Some Like It Hot (Special Edition) (1959)

Entertainment Weekly
"...[Monroe's] lighter than-air work remains a divine enhancement to one of the funniest movies ever..." 06/01/2001 p.67

Total Film
"...Elegant, sexy, energetic and side-slicingly funny, SOME LIKE IT HOT is the film all high-concept comedies want to be when they grow up..." 12/01/2000 p.109

Premiere
"Lemmon enacts one of moviedom's great comic creations." 04/01/2004 p.67

Entertainment Weekly
"Monroe's and Lemmon's finest two hours, and Curtis chip in a brutal Cary Grant impression." -- Grade: A- 07/21/2006 p.57

Empire
5 stars out of 5 -- "Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are enormously enjoyable....While Marilyn Monroe is a vision as wide-eyed love interest, Sugar." 09/01/2007 p.158

Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide 10 of 10
Sensational from start to finish, with dazzling performances by Lemmon and Curtis, a memorably comic turn by Monroe as Sugar Kane, and Oscar-winning costumes by Orry-Kelly.
 
Apollo Movie Guide 9 of 10
By the 1950s, Hollywood's own 'production code' had dominated American cinema for nearly two decades. The code was created to protect the industry by controlling the content of films. It set out stringent, and by today's standards, laughable, limits on what could be portrayed or even discussed in film, and for many year's, Hollywood's control of American movie houses meant that films not approved under the code simply would not be shown...This began to break down in the 1950s. As they lost control of theatres, the studios began to see foreign films and the first few major independent domestic productions that ignored the code doing well at the box office...Some Like It Hot is the product of the declining years of the production code. German emigre director Billy Wilder had been on the cutting edge of commercial film for some time when it was made in 1959. His The Seven Year Itch (1955) had been a biting and successful comedic swipe at sexual mores, and Some Like it Hot built on that earlier effort, with murder and mayhem, drinking, cross-dressing and seduction, set in the roaring '20s and presented at a frenetic and hilarious pace...Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play Joe and Jerry, two musicians who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, pursued by Chicago mobsters after they witness a gangland execution. Their solution? Dress in drag and hop on a Florida-bound train with an all-woman band. The band's vocalist is Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe...The cast is uniformly good, with Curtis and Lemmon working well together and Monroe being at her naughty best. But this is one case where the whole is clearly much greater than the sum of its parts. Wilder's mastery of the art of direction is evident throughout, and you'll have a hard time finding a faster paced comedy, nor one that delivers it all so flawlessly. - Brian Webster
 
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
What a work of art and nature is Marilyn Monroe. She hasn't aged into an icon, some citizen of the past, but still seems to be inventing herself as we watch her. She has the gift of appearing to hit on her lines of dialogue by happy inspiration, and there are passages in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" where she and Tony Curtis exchange one-liners like hot potatoes. Poured into a dress that offers her breasts like jolly treats for needy boys, she seems totally oblivious to sex while at the same time melting men into helpless desire. "Look at that!" Jack Lemmon tells Curtis as he watches her adoringly. "Look how she moves. Like Jell-O on springs. She must have some sort of built-in motor. I tell you, it's a whole different sex."...Wilder's 1959 comedy is one of the enduring treasures of the movies, a film of inspiration and meticulous craft, a movie that's about nothing but sex and yet pretends it's about crime and greed. It is underwired with Wilder's cheerful cynicism, so that no time is lost to soppiness and everyone behaves according to basic Darwinian drives. When sincere emotion strikes these characters, it blindsides them: Curtis thinks he wants only sex, Monroe thinks she wants only money, and they are as astonished as delighted to find they want only each other...The plot is classic screwball. Curtis and Lemmon play Chicago musicians who disguise themselves as women to avoid being rubbed out after they witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre...The movie has been compared to Marx Brothers classics, especially in the slapstick chases as gangsters pursue the heroes through hotel corridors. The weak points in many Marx Brothers films are the musical interludes--not Harpo's solos, but the romantic duets involving insipid supporting characters. "Some Like It Hot" has no problems with its musical numbers because the singer is Monroe, who didn't have a great singing voice but was as good as Frank Sinatra at selling the lyrics. - Roger Ebert