Comment Re: Marvel (Score 1) 92
Claude Rains and Peter Lorrie both played obviously homosexual men (Raines playing Renault in Casablanca and Lorrie playing Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon), telegraphed in such a way that it would make it past the Hayes Code. Heck, look at Johnny Guitar, with Joan Crawford playing as butch a character as you will find in the films.
But yeah, Some Like It Hot has so much straight and queer visual and dialogue innuendo running around it that it's absolutely nuts. When Tony Curtis's character blurts out in frustration "You’re a guy, and, why would a guy wanna marry a guy?”, Jack Lemmon's response is one of the great bits of movie dialogue "For the security!" Even the closing line, where Lemmon finally confesses he's a man, the response is "Nobody's perfect", which some regard as one of the great closing lines in cinema history.
Hollywood had to handle things carefully back in the day, and Wilder just as much as Hitchcock was a director who had a bag of tricks to foil the Hayes Code, so sometimes I actually wonder how Some Like It Hot ever got made. But this is the guy that directed The Apartment, so Wilder had a talent for getting blatantly sexual content past the censors.