Kiss Me, Stupid

Plot synopsis:
While driving his Dual-Ghia from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, lecherous, heavy-drinking pop singer Dino (Dean Martin) is forced to detour through Climax, Nevada. There he meets the amateur songwriting team of Barney Millsap (Cliff Osmond), a gas station attendant, and piano teacher Orville J. Spooner (Ray Walston), a man easily given to jealousy. Hoping to interest Dino in their songs, Barney disables the "Italian" sports car and tells Dino he will need to remain in town until new parts arrive from Milan. (Dual-Ghia was actually an American marque, mating a Dodge frame, drivetrain, and engine with Italian coachwork.)
Orville invites Dino to stay with him and wife Zelda (Felicia Farr), but becomes concerned when he learns the singer needs to have sex every night to avoid awakening with a headache. Anxious to accommodate Dino but safeguard his marriage, Orville provokes an argument with his wife that leads to Zelda fleeing in tears. He and Barney then arrange for Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak), a waitress and prostitute at a saloon on the edge of town called the Belly Button, to pose as Orville's wife and satisfy Dino.
That evening after the three have dinner, Orville plays his tunes for Dino on the piano and Polly requests a particular song. It is one she knows he wrote for his wife when trying to persuade her to marry him. Doing so, Orville gets lost in emotion, as does Polly, who has fallen a little for the dream of a domestic life that she doesn't have. Under the influence of wine and song, Orville starts thinking of Polly as his wife and tosses Dino out. He then spends the night with Polly.
Dino seeks shelter at the Belly Button, where Zelda earlier had gone to drown her sorrows. When she became drunk and rowdy, the manager deposited her in Polly's trailer to sleep. Hearing about the talents of Polly the Pistol and declaring himself eager "to shoot it out with her," Dino goes to the trailer and finds Zelda there and mistakes her for Polly. A longtime fan, she succumbs to Dino's charms and allows him to seduce her, persuading him how perfect Orville's song would be for him at the same time.
Zelda meets Polly the next morning and figures out the trick Orville played on her. She gives Dino's money to Polly, who needs it to leave Climax and start a new life.
A few nights later, Orville is distraught knowing that Zelda intends to divorce him. Suddenly he hears Dino singing one of his songs on coast-to-coast television. He is at a total loss as to how this could have happened. He wants an explanation, but Zelda simply orders him: "Kiss me, stupid."

Tags: satire

Review:
Orville and buddy Barney (Cliff Osmond) write songs in their spare time  one is called `I'm Taking Mom to the Junior Prom Cuz She's a Better Twister Than My Sister,' and another begins, `I'm a poached egg without a piece of toast/Yorkshire Pudding without a beef to roast'  and they're excited when singing sensation Dino (Dean Martin as the same kind of leering lush he usually played in his nightclub act and on TV) is stranded in town.
And it's a shame because this is one of Wilder's very best films; a cynical, often very funny comedy about a very touchy subject: fidelity (which probably accounts for its PG-13 rating; an oblique tribute to its' power)Ray Walston stars as Orville Spooner, a third rate songwriter from a small town who has yet to chart a big hit.
Perhaps Walston is a bit weak in a leading role (Sellers would have been fantastic), but the script is first rate, both funny and touching.Dean Martin and Kim Novak are seriously under-rated actors in my opinion; here Dean sends himself up as 'Dino' and is not afraid to play himself as un-likable.
While the lesser-known Felicia Farr comes across very well (she was also the wife of Wilder's frequent star, Jack Lemmon, I wonder how this film would have worked with Lemmon in the Walston role?)This is a gem of a movie and one of Wilder's best..
The much maligned and savaged KISS ME,STUPID has aged far better than the previously mentioned title, thanks in large part to director Billy Wilder's razor sharp satiric barbs at the expense of small town America's morals and mores, in this case, Climax, Nevada.Dean Martin portrays himself or rather a ratcheted up version of his 'Dino' persona.
Ray Walston, (brilliantly cast; nobody played sharper or more venal in comedy than he did - remember, he once even played the devil?), is the small-town songwriter who tries to sell some of his songs to a visiting superstar called Dino, (Dean Martin, parodying himself as a womanizing, hard-drinking piece of scum).
