Word: wildering
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...Billy Wilder, the producer, director, and co-author of the script, probably took some sort of commercial chance when he chose a transvestite setting for his sex spoof. Except for occasional shifting of buttocks, however, the usually queasy Boston audience has little trouble transcending its sidewalk morality-so broad is the funny business, so obvious the references...
...Wilder took much less of a commercial chance in signing up Marilyn Monroe for her first role in two years. In Some Like It Hot, she proves what the psychiatrists, the social critics and press agents have been saying throughout the lengthy hiatus: she qualifies as one of the remarkable public personalities of the day. Her talent, as revealed in the film, lies in an ability to say every line as a double entendre-meanings that are not smutty because the listener thinks of both of them simultaneously. Her presence is like the telling of a dirty joke whose punch...
...sophisticated script, which gets such a good shake from Wilder's direction, concerns the flight of two musicians, played by Tony Curtis and Harvard's Own Jack Lemmon, from certain liquidation by Chicago mobsters. Witnesses to a gangland slaying reminiscent of the St.Valentine's Day Massacre, the disguised Curtis and Lemmon light out for Miami with an all-girl band. As gents of lusty instincts, the proximity to pulchritudinous musicians strains their ambition to remain disguised, but somehow they persevere. Curtis eventually executes some fancy footwork to win Miss Monroe, and despite every effort to avoid it, Lemmon wins...
Died. Raymond Chandler, 70, mystery novelist (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The Lady in the Lake), screen adapter (with Billy Wilder) of Double Indemnity, creator of glib, tough-talking Private Eye Philip Marlowe; in La Jolla, Calif. Chandler came late (44) to his fiction career, but his imagistic style put brassy, sassy dialogue in the corners of some sizable Hollywood mouths,* set a standard few could imitate: "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket." The lady had a voice "that dragged itself out of her throat like a sick man getting...
Died. Samuel Wilder King, 72, onetime (1953-57) Governor of Hawaii (the first of part-Hawaiian ancestry), who intended to try to become the first Governor of the new state; in Honolulu...