It is said that there are only seven basic plots. Those include “overcoming the monster,” “rags to riches,” and perhaps the most classic of them all, the plot of Some Like It Hot: “two guys witness a Chicago gangland murder and escape the mobsters by dressing in drag and joining an all-women band.”
Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) as “Josephine” and “Daphne” are hired to play in “Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators.” There, they meet Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), the beautiful, ditzy, drunk singer of the band, whom they fall in love with. Sugar is looking for a wealthy man, so Joe later poses as Shell Oil Jr., heir to the Shell Oil fortune, to seduce her. Meanwhile, Jerry, as Daphne, is seduced by wealthy old man Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Also, it turns out the mobsters are having a Mobster Convention at the same hotel the band is staying in.
This movie is just so goofy, so lighthearted, and so fun that you can’t help but love it. It also ends with a laugh line that makes all the “Top 100 Movie Quotes” lists: after Osgood proposes to Daphne and then helps her and Josephine escape the mob, Daphne gives reason after reason why they can’t get married. Eventually, she drops the big one (while removing her wig): “I’m a man!” Osgood, without missing a beat, replies: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Rating: 9/10. The cast of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” don’t seem to like it much, but I sure do.
Cast and Crew
How do you “explain” Marilyn Monroe?1 Is it by putting her in a lineage of “blonde bombshells” that stretches back to Jean Harlow? Is it by pointing to her two2 famous husbands, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller? Should we rehash the same stories—when she sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK, the nude photos, her overdose death? All this does is make her less a real person and more an archetype, and what you see in that archetype—dumb blonde, symbol of empowerment, exploited and tragic figure—ends up saying more about you than it does about her. Jeez, explaining Marilyn Monroe is like explaining how to breathe.3
Tony Curtis, after snagging an Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones, is making his second and final appearance in this newsletter. Last time we discussed his family, so this time, let’s talk about some Tony’s other films.
He made a pair of noteworthy movies with Burt Lancaster: Trapeze (1956) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
He gets off the “I’M SPARTACUS” line before Kirk Douglas can in Spartacus (1960).
He played the title role of Albert DeSalvo in 1968’s The Boston Strangler.4
Jack Lemmon, who’s making his first appearance in the column here, will become a column stalwart. We’ll discuss him in an upcoming 1960 film where he reunites with Some Like It Hot director Billy Wilder.
The Trivia
When pretending to be a society girl, Sugar name drops Bryn Mawr and Vassar, so today’s Trivia is on sets of Seven Sisters!
You’ll often encounter the term “Seven Sisters” in Greek myth, where it refers to the daughters of the Titan Atlas.5 The sisters were transformed into stars by Zeus to escape the pursuit6 of Orion. These stars (also called the Pleiades) can be found in the constellation Taurus.
Sugar’s reference isn’t to the Pleiades, though, but to the Seven Sisters Colleges, a group of four Massachusetts and three non-Massachusetts liberal arts schools. Let’s do the MA ones first:
Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts). Founded in 1837, it’s the oldest of the Seven Sisters.
Radcliffe College (Cambridge, Massachusetts). It was founded as the Harvard Annex and merged with Harvard in 1999. Helen Keller’s an alumna.
Wellesley College (a same-named suburb of Boston, Massachusetts). Hillary Clinton went there. Don’t mix it up with Wesleyan, in Connecticut
Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). Their famous alumnae list is impressive. Barbara Bush! Nancy Reagan! Julia Child! And Sylvia Plath lightly fictionalized her time there for her novel “The Bell Jar.”
And the others:
Bryn Mawr College (a same-named suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Means “high hill” in Welsh.
Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, New York). Vassar’s noteworthy mostly because it went co-ed in 1969.7
Barnard College (New York City, New York). Barnard is the sister college to Columbia University.
Warning! Sarah Lawrence (NY), Bennington (VT), and the aforementioned Wesleyan (CT)? Not sisters.
And how about one last set of Seven Sisters? In the mid-20th century, the term “Seven Sisters of oil” was used to describe the following companies8, who controlled around 85% of the world’s oil reserves.
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which became BP, British Petroleum).
Texaco (“Texas Fuel Company,” founded after the discovery of oil at Spindletop).
Gulf Oil (also founded after Spindletop; the Pittsburgh Mellon family was the largest initial investor).
Royal Dutch / Shell (
soon to be inherited by Shell Oil, Jr.).Standard Oil Company of California (became Chevron).
Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Esso; became Exxon).
Socony-Vacuum. (Formed from a merger of Socony, the “Standard Oil Company Of New York,” and Vacuum Oil Company, which was also part of Standard Oil before it was broken up. Socony-Vacuum later became Mobil.)
Exxon and Mobil merged to create ExxonMobil, while Texaco and Gulf Oil became part of Chevron. Nowadays, the majority of oil reserves are controlled by national oil companies like Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), National Iranian Oil Company (Iran), and Petrobras (Brazil).
Odds and Ends
This movie is full of rapid-fire references, so this is a super-sized Odds and Ends.
Liszt’s “Liebestraum” plays in the funeral parlor. You should know that piece; this link is to a rendition by Daniel Barenboim. Don’t confuse it with lebensraum, which is a totally different, very Nazi, thing.
Sugar wants to find a man with shoulders like Johnny Weissmuller. Weissmuller was an Olympic gold medalist in swimming and played Tarzan and Jungle Jim in the movies.9
The murders that start the movie are based on the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day massacre where Al Capone’s killers knocked off seven members of Bugs Moran’s bootlegging gang.
The villain “Spats” Colombo (George Raft) gets his name from spatterdashes, pieces of fabric buttoned around the ankle that cover the top part of the shoe.
When preparing to kill Spats, the head mafioso says “to err is human, to forgive divine,” which comes from Alexander Pope’s 1711 treatise “An Essay on Criticism.”
A girl is found to be playing for Leopold Stokowski, a conductor known for appearing in 1940’s Fantasia and conducting without a baton.
Sugar name-drops the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin10, an airship that offered the first commercial transatlantic passenger flight service. It was pulled from service after the LZ 129 Hindenburg disaster.
And don’t you worry—we’re not done with crossdressing movies.
Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, though she often used her mother’s maiden name, Baker. In 1956, she legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
Her first husband was the non-famous James Dougherty; they married in 1942 and divorced in 1946.
We’ve recommended Karina Longworth’s “You Must Remember This” podcast before, but her three-parter (NSFW) on Monroe is as good a primer on the star as any.
Also, I know this doesn’t matter, but Curtis starred in the 3rd Bad News Bears movie. That film franchise has fun names: after The Bad News Bears (1976), the sequels were called The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977) and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978).
The Titans were the children of Uranus (the sky) and Gaia (the earth) and were the predecessors of the Olympian gods. They were eventually overthrown by Zeus and the Olympian gods in a mythological conflict known as the Titanomachy.
Yeah, that’s a euphemism. Orion wanted to rape them.
Two more Vassar facts: 1) They employed the USA’s first female professional astronomer, Maria Mitchell. 2) A famous alumna, Mary McCarthy, wrote The Group, a fictionalization of her time at Vassar.
There was actually an eighth sister: CFP, Compagnie française des pétroles (the French Petroleum Company). That company has since rebranded as TotalEnergies.
You’ll be forgiven if you confuse him for Buster Crabbe, who was also an Olympic swimming medalist and who also played Tarzan.
LZ stood for Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, the firm that made those airships.