Writer/director/producer Billy Wilder (1906-2002) was riding high in 1963 with a string of successful ,edgy comedies (Some Like It Hot; The Apartment; 1,2,3; Irma la Douce) and a stellar body of earlier work (that included Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Lost Weekend). "Kiss Me, Stupid" was the Waterloo of his career. Three weeks into filming, Peter Sellers had a near-fatal heart attack. Wilder had to start over, with Ray Walston (then much-beloved as "My Favorite Martian" on CBS Sunday nights). When the movie was done, United Artists insisted on reshooting a key scene (the original was in the European release and in a restored version that is not -- yet? -- on DVD). Although Wilder, with considerable justification, saw "Kiss Me, Stupid" as being about "the sanctity of marriage and human dignity," the Catholic Legion of Decency chose to make a stand (its last successful one) and condemned the movie with the judgment that Wilder "had regrettably produced a thoroughly sordid piece of realism [!] which [sic.] is esthetically as well as morally repulsive. Crude and suggestive dialogue, a leering treatment of marital and extramarital sex, prurient preoccupation with lechery compound that film's condonation of immorality."

As in viewing the movie's notorious (but commercially vastly more successful) near contemporary "The Carpetbaggers" (see http://www.epinions.com/movie-review-35C1-B7E4134-39C31C7E-prod1). it is hard now to understand what the fuss was about. Seeing it as "realistic" is even harder than seeing it as obscene. Dean Martin's character is certainly lecherous, but in the released version he is thwarted (compare the previous year's Academy Award-winning best picture "Tom Jones," which was not condemned). None of the words that epinions censors are in the dialogue. There is no nudity and no violence.

But it was not just the Catholic Legion of Decency: critics trashed "Kiss Me, Stupid," though some thought that with Peter Sellers it might have been okay. I think that the set-up takes far too long. (I think the same of the much beloved "Some Like It Hot.") Once Kim Novak appears, the elements ignite. Novak was taken about as seriously as Jayne Mansfield by critics of the time, and "Vertigo" was a commercial failure with only tepid critical endorsement. However, as in "Vertigo" and in "Picnic," she seems to me poignant. She was no Meryl Streep, but what she could do is play a woman pained by being treated as a sex object but resigned to the indignities her figure inspired in men.

The Plot

The movie begins with Dean Martin performing in Las Vegas (at the Sands). After an offhand rendition of Gershwin's "S'wonderful," he makes or confirms farewell dates with various chorus girls and the leaves town, headed for LA for a tv special. The road is closed and he has to take a detour. In Climax, Nevada, he stops for gas. Barney (Cliff Osmond), the gas station attendant (owner?) is part of a song-writing duo with piano teacher and pathologically jealous husband Orville J. Spooner (Mr. Walston). Barney sees a chance to press their songs on a recording star and disconnects the gas valve. Making sure that Dino knows nothing about mechanics, Barney tells him it will take overnight to make the parts he has fit, and sends Dino across the street to stay with the Spooners and casually be exposed to their songs.

Dino confides to Orville that without a new woman each night he has a headache the next day. We've seen Orville fly into jealous paranoia and now he has a real threat under his roof. Barney's solution is to hire a waitress/prostitute from the Belly Button Cafe and upset Zelda Spooner (Felica Farr, the real-world wife of Wilder regular Jack Lemmon) so that she goes home to her nasty mother. Zelda is so sweet natured and so accustomed to irrationality from her husband that it is not easy to get her out of the house.

Barney clears taking Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) away from work for the night. She reluctantly agrees to go along to be with his friend for $25. Installed as "Mrs. Spooner" she understands that her job is to get Dino to take some of the songs (near misses like "Two Coins in a Fountain" and "I Left My Heart in San Diego"). She is comfortable playing a wife and likes Orville (for his frantic neediness?). This makes being prostituted as a wife more repellent to her and the conflict between her roles is the heart (and soul) of the movie.

Plot Spoilers

Polly is not the only one with conflicting feelings. No, not Dino, who plays the usual Dean Martin lecherous boozer (a self-parody of a self-parody? He has not of the grandeur of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond). And certainly not Barney (who is as focused on self-advancement as Zero Mostel in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"). It is Orville. Even if she isn't his wife, how can he allow some arrogant celebrity paw a woman who has been introduced to him as Zelda Spooner.

Some of the time he studiously ignores what he has arranged to happen (that is, Dino getting it on with Polly). Occasionally his jealousy kicks in. And when Polly requests he play some of his songs for Dino, he genuinely forgets whatever else is going on in the room.

