Some Like It Hot | |
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Directed by | Billy Wilder |
Screenplay by |
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Story by |
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Based on | Fanfare of Love by Max Bronnet Michael Logan Pierre Prévert René Pujol Robert Thoeren |
Produced by | Billy Wilder |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Charles Lang |
Edited by | Arthur P. Schmidt |
Music by | Adolph Deutsch |
Production company | |
Distributed by | United Artists |
Release dates |
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Running time | 121 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $2.9 million[3] |
Box office | $49 million[3] |
Some Like It Hot is a 1959 American crime comedy[4] film directed, produced and co-written by Billy Wilder. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, with George Raft, Pat O'Brien, Joe E. Brown, Joan Shawlee and Nehemiah Persoff in supporting roles. The screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond is based on a screenplay by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan from the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love. The film is about two musicians (Curtis and Lemmon) who disguise themselves as women to escape from Chicago mobsters they have witnessed commit murder during the 1920's Prohibition-era.
Some Like It Hot opened to critical and commercial success and is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. The film received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, winning for Best Costume Design. In 1989, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the first 25 films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[5][6]
The film was produced without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) because it features cross-dressing. The code had been gradually weakening in its scope since the early 1950s, owing to greater social tolerance for taboo topics in film, but it was enforced until the mid-1960s. The overwhelming success of Some Like It Hot is considered one of the reasons behind the retirement of the code.[3]