All week we’ve been looking at some of the extraordinary all-female orchestras of the 20s/30/40s. Let’s finish thing off with a band that never existed, ‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’, from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamonds masterful comedy ‘Some Like It Hot’. Clearly Wilder and Diamond were inspired by one or  more of the bands we’ve looked at this week. Which one, I don’t know. I do know that they wisely chose a by-then-forgotten 20s hit ‘Running Wild’, which inspired one of Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic moments. She sizzles, to say the least. In fact, I find myself annoyed at the excessive screen time time Wilder allots to the two-shot of Lemmon and Curtis –how much do we really need to see of Lemmon pretending to play the bass while making goofy faces at Monroe? The front wide shot, however, gives us the quintessence of Marilyn. You can clearly see why so many smart men who should have known better threw away precious years of their life on her. Wilder, famously, was having none of it. He and Monroe had a difficult, testy relationship and the wounds never healed. I once saw Wilder speak after a screening of one of his films (not this one) and during the q&a somebody asked a question about Marilyn. Wilder was visibly annoyed–“Ah, yes” he said in his German accented English, “here it is. Always we get the Monroe question.” One of my favorite of Wilder’s many sarcastic quotes is about Marilyn. “‘There are now as many books about Monroe as there are about World War 2, and the two subjects have a lot in common.”