Wilder and Diamond\u2019s big subject, once again, was matters of business getting mixed up in the bedroom, with men behaving badly and unable to see women as anything besides prostitutes or possessions. Except this time their misanthropy was garishly cranked up to eleven, in stark, widescreen black-and-white with the ugly behavior shoved straight in your face, untempered by the inherent sweetness of stars like Jack Lemmon or Shirley MacLaine. Kiss Me, Stupid<\/em> is Wilder\u2019s most bracingly unlikeable film since his muckraking 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole<\/em>, which died a similar death at the box office. It\u2019s also a curiously powerful picture, pushing up against the era\u2019s mores and sexual politics in productively uncomfortable ways. You get the sense that the director is not always in control of his material, and that\u2019s why the movie leaves a mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kiss Me, Stupid<\/em> is best remembered for a fearless turn from Dean Martin, viciously sending up his own persona as a debauched nightclub singer and sex-addicted sociopath. He\u2019s playing a pal of Sinatra\u2019s named \u201cDino,\u201d decades before HBO programs like The Larry Sanders Show<\/em> and Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em> made it cool to play a narcissistic asshole version of yourself. The opening sequence mimics Martin\u2019s act at the actual Las Vegas Sands casino, with the louche crooner telling winking rape jokes (\u201cLast night this girl was banging on my door for 45 minutes. But I wouldn\u2019t let her out!\u201d) while Wilder cuts to hideously unflattering reaction shots of male waiters cackling like hyenas. In the previous year\u2019s The Nutty Professor<\/em>, Jerry Lewis created the character of Buddy Love to lash out at his former showbiz partner, but Dino does it better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The picture\u2019s convoluted, unpleasant premise finds the singer suffering car trouble and stranded in the hick town of Climax, Nevada. Dino happens upon two struggling songwriters \u2013 persnickety piano teacher Orville J. Spooner (Ray Walston) and his cheerfully amoral, gas station attendant partner Barney (an odious Cliff Osmond) who somehow manage to make beautiful music together. (Their unsold songs are by George and Ira Gershwin.) The two conspire to keep the crooner in Climax overnight –long enough to hear and fall for a few of their tunes– by using Orville\u2019s wife as bait for the priapic performer. Except he\u2019s far too jealous a husband to let this happen to his actual spouse (the fetching Felicia Farr) so the songwriters hire Polly the Pistol, a pro from a rundown roadhouse at the edge of town called The Belly Button, to pose as his wife for the night. Polly\u2019s played by Kim Novak with a blowsy sadness that shoves the movie\u2019s mean-spirited single-entendres into sharp relief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a snakebit production from the beginning, with the director\u2019s first choice for the lead, Jack Lemmon unavailable due to prior commitments. The role of Polly the Pistol had been intended for Wilder\u2019s Some Like It Hot <\/em>and The Seven-Year Itch<\/em> star Marilyn Monroe, whose death in 1962 caused shooting to be rescheduled. Jayne Mansfield was going to play Polly for a while before she got pregnant and Novak eventually assumed the role. Then, six weeks into production, star Peter Sellers \u2013 who had replaced Lemmon as the piano teacher \u2013 suffered a series of 13 heart attacks (!) and was sent home to England to recuperate. Ray Walston, a fine comic performer and nobody\u2019s idea of a leading man, stepped in as the star and leaves a big, leaky hole in the bottom of the movie. Putting it bluntly, there are things audiences will allow a Jack Lemmon or Peter Sellers to get away with that are unacceptable from anybody who isn\u2019t a movie star. And Ray Walston is an excellent character actor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet this disconnect also adds to the film\u2019s weirdly suspenseful second half, which after an hour of brutally crude jokes that don\u2019t always land well, takes on an oddly wistful, melancholy tone. Polly the Pistol discovers that she quite likes playing house, and the piano teacher\u2019s wife learns a thing or two about herself while spending an evening on her own. The drunken, piano-pounding antics call to mind John Cassavetes\u2019 Faces<\/em> four years ahead of schedule, and let\u2019s just say that Stanley Kubrick must have had this movie heavy on his mind while making Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>. The morally transgressive finale of Kiss Me, Stupid<\/em> goes a lot further than you\u2019d expect from a Hollywood comedy of its era. Heck, it goes a lot further than you\u2019d expect from a Hollywood comedy today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To say the picture didn\u2019t go over well would be an understatement. Condemned by the Catholic Church\u2019s Legion of Decency \u2013even after Wilder reshot one of the final scenes to appease them\u2014the film was called out by critics for contributing to the moral degeneracy of blah-blah-blah, with Time<\/em> magazine evocatively describing it as \u201ca jape that seems to have scraped its blue-black humor off the floor of a honky-tonk nightclub.” One of the film\u2019s few fans was Joan Didion, who insightfully suggested that the public\u2019s rejection of the picture stemmed from seeing the loose morals of popular swinging sex comedies transplanted from decadent international locales to the supposedly saintly streets of smalltown America. This makes even more sense when you remember that the naughty antics of Wilder\u2019s hit red-light district comedy Irma La Douce<\/em> were safely set in faraway France. Kiss Me, Stupid <\/em>is too close to home.\u00a0 ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/kiss-me-stupid-1024x576.jpg\")
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