Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Kiss Me, Stupid Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 9, 2015

Is there that much difference in the depiction of a certain degree of moral turpitude (or at least ambiguity) between a film which posits a junior executive renting out his room to his office superiors for their extramarital assignations and another film which posits a desperate husband supposedly offering up his wife in exchange for career advancement? On the surface, it wouldn’t appear so, but the reactions to two Billy Wilder films proves that the tenor of the times can sometimes be unpredictable. The Apartment premiered in June 1960, just as the United States was in the last months of the Eisenhower administration, with its supposedly sleepy, conformist attitudes holding sway, but with the promise of youth and elegance glimmering in the form of candidate John F. Kennedy. The Apartment was of course greeted with rapturous reviews and immense box office, becoming one of the crowning glories of Wilder’s latter day career, and going on to win a slew of Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Wilder, and Best Screenplay for Wilder and his longtime writing partner I.A.L. Diamond. The Apartment was a surprisingly sweet film, at least considering its somewhat tawdry premise, and the disconnect between subject matter and presentation remains one of its most notable achievements. About four and half years after The Apartment stormed the cinematic beaches, Wilder offered up Kiss Me, Stupid and was perhaps stunned at the critical backlash both he and the film received. Released Christmas week of 1964 (perhaps one of the central missteps in the film’s history), Kiss Me, Stupid was lambasted for its tawdry premise, though this time it was also on the receiving end of critical brickbats for its presentation, which many at the time felt was smarmy in the extreme. From the vantage point of some fifty years now, Kiss Me, Stupid is probably not the unmitigated disaster many felt it was at the time. It certainly has none (or at least very little) of The Apartment’s charm, sweetness and ebullience, but there’s a baseline of (sometimes overly manic) humor on hand in the film’s tale of a lothario crooner and actor named Dino (Dean Martin, obviously relishing this chance at self parody) who gets stranded in a tiny Nevada town not so subtly named Climax, where he encounters a couple of ambitious songwriters named Orville Spooner (a frenetic Ray Walston) and Barney Millsap (Cliff Osmond).

Kiss Me, Stupid begins with a sequence which was reportedly filmed at one of Martin’s real life Vegas shows, with the amiable singer “drunkenly” stumbling through a tune while at the same time popping off a series of at times questionable one liners. Already Wilder seems to be trying a bit too hard, cutting away to some waiters watching the show, two of whom are in stitches over Dino’s antics while the third stares in semi-somnambulistic catatonia. The sad fact is probably more audience members were in tune with that third waiter than with the other two, setting the film off on a somewhat precarious footing from the get go.

An unexpected detour on the road back to Los Angeles sends Dino trundling up a dirt road toward the tiny town of Climax, where Wilder also segues to introduce the audience to would be songwriter Orville and his lyricist friend, local gas station owner Barney. Through the interplay of the first Climax sequence, it becomes apparent that Orville is almost psychotically obsessive about his attractive wife Zelda (Felicia Farr, AKA Mrs. Jack Lemmon; Lemmon was evidently Wilder's first choice for the Walston role). Orville seems to think any male who even glances Zelda’s way is on the make for her, and that includes one of his nerdy teenaged piano students.

Dino of course arrives in Climax to the delighted consternation of several of the townsfolk. A quick thinking Barney uses his mechanical knowhow to keep Dino in Climax for at least a little while, so that hopefully he and Orville can convince the world famous singer to use some of their material. Meanwhile, two overly contrived plot points begin to merge. Dino’s “need” for regular sexual contact (supposedly to maintain his health) rears its amorous head, adding to Orville’s out of control jealousy, which in turn has led to a major flare up with Zelda. Weirdly, Orville seems only too happy to at least passingly consider pimping out his wife to Dino if it will result in the sale of a song, but her egress makes things a bit more difficult, at least for a moment, until he and Barney get the “bright” idea to utilize local “working girl” Polly (Kim Novak) to fill in for Zelda and to bed Dino if and when that becomes necessary.

The stage seems to be set for a bedroom door slamming farce involving mismatched lovers, mistaken identities and other elements of this timeworn idiom, but instead a series of doubles entendres and other fairly lowbrow material flies by with a certain tawdry effervescence. The film might have worked better had Walston been reigned in a little. He, like Lemmon, tended to be a somewhat “tic” prone actor, though Lemmon was able to dial it down when necessary, something Walston never quite seemed to be able to match. Here he’s left to simply maraud through scene after scene, ultimately provoking as much annoyance as hilarity.

Martin is rather refreshingly self deprecating in this film, and he and Novak actually have some good chemistry together. The film’s stage roots are only too obvious in this basically one set piece, though Wilder does attempt to open things up with gambits like the opening Vegas sequence and a couple of treks in and around Climax. The film’s rather dubious morality is, like The Apartment’s, fairly breathtaking if you take a moment to actually think about it (especially with regard to Zelda, who does in fact have an assignation with Dino toward the end of the film). Unfortunately the heaviness of that subject matter tends to weigh down any natural lightness inherent in the screenplay. Kiss Me, Stupid probably didn’t quite deserve the critical drubbing it took in 1964, but it also is an overly noisy affair that wants to substitute frenzy for character driven humor.

Kiss Me, Stupid Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kiss Me, Stupid is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Elements utilized for this transfer are in very good condition, with only very minimal age related wear and tear popping up on occasion. Contrast is strong and consistent and both black levels and grayscale look great. The image has pleasing clarity and sharpness, with good to very good detail even in wide shots. Interestingly, Wilder and his DP Joseph LaShelle light some scenes (notably those with Walston in his paranoid mode) almost like a noir, with large shadows eclipsing large parts of the frame. Those still offer nice detail and shadow detail in this pleasingly organic looking offering.

Kiss Me, Stupid Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kiss Me, Stupid features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix which offers fine support for the film's ribald dialogue and (perhaps more importantly) occasional song score which features "new" songs by George and Ira Gershwin. (Ira wrote new lyrics for a handful of unpublished George tunes.) Fidelity is excellent and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Kiss Me, Stupid Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:35)

Kiss Me, Stupid Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's more than a little ironic that Billy Wilder's previous film, 1963's Irma La Douce, also featured a prostitute caught up in questionable moral activities, but was greeted with cheers and box office acclaim. Perhaps Wilder went to this innuendo filled well once too often for his own good, but the fact also remains that Kiss Me, Stupid just doesn't have the bubbly charms or even the mordant cynicism of other, better Wilder offerings. Still, it's not the out and out disaster that it evidently was accused of being some fifty years ago. Martin is rather slyly self deprecatory and Kiss Me, Stupid offers Cliff Osmond a nice chance to strut his stuff. Novak can be a little forced at times, but she seems like a model of Method brilliance when thrust up against the manic hyperbole of Ray Walston. Taken as a whole, and especially for Wilder fans, Kiss Me, Stupid comes Recommended.