A Film and its Era: Some like it Hot (Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder films ‘Some Like It Hot’ in 1958. Portrait of a film: a movie that is at once a satire of the United States and its imitators, a burlesque parody, a thriller, a musical comedy filmed in black and white, an audacious look at the confusion of sexes and sentiments; honored as the best comedy of all time. Portrait of an era : that of the end of the 1950s when America, whose insolent prosperity combined with flagging morale, plays the Cold War at home with McCarthyism and the beginning of the fight against racial segregation. The brutal expansion of television will threaten cinema and mark the beginning of the end of Hollywood’s golden age. Portrait of a director : Billy Wilder, a Viennese Jew who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, practices iconoclastic realism and devastating clichés. He chooses Marilyn, convinced that in spite of her anxiety and her drug use, she is ‘a veritable genius as a comic actress’. His physical health would suffer as a result of the film shoot.