Overview

The American Film Institute has ranked Some Like it Hot as the greatest comedy of the 20th century for 25 years. Much has been written about its talented co-writer and director Billy Wilder and the trainwreck casting of the unstable Marilyn Monroe, from whom Wilder managed to get a successful performance. However, the real secret of the film's greatness lies in Wilder's career up to its production. He had fully nailed the six comedy subgenres, and his masterful intertwining of parody, dark comedy, romantic comedy, personality comedian, screwball comedy and populism was the trick. The famous final line ""Nobody's perfect"" was Wilder's own little LGBTQ+ time bomb. At the end of his screenplay (1959) he wrote that America was just not ready for Joe E. Brown's comment. But the film's critical accolades and today's popularity of its musical comedy adaptation say otherwise. As critics suggest, the provocative Wilder would be loving it. This book explores the history, context, and success secrets of this venerated American comedy.

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9781476694405

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Reviews

""Gehring's genius: he has watched pretty much every piece of 20th century cinema and digested it into an uber achievement of not just film but their interconnections both on and off the screen.""--Ink 19

""Gehring has a breezy and playful writing style... His prose is also, art times, wickedly cynical.""--Hitchcock Annual ""Forty plus frequently award-winning books later, and [Gehring's] style of writing about film comedy and/or film remains entreatingly insightful.""--Exclusive Magazine ""Gehring finds profundity in normalcy.""--Screen Reflections ""Gehring remains supreme in film comedy scholarship""--Choice ""Just about anything with film historian and media writer Wes D. Gehring's name on it will be of quality.""--Cinema Retro ""Gehring's genius: he has watched pretty much every piece of 20th century cinema and digested it into an uber achievement of not just film but their interconnections both on and off the screen.""--Ink 19

Author Information

Wes D. Gehring is the Distinguished Professor of Film at Ball State University, and the author of 44 books, keying on biographies of film comedians and comic genres. Their reception has resulted in speaking engagements from the Paris-Sorbonne University to New York's Museum of Modern Art. He has periodically been one of Turner Classic Movies' on-screen scholars for their summer online classes.

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