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Kiss Me, Stupid [1964] (REGION 1) (NTSC)


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A rare misfire for Wilder, but not an uninteresting one
Review date: 2007-12-06 Rating: 4 out of 10

Kiss Me, Stupid is an interesting misfire, but despite a promising and outrageous setup - Ray Walston's would be songwriter tries to keep Dean Martin's promiscuous crooner in the small town he breaks down in long enough to buy his songs by using his wife as bait: but, being insanely jealous, he hires Kim Novack to pretend to be his wife only to still find himself becoming jealous - it never really delivers the laughs. Walston, replacing Peter Sellers after he dropped out because of a heart attack, is too broad and Novak's Marilyn-with-a-cold impression too artificial, while Dean Martin's gleeful self-parody as a drunken lecherous and very superficial crooner called Dino sometimes seems a little too sidelined. Only Cliff Osmond really comes up with the goods with a performance that's often as theatrical as the patently phoney soundstage sets. Some nice moments, but this time Wilder and Diamond seem too enamoured of the censor-baiting premise to make it really work.

No extras at all on the UK DVD, but a decent 2.35:1 widescreen transfer.

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Reviews


A politically incorrect movie, but an excellent screwball comedy
Review date: 2007-10-31 Rating: 10 out of 10

Director Billy Wilder is not a novice in making highly successful comedies. Movies such as: Some Like it Hot (1959), Apartment (1960), and Irma La Douce (1963), made Wilder a very successful writer and director in Hollywood. Kiss Me, Stupid, starring Dean Martin and Kim Novak made in 1964 was received less warmly; conservatives still in control of American life were upset by the controversial story. The lead actor is actually Ray Walston who plays Orville Jeremiah Spooner, an organist at the local church and a piano teacher is jealous of his beautiful wife Zelda (Felicia Farr; wife of Jack Lemmon in real life). He is paranoid that she could attract another man and soon he may lose her. While coping with this fear, Orville also writes songs in his spare time with his buddy, local gas station owner, Barney (Cliff Osmond). As the luck would have it that Singing Dino of Las Vegas (Dean Martin) on his way from Vegas to Los Angeles makes a stop at Barney's gas station in Climax, Nevada. Orville and Barney quickly realize that they have the golden opportunity to use Dino to promote their songs. To keep Dino in Climax long enough, they concoct a story that his car needs a spare part which requires two days to arrive, and until then he could stay with Spooner. Initially excited about the idea but quickly turns into fear as Orville realizes that Dino is a drunkard, a seducer and the fact Zelda is his biggest fan, losing her to Dino was more closer than ever. So he hatches a plan to send his wife away to her parents, and hires Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak), a cocktail waitress at the local bar, Belly Button, to pretend to be his wife while he entertains Dino during his stay. The viewers get to see the "real life" of Dean Martin who pretty much plays as himself as a heavy drinker, and a womanizer who tries to seduce Polly (pretending as Zelda) in her own home in the presence of her "husband." Later he is thrown out of the house and ends up in Belly Button and later to the Trailer home of Polly located next to the bar. Circumstances would have placed Zelda already in the same Trailer when she moves from her parent's home to Belly Button to the Trailer home. It is a little shocking to the viewer, since director Wilder went a little far to show that both Dino and Zelda; and Orville and Polly, have sex, Dino pays for her service!!! The pair shrugs it off as an adventure, and Orville and Zelda get back together. In the climate of political correctness of today; director Wilder and the studio have portrayed the story honestly as what would be the most obvious under circumstances. But in 1964, political correctness was not appreciated and in fact the term did not exist. The film upset the Catholic Church and the Vatican's Legion of Decency banned the film. The film's opening scenes were shot during a live performance at the now defunct Sands Casino in Las Vegas. The customized Italian Ghia sports car driven by Martin in the film was also his own automobile. Originally Peter Sellers was slated to play the role Orville Spooner but due to his personal circumstances the role went to Walston. The movie is a little boring in the beginning but later becomes very interesting. Kim Novak appears in the movie after a third of the movie is completed, but her role as a girl under difficult circumstances in an unfortunate job, begins to like the life of Spooner, and dislikes the glitzy life of Dino; it is touching. Kim Novak is spectacular in her performance as Polly: Highly recommended to all her fans.

an interesting failure
Review date: 2007-07-30 Rating: 6 out of 10

I am American, and I do not think of myself as puritanical. But maybe I am, a bit. "Kiss Me, Stupid" is well worth watching, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I couldn't shake the feeling that Billy Wilder was in full dirty-old-man mode, wanting to take advantage of the sexual freedom of the 1960s, but without a sure feel of how to do it.

It's interesting to contrast "Kiss Me, Stupid" with "The Apartment," which is a wonderful movie. "Kiss Me, Stupid" is about lust and promiscuity v. domesticity and a tidy, small-town life. But both are portrayed as extremes: Dino is repellent in his carnality, while Orville's wife is too good to be true, and their town too wholesome and tranquil (the Belly Button to one side).

In "The Apartment" Wilder portrays sex alongside power, status, cant, privilege, hypocrisy -- as it often exists in real life. And his good characters aren't all good, which makes one sympathize with them.

It also means the difference between wit and smarminess.

Still, Peter Sellers might have been able to make this movie fly. It needed to be pulled in the direction of farce.

Kiss Me brilliant!
Review date: 2007-01-02 Rating: 10 out of 10

Based on the Italian stage comedy L'Oro della Fantasia (trans: The Hour
Of Fantasy), Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid appeared after a long run
of successes by the director, which culminated with a hat trick on The
Apartment for which he won Oscars for producer, director and
co-screenwriter, respectively. In the years that followed, however,
Wilder's reputation took a battering; he helmed several films then less
favourably received.

Many of these later films have found critical rehabilitation. Kiss Me,
Stupid has found too an increasing number of defenders, a new
generation of viewers discovering its unique tone with delight during
late night TV revivals. In an age when the double entendre can be king,
Wilder's film, stuffed full of visual and verbal sexual innuendo, and
with its ironic irreverence towards traditional values and mores, has
acquired a relevance that it never had before. Times have moved on a
little since the stuffed shirt brigade were shocked by what was seen
then as the leering immorality of Wilder's film, its supposed
vulgarity, with its jaundiced view of fidelity. These days the cynicism
so characteristic of the director and here drawn out the nth degree
appears entertainingly modern, while Dean Martin's central,
self-parodic portrayal of satyriasis ("It's a habit with me. If I skip
one night a week I get such a headache") can be seen as one of his most
memorable performances - probably because it runs closer to home in
contemporary eyes than some of his other, more safely packaged
appearances do now.

Originally Peter Sellers was cast as Orville Spooner, the eternally
jealous and ever-optimistic singer-songwriter, 62 duds in, from the
feverishly named Climax, Nevada. It was one of the great what-if
casting choices, and went as far as shooting some evidently well played
scenes before, for various reasons, the star pulled out. The decision
left the plum role to Ray Walston, thereby allowing that actor his
finest hour on screen.

