“I tell you … it’s a whole different sex!” This is the awed insight from the terrified 20s Chicago musician Jerry, played by Jack Lemmon, in Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot — now on re-release. He is disguised as a woman to escape scary gangsters, and so is his buddy Joe, played by Tony Curtis. They will get up close and personal with a girl-band on a night-train to Florida, including the demure ukulele player Sugar Kane, superbly played by Marilyn Monroe, demonstrating the most famous lip-pursing mannerism since Mae West: somewhere between a pout and a moue.

As well as everything else, it is the best remake in movie history: reworked from a 1951 German comedy that Wilder had discovered called Fanfares of Love written by Peter Thoeren and Michael Logan, itself remade from the same writers’ 1935 French movie Fanfare of Love. Reinvented by Wilder and co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. “Nobody’s perfect” is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

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