So Billy Wilder Is Cool Again...

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 Was Billy Wilder ever un-cool? No, I doubt it. But one of the surprises of the newest edition of the Sight & Sound poll is how well-represented Wilder is. He placed 3 films in the top 100 - "Sunset Blvd." (#78), "The Apartment" (#54), and "Some Like It Hot" (#38). On the surface all of this love seems excessive. Without dissing Wilder per se, citing him 3 times is a bit silly when there's a whole slew of other legends of the art form with 1 or 0 mentions (to name a specific contemporary I personally prefer, Douglas Sirk landed only 1 film in the top 100). 

 "The Apartment" is a film which I fully appreciate and understand the appeal of. "Some Like It Hot" is... not. And that's a bit strange, I feel, because in a lot of ways those are extremely similar movies. What Wilder does in both cases is craft a dark comedy about the relationship between sex and power - a novel, bordering on unheard of idea at the time (at least in the US). "The Apartment" wears its darkness on its sleeve, as a satire of meaningless office jobs where transactional sex is always present. It's surprising, then, that the script also contorts itself into a lovely romance by the end. Jack Lemmon, the hero of our story, facilitates his bosses' affairs to get promoted. He has no goals in life except to get promoted, because he thinks that maybe a promotion will be the first thing in his life to give him fulfillment. Equally modern is the hopeless romantic played by Shirley MacLaine, which is a wonderful performance in a character that actually gets the space to be depressed on screen. Even if the metaphors in "The Apartment" are somewhat obvious (Jack Lemmon literally gives up both his home and his girlfriend directly to his boss, and the promotion is so meaningless that the only tangible benefit we see is a fancier toilet), they have only gotten more relevant with age. As a bonus, somewhat rare for a Wilder film, it looks truly gorgeous. The opening look at endless desks is one of the great shots in cinema.

 Released the year earlier, "Some Like It Hot" feels "dark" by accident. Once again, this is a comedy about transactional sex, but here it's almost incidental to the plot. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are on the run from some mobsters and disguise themselves as women, that's the main story here. The two being kind of awful to their lovers is just barely there as details, and mostly treated as a joke. Tony Curtis wants to seduce Marilyn Monroe, which he does by lying to her and belittling her. Marilyn also treats sex as an overt transaction. A sympathetic portrayal of gold digging in 1959 is intriguing on paper, but after waiting 2 hours for these elements to add up to a theme, I felt the whole thing was a bit empty. Tony Curtis turns out to be exactly the sort of mean person that Marilyn Monroe monologues about falling for despite herself. Then all lies are forgiven, and all tears are forgotten. Now to be fair, this is a remarkably funny film. It's a rare thing indeed for a film this old to be this funny even today. I can't imagine anyone actually disliking "Some Like It Hot" - it's written too sharply. While I don't love Tony Curtis' acting, the scene where he's introduced as the Shell Oil heir is probably Wilder's funniest. Jack Lemmon, who is pretty good in "The Apartment", is excellent here. He gets the opportunity to play a cartoon character several degrees sillier than his co-stars, and he works the screen brilliantly. When the movie roars to life, it's probably because Lemmon is enthusiastic about every little thing he does as a woman. This all peaks when he's shunted off with a creepy older man as a date and turns out to have far more chemistry with him than Monroe and Curtis have with each other. This irony is clearly intended. That's what makes it all the more frustrating that Wilder gets close to making some sort of Real Point About People and then gives it up for the sake of a funny ending. 

 Obviously it's not fair to say that the earlier movie is just a worse version of the later movie, but... I would feel comfortable saying that "The Apartment" is like a more mature do-over of "Some Like It Hot". It satirizes a specific societal phenomenon. "The Apartment" is wonderful and worthy of any list. "Hot" making a Hot 100, I personally would not have picked it. 

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