Arf!
Upon its original release, Kansas banned the film from being shown in the state, explaining that cross-dressing was "too disturbing for Kansans". -
Trivia for "Some Like It Hot" on The Internet Movie DatabaseThat clinging, see-through dress Sugar wears during her solo of "I Wanna Be Loved by You" is one breath away from cinema's only Marilyn Monroe nude scene. The way Monroe uses the spotlight and her body language during the number prompted Roger Ebert to call the scene "a striptease in which nudity would have been superfluous. All the time she seems unaware of the effect, singing the song innocently, as if she thinks it's the literal truth. To experience that scene is to understand why no other actor, male or female, has more sexual chemistry with the camera than Monroe."
So naturally Kansas banned the film throughout the state after United Artists refused to cut the love scene on the yacht. (IMDB reports an additional objection that cross-dressing was "too disturbing for Kansans." And yet the costumes were so intelligently designed.) The same scene caused the Memphis censorship board, one of the most authoritarian in the country, to restrict the film as "adult entertainment." Elsewhere, just before its release, the Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas F. Little, the Catholic Legion of Decency's executive secretary, wrote a testy letter stating that Some Like It Hot was "morally objectionable" because of "gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations.... this film has given the Legion the greatest cause for concern in its evaluation of Code Seal pictures. The subject of 'transvestitism' naturally leads to complications; in this film there seemed to us to be clear influences of homosexuality and lesbianism. The dialogue was not only 'double entendre' but outright smut." -
DVD JournalThen there's Tony Curtis' affectionate takeoff on Cary Grant; hulking movie heavy Mike Mazurki asking Curtis and Lemmon, "Ain't I had the pleasure of meeting you two broads before?"; Marilyn Monroe somehow staying in her diaphanous gown while she sings "I Wanna Be Loved By You"; and Curtis and Monroe's love scene, on a moonlit yacht in the middle of the night, which got the film banned in Kansas City. -
Salon.com, Sunday, Nov 26, 2006You are right, Sher, that Kansas might find those two movies too disturbing for
dinosaurs Kansans, and Rocky Horror may have not made it past censors in the 70s there. By the time Wong Foo came out, I am sure that the guardians of Kansas' youthful minds were too busy fighting that new-fangled EVILution stuff.