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Some Like It Hot (1959)
Wilder shot it in black and white so the makeup would hold up, and put out a comedy the censors refused to approve.

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A Farce With A Massacre In It
Two Chicago musicians witness the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and go on the run disguised as women in an all female band heading for Florida. The premise is pure farce and the engine underneath it is mortal danger, which is why the jokes keep escalating: the men cannot drop the disguise because the alternative is being shot. Wilder insisted on black and white against the studio's wishes, because colour tests made the two leads in makeup look grotesque rather than plausible, and the decision gives the film the texture of the gangster pictures it is parodying. The Production Code office refused its seal over the cross dressing and the ending. United Artists released it anyway, it became one of the year's biggest hits, and the Code's authority never recovered.

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[icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 120 minutes
[icon:STAR] Director | Billy Wilder
[icon:CHART] Budget | $2.9 million
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $25 million worldwide
[icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Charles Lang

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Watching Some Like It Hot
3 Witnessed
4 Disguised
3 Courted
4 Reversed
4 Absurd
5 Shrugged

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Osgood Fielding III · Some Like It Hot · 1959]
Well, nobody's perfect.

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Colour tests showed the makeup as garish, so Wilder fought Monroe and the studio for black and white, which also let him shoot the massacre as straight period gangster film.

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Monroe struggled badly with continuity, needing dozens of takes on simple lines, while Curtis and Lemmon had to hold their performances intact in full costume through all of them.

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The refusal of a Code seal matters more than the laughs. By 1959 the Production Code had governed American film content for twenty five years, and a hit comedy that ignored it proved the system was optional. Within a decade it was replaced by the ratings board. The final line, written as a placeholder that Wilder and Diamond intended to improve, is now the most quoted ending in the history of the genre.

:LINK
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053291/
Some Like It Hot on IMDb: full cast and crew