With hindsight, Wilder's film is an ideal vehicle for postmodernists.
Not only does it start with a clue that it is packed full of signifying
elements (a gigantic, erect crane arm is the first thing the camera
sights after the LAS VEGAS SIGN CO wording), but the films also works
hard to deconstruct celebrities, family life and the value of marriage.
"By way of Warm Springs, Paradise Valley" Climax is a place of
conventional morality, where Spooner just happens to be married to the
prettiest girl in town: Zelda (Felicia Farr, incidentally another
Wilder regular, Jack Lemmon's wife). As designed by Alexander Trauner,
who also worked on such atmospheric films as Jour de Lève, and Othello
(1952) it's a small town where the only real excitement is playing the
piano or watching colour TV in shop windows, unless one heads out to
The Belly Button where apparently, at least as Spooner is assured by a
visiting citizen's committee, "love is for sale." Wilder opposes the
sexual opportunism and the commercial value placed upon relationships,
as epitomised by Dino's predatory libido and Polly's trailer with its
conspicuous 'bang bang!' TV, with the ostensible stability and moral
compacts of home life. But whereas the Spooner household is full of
laughably intense jealousies on the part of the husband, Dino's life is
one of easy come, easy go sex. The rub is, of course, that in Kiss Me,
Stupid the two worlds interact and mix: commercialism enters the home,
while the exploited eventually make a nest for themselves on the
proceeds. One of the ironies is that Spooner and Milsap's song writing
team provide the soundtrack for Martin's debaucheries, just as his song
albums have given Zelda her own romantic fantasies (she was once
president of Dino's fan club) and the married woman melts promptly into
his arms as soon as he serenades her. While there is some sorting out
at the end, with some token disapproval by the wife, it is clear that
the message of the film is not warning about the corruption brought by
show business types, or even the disgraceful willingness of some
ordinary folk to be swayed by the glamour. The greatness and maturity
of Wilder's film is that it shows how both sides can make acceptable
accommodation and get along, and without ever compromising
self-respect. Of course the idea that the ideal thing is to live one's
"live-long day and the long, long night" just as needed, and then to
forgive the inevitable, was something hard to find acceptance in early
1960s' America - let alone the thought that relationships could be put
on hold to improve them.

In the light of this one can see how fortuitous it is that Peter
Sellers did not eventually get to play Orville Spooner. While the
comedian would have had a field day with Spooner's psychopathic
jealousy, as well his various quirks, his real life celebrity would
have obscured the film's focus. Walston is enough of an unknown on
screen to suggest the moral confusion of a non-entity desperate for
success, for an audience, contrasting against the heavyweight allure of
Martin. As 'Dino', a few years out from his other best film (Rio
Bravo), the singer is so much at home in his role that one has to pinch
oneself to be reminded that he was actually playing a part. As Polly
the Pistol, "fastest draw in the west," Kim Novak was an inspired
choice. Showing the depth that Hitchcock saw in the actress when he
cast her in Vertigo a few years before, her performance convincingly
portrays the necessary mixture of wistfulness, self-possession and
deprecation that the tart with a heart role here requires.

Lensed in well composed widescreen black and white, and with an
excellent cheap edition available, albeit without extras worth the name
(the region one edition allegedly contains a couple of deleted scenes),
Kiss Me, Stupid is a film made by artists at the peak of their form,
without a dull scene throughout, and I recommended it unreservedly.

Wonderful 60's comedy !
Review date: 2006-12-16 Rating: 8 out of 10

Director Billy Wilder had already put his name on classic comedies like "Some Like it Hot" and " The Seven year itch" when he directed the great Dean Martin in one of his best roles. "Kiss me Stupid" is like the aformentioned films a sex farse, a comment on midle america's hipocrisy and a perfect show case for talents. Dean Martin is trully a great comedian and so it is Ray Walston( who substituted Peter Sellers after the brithish actor sufered a stroke)Kim Novack does fine has the rest of the cast...a classic film to be rediscovered! The dvd edition as a clean and sharp B/W picture with mono sound, and no extras.

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Kim Novak
Cliff Osmond
Ray Walston
Dean Martin
Felicia Farr

Creators:
Dean Martin (Primary Contributor)
Kim Novak (Primary Contributor)
Joseph LaShelle (Cinematographer)
Billy Wilder (Producer)
Billy Wilder (Writer)
Doane Harrison (Producer)
I.A.L. Diamond (Producer)
I.A.L. Diamond (Writer)
Anna Bonacci (Writer)

Director(s):

Recording label: MGM
Manufacturer: MGM
EAN: 9780792856191
Binding: DVD
ISBN: 0792856198
Number of items: 1
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC,
Release date: 2003-07-15
Universal product code (UPC): 027616887627
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Region code: 1
Running time: 125 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1964
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: French (Original Language)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: French (Subtitled)
Language: Spanish (Subtitled)
Language: French (Dubbed)

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