But being the all-American hypocrite that he is, he can't bring himself to use his real wife so he packs her off to a motel and hires the local floozie Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) to take her place.The film is very funny in the way it undermines our conventional sense of morality.
Billy Wilder's career as a hitmaker ended with this for-its-time smutty sex comedy, yet it shows all of the flaws and strengths that once made him one of Hollywood's top directors and, for all its sexual innuendo, is really a very sweet film.
Spooner, who hires a local prostitute (Kim Novak) to impersonate his wife (Felicia Farr) so he can use her to sell singing star Dino (Dean Martin) his songs, the other three stars are dynamite.
And Novak gives the performance of her career as the romantic small-town slut trying to earn enough money to get her trailer out of the desert.As with most of Wilder's films, all the cynicism and sex play mask a romantic heart:  Polly and Orville begin to believe in her masquerade as his wife, until he kicks Dino out to protect her honor.
Billy Wilder's failed satire of sex comedies involves famous crooner and ladies' man Dean Martin stranded in a small town on the Nevada border, befriended by hack songwriter Ray Walston who hopes to sell Dino his novelty songs.
Martin, Novak, and Felicia Farr are all engaging, and director Wilder sets up the running gags with his customary aplomb, yet not much can be done with Ray Walston, an eleventh-hour replacement for Peter Sellers and a complete mismatch for this ribs-nudging material.
A legend goes a s far as pretending that "kiss me stupid" is subpar.As far as Wilder comedies are concerned it's only one notch or two under the two Monroe ones and probably the underrated "avanti",and probably superior to "apartment" "one two three" or "stalag 17" Reductio ad absurdum that love between husband and wife is laudable,playing with every cliché you can think of and creating absolutely stunning scenes out of them.This is a movie one can only dream of ,nowadays ,when comedies are vulgar,not funny at all and gamble on audience's stupidity (!)Once again,once more ,Wilder 's screenplay is exciting,witty,now delirious-the parrot watching the telly-,now almost dramatic -the scene when Walston throws a loaded Martin out of his home,this admirable sequence when Novak thinks that it would be great to be a housewife .Wilder plays with his characters ,no one is in the right place,no one acts as if he's supposed to do,and,that's the miracle,everything will turn right.Invention is everywhere ,in every scene,in every line of dialogue,even in these silly songs the hero and his pal want Dean Martin to sing (check the words:" when I'm without you,I'm a Yorkshire pudding without a roast beef(sic))Wilder was a director who used to dare ,provocation was his forte :from the name of the one-horse town (Climax) to the holier-than-thou woman who set up a petition against the "belly button" ,this den of iniquity.
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 epitomize 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.
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..
While this isn't a terrible movie, it isn't great; in fact it isn't even very good, despite a decent effort from Walston, a pretty good self-parody by Martin, and a game try by Novak to overcome her limited talents.The story is based on an Italian play, and Wilder and his long-time collaborator I.
There then follows an over-complicated plot to install local waitress (and part-time hooker) Polly the Pistol (Novak) as Oliver's wife (without Oliver's real wife knowing) so that Dino can get as fruity as he likes with her without Oliver going off the deep end.This is pretty cynical, downbeat stuff, complemented by a sombre black-and-white cinematography that seems to emphasise the bleakness of not just the character's surroundings, but their entire lives, and it's not easy to successfully translate this mood of dispirited ennui into a serviceable comedy.
Granted, a little too much time and space is given to Ray Walston early on as he over reacts and overacts to the idea that his wife might be deceiving him, but then filming began with Peter Sellers in the role and nobody would have complained then.
Jealous piano teacher Orville Spooner (Ray Walston) sends his beautiful wife, Zelda (Felicia Farr), away for the night while he tries to sell a song to a famous nightclub singer Dino (Dean Martin), who is stranded in town.The Catholic Legion of Decency strongly objected to the completed film and it was condemned, the second film to get such an honor -- the first being "Baby Doll" in 1956.
Kim Novak is transformed into a pitiful dumb broad, and Dean Martin plays himself, or, more pointedly, he plays the version of himself that his worst enemy might have imagined in a feverish bout of spite.Walston's role originally belonged to Peter Sellers, who suffered a heart attack and was forced to withdraw from the picture.
