I’ll watch almost anything in black-and-white Scope, which I happen to be queer for, but I draw the line at Billy Wilder‘s Kiss Me Stupid. I tried to re-watch it last night (again), and I couldn’t do it, man. I just couldn’t.
(Oh, and I watched two full episodes of grubby, grimy, endlessly talky Andor on Saturday night, but more on that later.)
It’s not so much the overbearing lead performance by Ray Walston, who was hired at the last-minute when Peter Sellers suffered a heart attack, and Kim Novak is…well, not too bad even though Polly the Pistol is a pathetic character. It’s Dean Martin I can’t stand. He’s playing himself here — a rich, big-name Italian crooner who’s so smug and lazy he can barely say his lines without putting himself to sleep…thinks he’s the center of the universe but in fact is completely out of swing with mid ’60s culture and doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, and who has no funny lines…just a smug, oily-haired lech trying to bang Novak while getting half-bombed.
Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on (a) a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and (b) on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and (c) poor, treated-like-dirt Novak. Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow…good God.
(l. to r.) Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Dean Martin in a rare color snap from the set of Kiss Me Stupid.
From a 3.27.11 Glenn Kenny Some Came Running piece called “I’m With Stupid: “One thing I find perverse enjoyment in with Kiss Me, Stupid, is its coarseness, or more precisely the way that coarseness manifests itself. It was made just as the sexual revolution was revving up and the studio system was circling the drain. While Wilder’s comic sensibility was always at least partially about pushing a joke or double-entendre past whatever the acceptable breaking point for the Breen Office was, the man himself was in some ways a bit of a prig. His ’60s films were getting more and more frantic, but with Kiss Me, Stupid, there’s an almost palpable sense of Wilder saying ‘screw this.’
“Dean Martin biographer Nick Tosches, no slouch at coarseness himself, describes the Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond script for Stupid thusly: ‘Kiss Me, Stupid was as sordid an idea as had ever been proposed for a movie comedy. Wilder [and Diamond] had written…pictures that were sexy in an insouciant, sweet sort of way. But their screenplay for Kiss Me, Stupid was downright, leeringly sleazy. Sex and venality lay at the heart of every dirty laugh.’
“Wilder, the disciple of Lubitsch, for some reason decided to replace the Lubitsch ‘touch’ with a haymaker. To sap from it all of its humanity and compassion.”
Brenkilco, eight years ago: “The tide went out really fast for Wilder after 1960. A guy who had once been an envelope pusher just seemed timid and tiredly vulgar when censorship finally caved in. Irma La Douce hasn’t the energy to be offensive. It’s just tedious. The Fortune Cookie’s cynicism is OK but it’s condescending sentimentality and misogyny are vile- the clueless but noble black football player and the slatternly female lead have to be seen to be believed. Avanti, Buddy Buddy and The Front Page are all thumpingly bad films. In the latter the over age cast painfully tosses around four letter words as if nobody had ever said them in a movie before. Fedora is a case for further study but only in Sherlock Holmes, something as far removed from contemporary tastes as could be imagined, did Wilder show a bit of the old spark. It’s imperfect, overlong and has its crass moments but also a romantic, Lubitsch like spirit that the director otherwise seemed to have given up on.”
Eddie Cockrell, eight years ago: “I agree with all your points about Kiss Me, Stupid, but these are the very virtues that render this amongst the greatest — and certainly the most misunderstood — American comedy of the last half of the 20th century.
“When I was a programmer at the old American Film Institute Theater in Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center in the early 1980s, the only extant print of this we could get was a 16mm pan-and-scan. It played very well to the audiences of the day, and if anyone was offended or outraged I never heard about it (and I always heard about it when it happened). The first time I saw a 35mm Scope print was during the Berlinale one year; I dragged along a bunch of my friends and colleagues and it was a revelation to them as well.
“More recently, I showed the film to a class of aspiring screenwriters and it left them speechless — even the feminists in the group who had made their politics quite clear during previous sessions. Finally, and I won’t divulge the details of this encounter, but a woman with whom I was working on a project saw the film recently and was absolutely enraged by it, just spitting, foaming mad. It was most entertaining.
“I think the movie endures for two general reasons. First, as Glenn Kenny observes, because of the complete and utter venality of everyone involved. Of course Wilder pushed this further than he ever had before, and he paid the price when the film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency (he later regretted making the movie, but I’ve always thought it was because of what it did to his career, not that he wasn’t successful at what he set out to do). But it has always seemed to me to be a conscious decision to hold a mirror up to society at the time.
“The second reason goes to the casting of Ray Walston in place of Peter Sellers. Sellers had recently married Britt Ekland, and had a heart attack after taking amyl nitrate prior to a roll in the hay with her. By then director and star were so at odds over they’re very different working methods that when Wilder received word of Sellers’ heart attack, he quipped that ‘you’ve got to have a heart before you can have an attack.’
“The film always cheers me up.
“I strongly encourage your readership to look at the film from the perspective of the time in which it was made. And, really, in the scheme of Wilder’s work, are any of the characters in Kiss Me, Stupid any more venal than James Cagney‘s “Mac” MacNamara in One, Two, Three or Walter Matthau’s “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich in The Fortune Cookie? These two movies (as well as Irma La Douce) bookend KISS ME, STUPID, yet it’s this particular film that gets all the blame for the downward spiral in Wilder’s career. I’ve never understood that, and hope for the day when opinions of the film can undergo a major rehabilitation.
“Didn’t mean to bang on, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”
