Billy Wilder worked with Marilyn Monroe twice, which is twice as much as most directors could stand her. Famously late and unreliable on the set of 1959’s brilliant drag-gangster farce Some Like It Hot, she required countless takes with her more professional co-stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, giving Wilder fits in trying to cut the picture together. And yet. Some Like It Hot represents Monroe’s saddest, greatest, most damaged and vulnerable performance precisely because all her foibles show through in the part of chanteuse Sugar Kane. “It’s the story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” she says—and that’s pretty much the way Hollywood treated Monroe, too. No matter how fast, furious, and irreverent the script, Monroe’s fragile character gives Hot a heart that was worth all Wilder’s exasperation. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

April 23-24, 9:30 p.m.; Sun., April 25, 7 & 9:30 p.m.; April 26-27, 7 p.m.; Wed., April 28, 10 p.m.; Thu., April 29, 9:30 p.m., 2010