Some Like It Hot is showing at the Delaware Art Museum cinema in Wilmington on Saturday, January 18, at 1:30 pm. The screening is part of a film series, ‘Jazz Age Moving Pictures,’ accompanying the museum’s current exhibition, Flapper Philosophy: Modern Women in the Jazz Age.
While Some Like It Hot is set in 1929, Marilyn is also linked to another jazz age classic as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was first published in 1925. However, the 1953 movie had a contemporary setting – and so while Lorelei Lee was originally a flapper, Sugar Kane gave Marilyn her belated chance to explore the Roaring Twenties onscreen.
Interestingly, a first-edition hardback copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is featured in the exhibition, alongside an English parody published soon afterwards. But while Anita Loos’s comic novel remains an American classic, Blondes Prefer Gentlemen – and its author, Nora K. Strange – are now forgotten.
The Marilyn Report 