreciate Wilder’s dramas a bit more than I did “Some Like It Hot,” which isn’t all that surprising to me, as someone whose list of favorite films ever would feature more dramatic films heavily over comedic ones.

Of the 12 films featured on the AFI list that I saw for the first time in 2025, I think the best overall is probably Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” and my personal favorite of the 12 was likely Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night.”