Billy Wilder had just come off making Irma La Douce, and as a self-aware artist he must have been conflicted and bitter to watch that piece of low-grade prurient tripe become the biggest box-office hit of his career.
More cynical than ever, perhaps, he embarked on one of his most problematic films. Kiss Me Stupid, as its title implies, is half masterpiece and half mess, riveting and unwatchable at the same time.
It begins with Dean Martin performing the great Gershwin classic "S'wonderful." This sweetly ironic song is built on clever, intricate wordplay, but Dino keeps interrupting it every few bars to lob cheap "adult" jokes at his smoke-wreathed Vegas audience. You can actually sense Wilder's disgust seeping through the sharply etched widescreen images.
And yet as the film's director he does just what Dino does... taking a sweetly ironic story and coarsening it with leering innuendo, poundingly unfunny punch lines, and pointless smut. Is Kiss Me Stupid a pointed attack on an empty and vulgar society? Or is it the empty and vulgar work of a tiring older man abandoning any pretense of giving a sh*t? Both, I suppose.
Despite its crude overemphasis, the movie is painfully accurate in portraying the worst aspects of American life: the stifling dead-end atmosphere of little edge of nowhere towns -- the total abasement in the presence of celebrity -- the desperate clinging to possessions all the way down the socio-economic ladder.
As with any classic portrait of this country, it centers on the only means of escape: the road -- in this case, the road to and out of Climax. The story begins with Dino cruising down it in his convertible, and ends with Kim Novak's Polly pulling out of it, waving cheerfully as she abandons her role as the town's most popular whore. You can't help but feel that the director, having finally let it all hang out in a movie with "flop" written all over it, can relate.
More cynical than ever, perhaps, he embarked on one of his most problematic films. Kiss Me Stupid, as its title implies, is half masterpiece and half mess, riveting and unwatchable at the same time.
It begins with Dean Martin performing the great Gershwin classic "S'wonderful." This sweetly ironic song is built on clever, intricate wordplay, but Dino keeps interrupting it every few bars to lob cheap "adult" jokes at his smoke-wreathed Vegas audience. You can actually sense Wilder's disgust seeping through the sharply etched widescreen images.
And yet as the film's director he does just what Dino does... taking a sweetly ironic story and coarsening it with leering innuendo, poundingly unfunny punch lines, and pointless smut. Is Kiss Me Stupid a pointed attack on an empty and vulgar society? Or is it the empty and vulgar work of a tiring older man abandoning any pretense of giving a sh*t? Both, I suppose.
Despite its crude overemphasis, the movie is painfully accurate in portraying the worst aspects of American life: the stifling dead-end atmosphere of little edge of nowhere towns -- the total abasement in the presence of celebrity -- the desperate clinging to possessions all the way down the socio-economic ladder.
As with any classic portrait of this country, it centers on the only means of escape: the road -- in this case, the road to and out of Climax. The story begins with Dino cruising down it in his convertible, and ends with Kim Novak's Polly pulling out of it, waving cheerfully as she abandons her role as the town's most popular whore. You can't help but feel that the director, having finally let it all hang out in a movie with "flop" written all over it, can relate.