What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1959

The Year: 1959

What the Nominees Were: Anatomy of a Murder, Ben-Hur, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story, Room at the Top
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Hitchcock’s most delightful confection North by Northwest, Billy Wilder’s seminal Some Like it Hot, and the wickedly modern romcom Pillow Talk

What Did Win: Ben-Hur
How It’s Aged: It’s bloated. Too long and too impressed by itself, and I’ve never been a fan of Charlton Heston’s wooden acting. The chariot race is a lot of fun, but not worth sitting through the rest of it. And talk about a deus ex machina!

What Should’ve Won: Some Like It Hot
How Hard Was the Decision: Not that hard. Some Like It Hot is the most acclaimed movie of 1959.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, based on the French film “Fanfare of Love” written by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O’Brien, and Joe E. Brown

The Story: Chigago musicians Joe and Jerry accidentally witness the St. Valentines Day massacre, and have to flee town in drag as members of Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators (using the names Josephine and Daphne). They both fall for the band’s singer, Sugar, but Joe wins her by adopting a third identity: Oil heir Junior. Daphne, meanwhile, accepts a wedding proposal from a millionaire. When the gangsters show up at the resort, everything gets quite chaotic until the millionaire spirits them all out of town. When Daphne finally reveals she can’t marry him because she’s a boy, he just replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Costume Design but it lost Director, Actor for Lemmon, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction and Cinematography. And it didn’t even get nominated for picture!
Why It Didn’t Win: It’s tempting to say that biblical epics are a shoe-in, but that’s not true at all, because Ben-Hur was the only one that won. Just chalk this up to the Academy’s distaste for comedy. (And yet, that too feels like an insufficient answer, because Wilder and Lemmon would win Picture the next year with another comedy, but that one had more sour to leaven the sweet, as we’ll soon see.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Sugar says, “I come from this musical family. My mother is a piano teacher and my father was a conductor.” Joe asks, “Where did he conduct?” Sugar replies, “On the Baltimore and Ohio.” (A railroad.)  The big question is, does Sugar know she’s being funny when she says that or not? Monroe plays it as if she doesn’t, but then you think about it and realize that of course she does, she’s just deliciously deadpan. As a result, she couldn’t be funnier.
   
2. One of those pieces of movie trivia everyone knows is that Curtis said kissing Monroe was like kissing Hitler, but you’d never guess it. Of course, the whole gag is that Sugar is doing all the work, and boy oh boy is she working those kissing scenes. Despite Curtis’s warning, there’s not a red-blooded, straight American male that wouldn’t take his place.
   
3. One aspect of drag comedy is watching our heroes discover what women have to go through, in terms of unending unwanted physical contact. Josephine says to an indignant Daphne, “Now you know how the other half lives.” As Shakespeare could tell you, drag always gets a laugh, but it also allows you to show things that don’t usually get shown. (There have been two hit Broadway adaptations of this movie. In the more recent one, Daphne was shown as being happily and permanently trans, but then I realized halfway through that they couldn’t end on the line “Nobody’s perfect” because they wouldn’t want to say there was anything less than perfect about her transition. Indeed, the line did not appear, though they did gesture to the fact that it wasn’t there.)
4. When I broke down the structure of genres, I said that the second and third quarters of comedies frequently boil down to “success with mask”. Well that would make this the ultimate comedy because Curtis’s character is having success with two masks, for twice the fun. When he’s doing a quick change from Josephine to Junior, he forgets to take his earrings off, and, because they’re sparkly, we’re very aware that he’s running off to his date with them still on. The comedic tension builds and builds until he finally discovers them and whips them off just in time.
   
5. The movie is leisurely paced: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which is the inciting incident, doesn’t happen until 21:04, when it could easily have happened ten minutes earlier. They don’t arrive in Florida until 48:29. All of Wilder’s post Apartment movies (many of which I love) are too bloated, and this one is just pushing the line, but ultimately it justifies its shaggy-dog pacing, because things get quite zippy at just the right points.

Ah, 1959: Shudder