silver nitrate notes

Some Like It Hot and Charles Lang's Comedy Light

18 nov 2021

Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) is, in most surveys, the highest-rated American comedy of all time. It was also shot in black and white despite Marilyn Monroe's contract including a guarantee of colour photography for her pictures. Wilder refused the colour. He argued, and eventually persuaded Monroe, that the film's premise (two male musicians hiding from the mob by dressing as women and joining an all-girl orchestra) required black and white because in colour their makeup would look ridiculous rather than convincing. Monroe agreed. The film was shot on Plus-X.

The cinematographer was Charles Lang Jr. (1902-1998), an ASC veteran with fifty years of credits including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Lang's reputation was for shooting women in close-up: he had photographed Dietrich, Colbert, Hepburn, and now Monroe. His lighting of Monroe in Some Like It Hot is a technical achievement that would have been impossible in colour. He uses a high key light directly above the lens axis to flatter her features and adds a second source low on the opposite side to pick up the translucency of her skin. The cumulative effect is a soft, almost glowing rendering of her face that sits slightly above the rest of the film's register.

What Wilder does with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag is a harder visual problem. In colour, their makeup would have read as makeup. In black and white, the grain of the stock absorbs the makeup into the image. Curtis's face particularly, with its strong features, could easily have read as masculine in any hue; Lang solves this by using long lenses at middle distance, which softens the face slightly and allows Curtis's performance of Josephine to register as performance rather than failure.

The film's pace is faster than Wilder's earlier work. The screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond is built around a series of increasingly unlikely deceptions, and Wilder keeps the camera close to whoever is in the middle of each deception so that the audience is never more than two beats ahead of the characters. The hotel-room scenes between Lemmon and Joe E. Brown's millionaire Osgood, where Lemmon is trying to discourage Osgood's increasingly serious proposals of marriage, are the film's best sustained comic sequences. The last line is famous. It was also reportedly an uncut ad-lib from Brown. Wilder liked it enough to build the ending around it.

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sources
[1] Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. Hyperion, 1998.
[2] Wilder, Billy. Conversations with Wilder, ed. Cameron Crowe. Knopf, 1999.
[3] Phillips, Gene D. Some Like It Wilder. University Press of Kentucky, 2010.
[4] Lang, Charles Jr. Interview in American Cinematographer, June 1959.