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Billy Wilder looks back at the Roaring Twenties and finds Der Rosenkavalier, a tour de force of sustained giddiness. Deceptive surfaces from the get-go, the coffin that oozes booze and the mortuary that masks a speakeasy. A police raid leaves saxophonist (Tony Curtis) and bass-slapper (Jack Lemmon) jobless, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre makes them witnesses, the way out of Chicago is aboard the Florida-bound Pullman with Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators. (Their masquerade is a matter of false eyelashes and Orry-Kelly gowns, crimson peppers into darting dragonflies as Basho would have it.) "Now you know how the other half lives." Opposite the brutal masculinity of the underworld is the fulsome femininity of the ukulele player, a magical Marilyn Monroe, pendulous in a clinging spotlight and as gravelly pixilated as Garbo in Ninotchka. Fugitives in the harem, a string of lickety-split entanglements sorted out in the beachfront resort with a "Friends of Italian Opera" convention. "I don't mean to be forward, but ain't I had the pleasure of meetin' you two broads before?" The screwball summation of Wilder themes fires on all cylinders, a meticulous construction founded on gender's sundry disguises versus the ultimate truth of the sex drive. The cad in drag adds another identity to snare the showgirl, Curtis in Cary Grant tones and specs as the unarousable Shell Oil scion whose heavy-petting interlude with Monroe achieves what sessions with Freud couldn't. Meanwhile, Lemmon's farcical abandon is divinely matched with Joe E. Brown as the elderly moneybags ready to "blindfold the orchestra and tango till dawn." The stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera in a train's upper berth, George Raft's coin trick repeated to his face, Edward G. Robinson's son popping out of a cake with Tommy-gun in hand. "Why would a guy wanna marry a guy?" "Security." The choice analysis is by Cammell and Roeg in Performance. Cinematography by Charles Lang. With Pat O'Brien, Nehemiah Persoff, Joan Shawlee, Dave Barry, Billy Gray, Barbara Drew, Grace Lee Whitney, George E. Stone, Mike Mazurki, and Harry Wilson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |