Marilyn Monroe sings, acts and necks in Some Like It Hot, which is wild, wild,wild, and larded with clever purple wisecracks about the gangsters, girl dance bands and free-wheeling libertines of the Twenties. The screenplay by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond goes as follows: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are a couple of broke musicians who are forced to make like broads in order to join a Florida-bound girl band – it's the only way they can escape gang leader George Raft. While celebrating St. Valentine's Day in their own odd manner, George and some pals had caught the two watching. In Florida, the gangsters come, the police (Pat O'Brien) come, there's some funny love-making (we mean funny like ha-ha) and not-so funny chase scenes. Marilyn, Tony and Jack do nobly by the arty dialog and fairly simple characterizations they've been given, and director Wilder obviously worked like hell to make this the fine ribald classic it is.
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That great Freudian jigsaw puzzle, the grisly just-for-kicks Jazz-Age killing of a 14-year-old schoolboy by a pair of bright but emotionally sick youths, has been brought to the screen with unusual dramatic force in Compulsion. Much credit goes to Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman who give incisive performances as Judd Steiner (Leopold) and Artie Straus (Loeb); a lot goes to conscientious director Richard Fleischer, who's imbued the by-now-familiar story with tension, excitement and even pathos. The picture in general follows the lines of Meyer Levin's novel. Richard Murphy's screenplay, while it makes Artie and Judd seem astonishingly real, is not nearly so explicit, of course, as the novel or the 1957 Broadway play about the homosexual neuroses of the pair. But there are closeups and bits of dialog pointing that way. Orson Welles is effective as the Darrowlike defense attorney and E. G. Marshall is superb as the trapper of the killers.
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Figure for yourself the complete bouleversement of Ferdinand Pastorelli, alert Customs Sergeant on the French-Italian border. All his life he has considered himself French, only to learn that through a geographical caprice, he has been not French but Italian! Why? He had the mischance to be born in the kitchen (in Italy) instead of the bedroom (in France) of an on-the-border tourist inn. The only recourse for Pastorelli, aswim with respect for the law, is to become a citizen of Italy, then apply for entry into France, even though it means abandoning his wife and accepting legal help from a sly Italian smuggler. This, then, is the highly farcical foundation for The Law is the Law, with Fernandel as the bewildered sergeant and the fantastically droll Toto as the smuggler. The screenplay of Jacques Emmanuel and Jean-Charles Tacchella wrings wry humor from the consternation of innocents made felons by the unfeeling law, and Christian-Jaque has directed in a spirit of grand tomfoolery.
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In contrast to the grim and grimy tone of most big-city waterfront films, Never Steal Anything Small is a barrel of boffs amounting to a hoodish harlequinade of the genre – and this despite no small amount of acid-tossing, extortion and other wharf-rat pastimes. James Cagney romps through his role of an ambitious schemer, Shirley Jones and Cara Williams lend scenic decoration, while Roger Smith ably mimes a hubby cuckolded by Cagney. Charles Lederer directed and did the rocketing script from the play The Devil's Hornpipe by Maxwell Anderson and Rouben Mamoulian. Rosy color and some bright songs and dances are thrown in so you shouldn't go away mad. And you won't.
