Some Like It Hot

directed by Billy Wilder

starring Jack Lemmon, Tony

Curtis and Marilyn Monroe

April 29 at 7pm

at the Harvard Film Archive

Missing

directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras

starring Jack Lemmon, Sissy

Spacek and Melanie Mayron

April 30 at 7pm

at the Harvard Film Archive

This weekend Jack Lemmon '47 returns to his alma mater; and Harvard has prepared the fatted calf for him. As part of the third annual Arts First festivities, Lemmon will receive the first Harvard Arts Medal, an award meant for "a distinguished Harvard or Radcliffe graduate or faculty member who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts." Lemmon will also be the subject of a tribute at the Harvard Film Archive, which will show four of Lemmon's representative films.

1959's "Some Like It Hot," a gangster-era comedy directed by Billy Wilder and scripted by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, features Lemmon's best performance ever. Lemmon and co-star Tony Curtis play a pair of Chicago musicians who witness the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The Mob wants the two permanently silenced and the musicians decide to leave Chicago any way they can.

With frilly frocks, cloche hats and new names--Curtis becomes 'Josephine,' and Lemmon 'Daphne'--in place, they join an all girl band with a gig in far-away Florida. This is no ordinary all-girl band, for it features Marilyn Monroe, at her ripest and most Iuscious, as Sugar Kane, a chanteuse and clarinet player with a weakness for liquor and rakes.