Some Like It Hot won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White (Orry-Kelly) and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jack Lemmon), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. In 2000, AFI named Some Like It Hot as the greatest film comedy of all time as a part of its "100 Years... 100 Laughs" series.

Billy Wilder’s classic comedy stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as a pair of unemployed musicians who inadvertently become witnesses to the St. Valentine Day’s Massacre. To escape the wrath of the gangsters, Joe and Jerry are forced to hit the road in drag, taking the only jobs available with an all-girl band bound for Miami. Enroute, both men fall for lead singer and blonde bombshell Sugar Kane, (Marilyn Monroe), but are unable to fulfill their desires for fear of revealing their identity. Joe tries to get around this by adopting a third identity for seduction, that of a shy millionaire who sounds strangely like Cary Grant. Meanwhile, Jerry has his own problems as he fights off the advances of Osgood E. Fielding, a real millionaire hypnotized by his/her charms.

Billy Wilder broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929, and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He emigrated to Paris, then the US. His other screenwriting and directing credits include Ninotchka (1939), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Oscar for Best Screenplay), Double Indemnity (1944), Ace in the Hole (1951), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960).