A major retrospective of films written and directed by Billy Wilder is underway at Film Forum NYC, with The Seven Year Itch showing next weekend.
“‘When it’s hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox.’ With the dog days already melting the asphalt, Tom Ewell packs the wife and kid off to Maine, while he holds the fort in sweltering NYC to work at his publishing job, turning literary classics into vintagely lurid 25-cent paperbacks … But when the summer widower’s next project, Repressed Urges in the Middle-Aged Male, coincides with the arrival of a new upstairs neighbor — TV toothpaste pitchwoman and ‘art’ photo model Marilyn Monroe (!) — it’s time to scratch that old ‘seven year itch.’ If Rachmaninoff doesn’t do the trick (‘That’s classical music, isn’t it?’ she asks. ‘I can tell because there are no vocal’), at least there’s the thrill of watching her cool off over a subway grate on a sultry summer night. And when klutzy would-be Casanova Ewell confesses ‘Nothing like this ever happened to me in all my life,’ Marilyn ingenuously replies, ‘That’s funny. Happens to me all the time’ … the Eisenhower era sex comedy [is] the apotheosis of Marilyn Monroe, and, in her white-dressed pose above the subway, not only her own most iconic moment, but one of the most enduring images in movie history. Screenplay by Wilder and, surprisingly enough, original playwright George Axelrod.”
But first Some Like It Hot, and its Parisian genesis: a freshly restored Fanfare d’Amour (1935), later remade in Germany as Fanfaren der Liebe (1952), which then inspired the Austrian-born Wilder and co-writer IAL Diamond’s comic masterpiece.
“Jean Rameau (Fernand Gravey) and Pierre Dupont (Julien Carette), two out-of-work musicians in search of stable employment, set their sights on the female led Tulipes orchestra when they learn of two openings in the group. Jean and Pierre disguise themselves as women to audition, ultimately landing the job and joining the group as they travel to perform along the French Riviera. One of the key, yet rarely seen, inspirations behind Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (both films credit the story to writer Robert Thoeren). This new digital edition was scanned in 4K and fully restored from the original 35mm nitrate fine grain print.”
The Marilyn Report 