The real Zelda comes back and sees only her husband and the Belly Button Cafe girl dancing (Dino is on the floor out of her line of sight) and storms off to the Belly Button Cafe to get drunk. She gets so drunk that she requests the band do "Melancholy Baby," though there is only a jukebox.

She is 86ed and put in Polly's trailer to sleep off her bender. Back at the house, Orville snaps and throws Dino into the street. Looking for "action," Dino goes to the Belly Button. The bartender, not seeing Polly working, sends him to her trailer, where...

Zelda has recovered considerably. In the reshot (American release) version, she puts Dino to sleep with a bag rub. In the original/European version, it is clearer that Polly and Zelda have exchanged more than their names for the night.

Dino leaves $500 in an empty Jack Daniels bottle and drives off. Orville drives Barney's two truck to return Polly to her trailer. Polly and Zelda have coffee. Zelda insists the $500 should be Polly's and sisterhood is powerful (avant la lettre). Although Wilder was charged with misogyny (primarily for showing the other Belly Button waitresses from Dino's point of view), Wilder could have added "female solidarity" to "human dignity" and "the sanctity of marriage" as what "Kiss Me, Stupid" is about.

Even with a "plot spoiler" warning, I won't write about the ending, other than to say it is a satisfying one (right up there with "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment") and ends with the line "Kiss me, stupid."

Evaluations

Like I haven't already defended it from its contemporaries... Well, by making the audience feel the indignities visited on Polly and Zelda as indignities, I think Wilder was right. I can't imagine many viewers identifying with Dino, Barney, or Orville, at least Orville when he is scheming or being paranoid. The characters with any modicum of wisdom are all female (Zelda, Big Bertha (the owner of the Belly Button, played by Barbara Pepper), and Polly).

Orville agrees to take extreme (and counterproductive) measures to keep his wife from the clutches of a notorious womanizer, but he repents and does not allow Polly to carry through on Barney's plan. And he recognizes how badly he has treated Zelda and seems to me genuinely penitent to her. I don't see "Kiss Me, Stupid" as lecherous or pro-lechery. Participating in leering, yes, but ultimately celebrating fidelity, understanding, and the superior wisdom of women (like the Carole Gilligan strand of later feminism).

As for the performances: Dean Martin does his thing. My generation mostly found his "hipness" tired, though apparently some of our juniors as well as our elders found him fun.

Cliff Osmond is way too Zero Mostel, which is to say too broad, though seeming dumber.

Peter Sellers might have been more interesting and less abrasive than Ray Walston as Orville, though I also considered Sellers frequently abrasive, sometimes awful (Waltz of the Toreadors), sometimes inspired (Dr. Strangelove). I don't know why Jack Lemmon wasn't recruited (or James Cagney, who would have sped up the delivery of lines, as in "One, Two, Three"). Lemmon would surely have been more sympathetic. Walston could be very funny ("Damn Yankees," and he was practically the only saving grace in "South Pacific") and very charming ("My Favorite Martian"). I don't think that Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond saw him as a sympathetic figure, and that his raging cluelessness is what they intended (and Sellers might have subverted).

Felicia Farr is fine as Zelda, sweetly tolerant and wise when it counts. Kim Novak does what she did best, combining vulnerability and passivity with some willed toughness and palpable weariness at being a sex object. For me, she makes the movie worthwhile.

It takes too long to get her on-screen. As I said, the set-up takes too long. "Irma la Douce" was already too long, and "Kiss Me, Stupid" also (unwarrantedly) is longer than "Some Like It Hot." To some extent Wilder's films after "One, Two, Three" are slacker than it or its predecessors. This is probably why "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," regarded by some as a masterpiece even in its truncated form, was hacked up.

Napoleon came back after Waterloo, and Wilder's next film ("The Fortune Cookie," which got Walter Matthau an Oscar and made him a star) was a commercial success, but that was the last one and he was consigned to oblivion long before his death earlier this year (though he continued to go to the office and work on scripts even in his 90s).

Like his other venture into the high desert plateau ("Ace in the Hole"), "Kiss Me, Stupid" was a critical and commercial disaster. And like it, it is a movie that, though not among his best, is interesting and pointed.

P.S. Ira Gershwin supplied lyrics for three George Gershwin melodies for use as the products of the Barney-Orville collaboration. Fittingly, it is not the best one that Dino picks.

And though the VHS box is colorized, "Kiss Me, Stupid" was shot in black-and-white -- by Joseph LaShelle, who received an Academy Award for "Laura" and was nominated eight other times, including for "My Cousin Rachel" and for three other Wilder pix (The Apartment, Irma la Douce, The Fortune Cookie).


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS