1964: Kiss Me, Stupid

Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964) 9/10

With his renowned variety show, Dino (Dean Martin) is the star of the Las Vegas strip. He croons, he jests, he acts, he sings. He is a complete entertainer and an attractive draw for both sexes. The bright lights of Vegas however cannot mask Dino's blazing Hollywood aspirations. Placing his Sands' revue on hiatus, Dino absconds from the legions of beauties wanting "one for the road," hops in his Italian convertible and roars away to Hollywood for a profitable season of film shoots and television specials.

Along the desolate desert highway, Dino detours through the craggy hovel of Climax, Nevada. In this lifeless hamlet, two local struggling tunesmiths-paranoid piano teacher (Ray Walston) and sloven gas attendant Barney (Cliff Osmond)-sabotage the lounge lizard's sleek ride in order to peddle their infantile romantic ditties such as I'm A Poached Egg and I'm Taking Mom To The Junior Prom, Cos' She's A Better Twister Than My Sister. Adrift from the glitz of Las Vegas' bounty of casinos and his endless cache of booze and birds, the sleazy Dino salivates for some interim "action" to temper his cravings. Prowling for sex, Dino's arouses Orville's marital fears that his attractive wife Zelda (Felicia Farr) will soon be added to the crooner's bevvy of conquests.

Released in 1964 as the Production Code's moral leash began to slack, Kiss Me, Stupid acquired notoriety for its risque humour and moral ambiguities. Although tame by contemporary standards, Wilder's film, alongside Elia Kazan's Babydoll, was bestowed with a rare "condemned" rating by the Catholic League of Decency. Reviewers were scathing in their distate for Wilder's vulgar humour, theatre owners refused to run the film and audiences shunned United Artist's tacit release on its artsy Lopert imprint.

Viewed almost forty-five years after its brief original run, Kiss Me, Stupid emerges as a forward-thinking picture; a classic farce ahead of its time and its audience. British poet Philip Larkin may have chimed sexual intercourse began in 1963,but by 1964 it was openly visible. Unlike, the "safe" sex comedies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Wilder's film does not linger around the bedroom door,but rather breaks the door down. The repetoire of double-entendres at Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond's disposal are not disguised in coded layers; they operate with liberated abandon.

Sexual witticisms drench Wilder and Diamond's script in a manner akin to the innuendo adorned flavourings of Moliere and Shakespeare. Like the latter's Comedy of Errors,Kiss Me, Stupid hinges upon mistaken identities, infidelity and bawdy sexual humour to enliven the film's discourse on love, sex, greed and marriage. Furthermore, Wilder's film exploits Dean Martin's offscreen persona to create a credible early example of a celebrity engaging in cinematic self-parody.

In a role originally intended for Peter Sellers, Walston plays Orville Spooner; a nervy, suspicious eccentric whose wife Zelda is deemed the most beautiful woman in town. After five years of marriage, the wiry and disheveled Spooner still remains stunned that Zelda accepted his marriage proposal. Therefore, Orville treats Zelda's every word and decision with mistrust; fearing she will leave their penurious and rural homestead. The arrival of the sex-hungry and leering Dino emboldens Orville's selfish practices.

Isolated in a backwater desert community, Orville lusts for wealth, primarily as a security mechanism to ensure Zelda remains his. These chauvinistic and greedy attitudes shape Orville's conception of marriage. His worries about being able to provide for Zelda are informed by the material culture Dino represents, rather than the romantic notions his loving wife adheres toward; whilst his controlling nature strengthens his unconscious desire to be a strict patriarchal figure. Therefore, Dino is viewed as an antithetical figure representative of the carefree glamourous playboys viewed in other films of the period such as Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Orville's response to local prostitute Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak)- whom he and Barney hire to placate Dino's urges-is interesting in that whilst the local piano teacher preaches devotion to his wife, he increasingly appears attracted to the doting, flu-rattled Polly, whose failed ambitions and eagerness to please appear better suited to Orville's clingy personality and brittle self-confidence.

Written by Wilder and his frequent collaborator I.A.L Diamond, Kiss Me Stupid is a raw, layered farce. Concocted as a comedy of errors, Wilder's film is a sharply tuned comedy of errors; cooly constructed around Orville's personality flaws which fate him to the collapse of his selfish web of deceitful ideas and plans. In using black and white cinematography, rather than colour, Wilder enhances the picture: capturing the drained, monotone environment highlighted by an unimaginative and dreary populace who spend their evenings crowded around the colour televisions in a local hardware store.

Walston's solid performance captures his character's hyperactive desperation and frenzied ways. Dean Martin simply adopts a cool demeanor in a role that requires the singer-cum-actor to simply be himself: allowing Wilder's stinging humour to poke fun at Martin and the Rat Pack's popular image. Yet, the genuine star of the film is possibly Kim Novak, who demonstrates a breadth and diversity often lacking in colder efforts such as the character of Madeline in Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Almost half a century from its initial release, Kiss Me Stupid appears not as a moral corrupting force, but as a wonderfully biting examination of modern values and ideas with regard to love, sex and marriage. Like in other Wilder films such as Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole and One, Two, Three, the famed director demonstrates the shallow material desires and internalized greed of humanity. In doing so, Wilder formulates an investigation into the emptiness and disparity of modernity; themes often found in the 1960's Italian cinema in the films of Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni. But unlike the latter directors, Wilder's film adopts a less serious outlook, preferring to exercise his message and his analysis through comedic terms. The result is an overlooked comic gem.

* Kiss Me Stupid is available through MGM Home Video and is released in their Billy Wilder Collection box set.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque