Kiss Me, Stupid

Billy Wilder was a master at sneaking sex into films like The Apartment and Irma la Douce in the years before the arrival of the ratings system, but 1964's Kiss Me Stupid—his most gleefully cynical and brash sex comedy—was so maligned that it almost sunk his career. Set in the town of Climax, NV (the first of many double-entendres), the story centers on amateur songwriters Orville and Barney (Ray Walston and Cliff Osmond), who scheme to sell their tunes to a boozing, womanizing Vegas singer by the name of Dino (played by Dean Martin in a knowing parody of himself), who is forced to make a detour when his car breaks down. The tunesmiths' plot is to tempt him with a woman, so they hire local prostitute Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) to pose as Orville's wife after Orville gets his real spouse, Zelda (Felicia Farr), out of the house. Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, adapting a European farce, revel in the smutty garishness of the whole situation. Walston, a last-minute replacement for Peter Sellers, goes for big and goofy here, while Osmond is enthusiastically opportunistic. Novak both plays up and against her bombshell image as a workaday hooker, and Martin is pure cartoon wolf, sizing her up like a piece of meat. Although widely condemned, this is a weirdly, grotesquely funny movie—more cult film than classic—which remains an odd artifact of 1960s cinema. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)