"I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you....."

The scene: a nightclub in Florida. The focus: a bandstand, regaling a noisy crowd of revellers and thugs. The spotlight: a shimmering vision with a sultry voice to turn one's knees weak, into putty. The viewer: a hopelessly lovesick 20-year old whose heart is doing dangerous and unprecedented calisthenics, whose eyes glaze every other second, whose breath escapes in short bursts, punctuated by long, pathos-ridden sighs, whose mind is fixated on that beauteous form, crooning away to glorious heights, unmindful of the impact she is having.

Ten seconds later, a sudden noise interrupts the scene, that of a body falling heavily to the ground, when the senses have been arrested by a sight too overwhelming to permit consciousness in a state of delirium.

The reel scene: "Some Like it Hot".

The real scene: myself, falling hook, line and sinker for the most gorgeous woman who ever walked the face of the earth....

the incomparable Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. Today being the 80th anniversary of the goddess' birth, read on....

The time: a hot Sunday afternoon at the end of an uneventful, and therefore, tedious week. The overpowering sense of ennui that has set in renders even the least demanding intellectual activity impossible. What then? Turn to the perfunctory charms of cinema to prop sagging spirits and drooping eyebrows. What shall it be? Nothing ponderous and windy, please. High time Bergman and the rest of that specially anointed bunch of 'serious'(read: dull, drab and stuffy) filmmakers were shown their place.... the museum of ostentation. It had to be Wilder...

Billy Wilder has long been a favourite of mine. His films are knowing, satirical and very entertaining, and his capacity for sly bon mots , peerless. The Apartment juggles comedy and drama so adroitly that you can only stare at the screen, breathless. Sunset Boulevard ruthlessly skewers the studio sytem of Golden Age Hollywood, while painting a portrait of the impermanence of fame, and how dangerous one's pathetic cravings for it may turn out. But he did make one film that is unanimous in the reaction it provokes:

It is utterly hilarious... from beginning to end.



Some Like it Hot, the cross-dressing classic that catapulted Jack Lemmon to instant super-stardom and solidified the status of the diva(the subject of this post) as a sex symbol with a disarming sweetness to her, besides other things. Before I rave about her, a few quickies on the film itself.

What can I say? I adored it. It is silly, light and preposterous, sweet-hearted, cunning and bawdy, swift-paced, irreverent and a true gem. It is brilliantly written, and brilliant comedic writing is, as we all know, the toughest thing in the cinema business. Add to all this, 2 gifted comic actors, the irrepressible Lemmon as the bull-fiddle-player who gets a proposal from a multimillionaire.....but don't let me spoil it for you, if you haven't seen it already. ...and...

Monroe. Ah! Monroe....the most photogenic, and easily the most photographed celebrity of the century, maybe also the most troubled, who projected that effortlessly devastating mixture of simmering sensuality and vulnerability that endeared her to millions worldwide. That pout, that still makes any man, me included, wish the ground would open up under him and swallow him whole; that voice, breathy and persuasive; that smile, that radiance it exuded, the warmth it oozed, the coy allure it defined for decades to come.....

I believe Some Like it Hot may possibly be her signature role, for her screen persona was best exemplified in it: the sweet, trusting blonde, extremely desirable and harbouring a secret sorrow... Besides, she was pregnant during filming, which imparted an unearthly glow to her complexion, and accentuated those famous curves to the point of dizziness. And the shrewd Wilder framed her just so as to target the male libido, sending men into a swoon ever after...

In fact, her entry in the film is a classic. Lemmon and Curtis, dressed in drag, spot her from afar(she is on the all-women band the men are travelling with, in drag) and the pout precedes her. When she passes the engine, a plume of steam shoots out, caressing her behind in the process. It is a delicious scene, with her bottom heaving tantalisingly with every step, leading Lemmon to remark :

"Will you look at that! Look how she moves! It's like Jell-O on springs. Must have some sort of built-in motor or something. I tell you, it's a whole different sex! "

There are numerous such quotables from the film, several referring to Monroe herself, who was never more adorable, even in that delightful bit of fluff "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", where she waltzed with the scene-stealing Jane Russell to standards such as "Diamonds are a Girl's best friend", "Bye, bye Baby" and "We're just 2 little girls from Little Rock".

The film itself perfectly demonstrates the theorem that "whenever Marilyn is on screen, she is all the camera sees". Indeed, in the scene where she sings the eponymous song this post is named after, the spotlight is on her, and the peripherals fade into oblivion. This woman was something, I tell you. Even in that jaw-dropping costume(no back, and very sparing on the bust area) she is attired in, she never seems vulgar or cheap. Just lovely, and sexy.

She wasn't the quintessential screen siren, the femme fatale, like her contemporaries, the shapely Russell, the lissome Rita Hayworth, the sultry Lauren Bacall and Lana Turner, or the hugely talented Barbara Stanwyck, though she did dabble in noir once. But she didn't need to. She had crafted a personality all her own, and no one could touch it. And besides, they weren't half as enticingly curvaceous as she was.

The behind-the-screen tales accompanying the film are fun too. Check them out at IMDB. But as some samples:

• Curtis has scenes with Monroe where he pretends to be a rich oil-magnate(to win her over!--for details, watch the film!) with a problem with love. So Monroe tries a kissing cure. Of course, he can't get enough of it...... Curtis complained that she kissed like Hitler! Prompting the response from a breathless nation that Hitler must have been a wonderful kisser!(and Monroe replied: "I think that's his problem")
• Marilyn was apparently notoriously unpunctual and forgetful, especially with her lines. So every scene required dozens of takes. A simple one, where she had to say "It's me, Sugar" needed 47 takes because she always used some such combination as "Sugar, it's me" or "Me, it's Sugar" or "It's Sugar, me". Wilder actually wrote lines on a blackboard so she wouldn't flub takes. 59 takes were needed for "Where's the bourbon?", which the Sugar character said rummaging in a drawer, because she said "Where's the whiskey?" or "Where's the bonbon?". And when Wilder pasted the line in the drawer, she went and opened the wrong ones, so he had it pasted in all of them!

And so on...

Marilyn had a tumultous and eventful life, with 3 marriages and several dalliances with famous personae, even JFK, reportedly. Her overdependence on drugs and sedatives towards the latter half of her career made her unpopular with film crews and directors, and finally led to her death in August 1962. She was just 36. With her died an enduring legacy, that of true cinematic presence, of voluptuous grace and innocence, of worldwide popularity and public interest in celebrity lives. To give you an idea of the extent of her immortality: my mother recalls a foolish little ditty she was taught as a pre-schooler, along the lines of "Marilyn Monroe went to town..." She was of course, everyone's favourite pin-up girl.

Maybe the appurtenances of her unique celebrity, the pressures and demands, were ultimately too much to deal with. Even the actual circumstances of her death are mysterious. But her personal life notwithstanding, what survives is her screen persona, her glamour, her comic flair, and her special aura, that transcended her stereotypical image to create the first real star in film. Her legend is given a loving dekko in the TIME 100 article.

Thanks to her, the average male's fantasy was fulfilled, even if in a world of flickering lights and impalpable figures. And I was a babbling, incoherent mass for hours after the film ended.... and am a lifelong devotee now.