Some Like It Hot is showing at Portland Art Museum in Oregon on Saturday, April 18, at 2 pm. The screening is part of a series, Pee-wee’s Most Favoritest Films, celebrating the entertainer Pee-wee Herman (aka Paul Reubens), who passed away in 2023. When this series debuted at BAM Cinema in New York in 2025, two further Monroe films were also featured (All About Eve and The Misfits.)
“Paul Reubens’ college-era experiments with drag were undoubtedly influenced by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis chewing up the scenery in stockings, wigs, and pumps opposite Reubens’ screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Billy Wilder’s 1959 prohibition era crime-comedy, Some Like It Hot, is perfect screwball entertainment, ranked first on the American Film Institute’s ‘100 Years…100 Laughs‘ list from 2000. Wilder said that once Monroe let go of her inhibitions, ‘she was phenomenal, one of the great comediennes.'”
Across the Pacific Ocean, Some Like It Hot is showing as part of a Drag Week series at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne on Sunday, April 19, at 4 pm.
“By the time Some Like It Hot hit cinema screens, the American film industry’s self-imposed censorship code, the Hays Code, had been in effect for 25 years. Staunchly opposed to the code, which placed strict rules on implied nudity, sexuality and unpunished immorality, Billy Wilder’s 1959 film subverted it at every turn.
Banned in some places [Kansas] upon its original release, the film is now considered groundbreaking for its approach to gender, sexuality and camp. While Curtis and Lemmon are essentially hiding beneath their drag, the film treats drag less as a deception and more as a revelation, allowing the characters to experience new freedoms, new vulnerabilities and new forms of desire.”
The Marilyn Report 