It's a wretched looking film highlighted only by Kim Novak and Dean Martin's performance as "Dino," a famous crooner very much like the lecherous character Martin played throughout much of his public life..
he has a great line when an unsuccessful songwriting team fling their best tune at him > he has been forced by a detour into a small town, where he has been manipulated to stay the night: "just what I need...another Italian love song!".problem is that his self parody has a seriously "dark" side > he is not the wine-women-song man but a leering letch, anxious to jump on Ray Walston's wife (actually KIm Novak, the small town hottest barmaid, playing proxy - SEE THE MOVIE).
KISS ME, STUPID might have failed in 1964 for no better reason than the dreadful title (remember 1967's sublime THE HONEY POT?), but the film, drawn from an Italian play, "L'Ora della Fantasia" (filmed earlier as "Moglie per una Notte" or "Wife For A Night" with Gina Lollobrigida unexpectedly in the Felicia Farr role of the wife!) was essentially one long dirty joke about a jealous husband willing to sacrifice SOMEONE's virtue to get ahead, just not his wife's...except that it had Billy Wilder, who found something special there.In 1964, Billy Wilder's production, the script lovingly crafted with frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond with excellent songs recrafted from the Gershwins' trunk by Ira (it's only the NON-song background music which was by Andre Previn), suffered from every problem imaginable.
Dean, of course delivers as the singer Ray Walston's piano-teacher/composer (with his mechanic/lyric writing partner Cliff Osmond) is desperate to sell a song to, making vintage and rewritten Gershwin songs ("Sophia" was originally "Wake Up, Brother, And Dance," cut from "Shall We Dance") sound as fresh as 1964 - but the key to the film is perhaps the ONLY near great performance of Kim Novak's career.Under Wilder's direction (something not even Hitchcock could do), Novak makes "Polly the Pistol" a fully rounded character that the audience can care deeply about and be rewarded when Wilder and Diamond give her a genuinely hopeful happy ending - something they do for *everyone* in this unexpectedly warm film, unlike the possibly more realistic "...Apartment." Novak's brief scene with excellent second tier actress Felicia Farr as the wife (why did she never find the roles to make her a bigger star?), is a minor masterpiece and worth the whole film.Those too shallow to understand why an artist like Wilder would choose to film in the more detailed visual vocabulary of black & white (or who miss Hays Code "morality") will probably never be the ideal audience for KISS ME, STUPID, even 'though the poorly chosen title might seem geared to that sort of "lowest common denominator" comedic taste.
No one felt it necessary to dub him in 1958 when he recreated his London role (Luther Billis) in the film of "South Pacific" or his Broadway role (Mr. Applegate) in "Damn Yankees." One suspects that the obvious dubbing was in the service of an "in joke" in the Wilder/Diamond script where the wife insists to "Dino" that the song "Sophia" would be better suited to the voice of pop singer, Jack Jones.
The beginning of Kiss Me Stupid has Martin performing in Las Vegas and I'm willing to bet that all Wilder did here was set up his cameras and film Dean probably doing his final show one night at the Sands half in the bag.
What to do, but hire a chippie from the local bordello, Polly the Pistol as played in Marilyn Monroe style by Kim Novak and have her pretend to be Mrs. Walston.Wilder's headaches with Monroe are the stuff of legend on the sets of The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. He had no such problems apparently with Novak, but Kiss Me Stupid is hardly in the same league with either of the Monroe films.Speaking of Gershwin standards for some of the songs that Walston-Osmond team come up with, Billy Wilder got none other than the retired Ira Gershwin to write some new lyrics to some unpublished numbers that the late George Gershwin had done back in the day.
There is a reason that none of these songs became any kind of hit for Dean Martin.Sex has always been a great topic for Billy Wilder films and in such things like the aforementioned Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot and also The Apartment and Irma La Douce, Wilder is brilliant and insightful.
Spooner who works as a piano teacher in Climax which is a small town in Nevada.He's also a church organist and writes songs with his buddy, gas station attendant Barney Millsap (Cliff Osmond).Orville often gets jealous over his beautiful wife Zelda (Felicia Carr).One day a real star stops in this small town and has to stay for a little longer.This unlucky fella is Dino who has the appearance of Dean Martin.Well, the two fellows get an idea.They could try and sell a song to Dino and become famous themselves.The only problem is Orville's wife.Dino is known as a ladies' man and he'd probably make a move on Zelda.So they replace her with somebody else.That somebody is Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak), a waitress of a joint called Belly Button.Now Dino can mess around with his "wife" as much as he likes.Billy Wilder is the director and I.A.L. Diamond is the writer of Kiss Me, Stupid (1964).It's a very much underrated gem of Wilder's movies.It made me laugh quite a few times.Ray Walston is hilarious as the jealous husband with the picture of Beethoven on his shirt.And Cliff Osmond offers some moments of laughter as Barney.
Felicia and Kim are wonderful women.Dean Martin does some fine parody of himself as the character he plays.You got to like Barbara Pepper as Big Bertha.Mel Blanc, The Man of a Thousand Voices plays Dr.Sheldrake.Henry Gibson is in his second movie portraying Smith.André Previn is behind the original music and Ira Gerswin behind the lyrics.I actually liked the song Walston and Dino sang.It really sticks in your head."Listen to me Sofia...".
Dean Martin bravely plays an exaggerated character of himself (how many stars today lampoon themselves?), Kim Novak is drop-dead gorgeous as well as being amusing, and Ray Walston is a master "straight man."  Also of note are a hilarious Cliff Osmond, a Wilder rep player of sorts, as Walston's songwriting partner.
Seen today Kiss Me Stupid is a daring and brilliant film.One should read both 'Kim Novak On Camera' and also 'Conversations With Wilder' concerning this movie.
Walston simply did not have the star charisma to work with real movie stars Dean Martin and Kim Novak.This film is a good film that should have been a great film.
Ray Walston simply does not register especially when working with two genuine movie stars Dean Martin and Kim Novak both whom the camera loved.
The sometimes misguided attempt to take an Italian sex farce, and transfer it to a small town somewhere  in the desert results in a movie that doesn't quite feel right, but certainly has a lot of fascinating elements.the early sequences, featuring an insanely jealous Ray Walston, absolutely convinced that his pretty wife (felicia Farr) is having an affair with everybody from the milkman, to the dentist, to the 14 year old boy he's giving a piano lesson to are perfectly timed, and result in classic comedy.
Things may go a little wrong when Cliff Osmond, as Walston's song writing partner, and the owner of the gas station across the street, gets involved, in a performance that is a little too broad.The movie becomes even more interesting, to me, when Dean Martin enters the story, playing a parody of himself that few stars then or now would agree to.
Originally it was supposed to be Peter Sellers, who left after a few weeks because of a series of heart attacks, and Walston was a last minute replacement, but I suspect that the script was originally intended for Felicia Farr's husband, Jack Lemmon, whose decency and incredible comic ability humanized a few Wilder characters over the years, and who would have, I think, changed the tone of this movie considerably.
Who already watched to most movie from the Master and compare with Kiss me stupid has a great disapoitment,the miscasting is around two actors Dean Martin and Ray Waslton,the first really a annoying guy,he actually think including in the movie he is best than Elvis and Beatles....a second class singer who didn't has a charm neither charism.Walston was a wrong choice to the role,but Kim Novak provides a sexy acting about Polly the Pistol....Wilder drive forces in this character who proves to be later a sole character which deserve a best review of the entire picture!!Resume: First watch: 1990 / How many: 3 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.
A delightful movie from Billy Wilder with a marvellous and at times very touching performance from Kim Novak and Dean Martin sending himself up in great style.
Despite some memorable performances in this film, (Ray Walston as Orville is one to be remembered as a highlight in his career), "Kiss Me, Stupid" pales in comparison to Billy Wilder's past comedies (i.e.
Dean Martin plays a character named Dino in this Billy Wilder film, Kiss Me, Stupid, centering on Ray Walston's jealousy and possessive nature when it comes to his wife, played wonderfully by Felicia Farr (Jack Lemmon's wife in real life.) Ray and Cliff Osmond are songwriters on the side (Ray being a piano teacher and Cliff being a mechanic by trade) in a small town in Nevada, so when Dino is driving through on his way to a gig, they make the most of it, making the car undriveable and making Dino stay the night at Ray's house.