The New Pictures

Some Like It Hot (Mirisch; United Artists), Marilyn Monroe's first picture in nearly two years, is a double-barreled period piece: it not only parodies the freewheeling, gangster-ridden '20s, but it recalls the pie-throwing farce of cinema's infant days.

Good old-fashioned pratfall that it is, it was not turned out without heartaches and headaches for Writer-Director-Producer Billy Wilder. It was made last fall, when Actress Monroe, believing herself pregnant, was reportedly more sulkily temperamental than usual, with Playwright-Husband Arthur Miller hovering solicitously on the edge of the set during much of the shooting. What's more, Wilder took the fairly daring risk of turning two of Hollywood's most popular leading men (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) into female impersonators.

Curtis and Lemmon are a couple of musicians in a Chicago speakeasy. When the club is raided and they are suddenly out of a job, they arrive at a garage to borrow a friend's car just in time to witness a painfully accurate re-creation of the St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. With Curtis and Lemmon cowering in a corner, Mobster George Raft and his henchmen line seven men against the wall and machine-gun them dead.

To escape sure death as witnesses to the slaughter, Curtis and Lemmon leap into garter belts and padded bras, join an all-female orchestra heading for Florida. The band's singer: Actress Monroe. For the rest of the movie, Curtis and Lemmon are rarely out of their dresses,

Marilyn is rarely in hers. Clad in negligee and open mouth, she crawls into Lemmon's upper berth to thank "her" for a favor, notices with innocent surprise: "You poor thing, you're trembling all over."

In Florida, Lemmon's bewigged and beaded feminine charms catch the eye of a much-married millionaire (Joe E. Brown). Curtis meanwhile finds time to forsake female impersonation long enough to quick-change into yachting cap and blazer, and woo Marilyn with a fairly good impersonation of Cary Grant. At the end, boy wins girl, and old boy is still hotly pursuing his falsied Lemmon.

Lipsticked, mascaraed and tilting at a precarious angle ("How do they walk in these things?"), Actor Lemmon digs out most of the laughs in the script. As for Marilyn, she's been trimmer, slimmer and sexier in earlier pictures.

Lonelyhearts (Dore Schary; United Artists). In the early years of the Depression, a young man named Nathan Weinstein, the manager of a small hotel in Manhattan, suffered a strange and horrible schizo-religious vision. Set down in a slim volume called Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933 under the pen name of Nathanael West, his experience was acclaimed as a masterpiece of the peculiar literature of phantasmagoria--a vision of hell on earth, a scream of anguish at the meaninglessness of human suffering.

Dore Schary, onetime production boss of MGM, who is back in movies as an independent writer-producer, has translated this repulsive masterpiece into a snappy, sexy, phony little Horatio Alger story. The book told the story of a young reporter who, while writing the agony column for a New York newspaper, came to feel that he was being stretched upon the cross of the world's suffering. He goes insane and is murdered by one of the suffering souls he is trying to save. And what does it all mean? That nobody in his right mind can love his neighbor?

The picture says no such horrid, controversial thing. According to one billboard, the hero (Montgomery Clift) has a relatively simple problem: "Will he make a good husband?" Though his heart bleeds for humanity, the wound is healed with a kiss, and in the end it looks as though he gets married and lives happily ever after.

Nevertheless, there are moments when a whiff of West goes drifting through the theater like a scent of cyanide emitted by a pretty bonbon; and most of those moments involve Maureen Stapleton, a gifted actress from Broadway who, in her first movie role, impersonates a revolting specimen discovered by Miss Lonelyhearts on a "field trip" among his correspondents. But most of the time the spectator is apt to find himself feeling, as Author West puts it, "like an empty bottle that is slowly being filled with warm, dirty water."

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