Runnin' Wild from Chicago to Florida: Some Like It Hot and Historical Memories of the Roaring Twenties

In turning the St Valentine's Day Massacre into a joke, few period-set films appear to treat history less seriously than Billy Wilder's classic cross-dressing comedy "Some Like It Hot" (1959). This paper, however, documents the extent to which Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L Diamond engaged with the academic and populist historiography on Chicago and Florida in the late 1920s, as well as the public historical memories of the "Roaring Twenties" that had circulated in popular culture representations from the 1930s through to the late 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on how the history of Prohibition and the historical memory of events such as the massacre provided the filmmakers with much more than just a ‘setting'; rather "Some Like It Hot" demonstrates Wilder's conscious exploitation of historical memory to circumvent censorship (particularly the Catholic Legion of Decency) in order to construct his sex comedy. This paper will further examine how "Some Like It Hot" then constructs an "alternate history" of sexuality in the United States, drawing not only on American historical memory, but also Wilder's own historical memories of Weimar Berlin, to reflect on the sexual "prohibitions" of Fifties' America.