by Ed Sikov
Wilder and Diamond insert a bit of comedy dialogue that they each evidently found amusing, however different their perspectives may have been. Izzie was Billy’s employee, after all:
IRMA: Let’s see … five hundred francs each time, that’s a thousand francs a week, fifty-two weeks in a year, so that would be … Darling, can I have a hundred francs?
NESTOR: Sure!
IRMA: For a hair dryer.
NESTOR: Here’s another hundred. Get some curtains, too.
IRMA: Why are you so good to me?
NESTOR: I just believe in fair dealings between labor and management.
The comedy can be extremely broad and bloodthirsty at times. Wilder opens one sequence with a Panavision close-up of a side of beef, splayed, its legs pointing up in the air. A cleaver is falling as the shot fades in. The blade drops, splitting the beef right between the legs and well into the rib cage. Wilder dissolves to a row of pigs’ heads with Nestor’s face popping in the middle. At times, Irma is anything but douce. In one especially grim scene Irma and Nestor snipe at each other viciously, with Irma descending into shrill squawking. Nestor twists her arm behind her back, bullying her the way Hippolyte once did; she spits in his face, and it’s not the least bit funny. Wilder fades to black, holds on the emptiness for a moment, then fades back in, the sound coming in before the image: “Here we are in the seventh inning, Maury Wills on first.…” A GI is walking with a whore, a transistor radio held to his ear. She leads him to the hotel and has to whistle at him to tear his attention away from the game. He grudgingly goes in with her.
In a remarkable bit of duplicity, Nestor comes to the bizarre realization that Irma’s leaving him—for him. The other him, the fake him—Lord X. How unsettling it is for him to realize that the phony persona is more appealling to her than the real one, especially since he knows that the real one is so deficient:
NESTOR: How do you like that phony—he’s been lying to her!
MOUSTACHE: What do you mean, he? There is no he—it’s you!
NESTOR: Of course it’s me. But she doesn’t know that! And she doesn’t know that I know. But I know that she likes him better than she likes me. See? She wouldn’t even take any money from him.
MOUSTACHE: You’d better have a drink.
Nestor’s only solution is to kill himself.
As if he were compelled to pay for his own sexual excesses, both onscreen and off, Wilder inserts a disingenuous moral near the end of the film. “I don’t believe in miracles,” Irma sighs, to which Nestor replies, “When I met you, you were a streetwalker. Now you’re going to be a wife and mother. Isn’t that a miracle?” Critics who deride Wilder’s need to have it both ways could do no better than to cite this, the sappiest line in his career.
André Previn was recruited once more to score the film. Previn was surprised when Wilder asked him to “disregard all the pratfalls” and compose a sweet-tempered romantic score, especially for the scene in which Nestor and Irma spend their first night together. “Of course he was right,” Previn recalls. “And the final result was curiously touching.” After showing the composer the film he was about to score, Wilder left him alone.
Considering the subject matter of Irma la Douce, the lack of cuts demanded by the PCA and the Legion of Decency was extraordinary. Their laxness led directly to a violent backlash the following year, but in 1963 they dropped their guard. United Artists told the Legion in May 1963 that just a few cuts had been made to make the film acceptable. A shot of MacLaine naked to the waist was replaced by a shot showing only her head and shoulders. The sequence in which Lord X reacts to Irma’s attempts to arouse him by spinning fantasies was revised to eliminate “as much as possible his body and pelvic contortions”; they were replaced with shots of his face. And the shot of an American soldier coming down the stairs of the Hotel Casanova with a whore on each arm was cut—but only from the U.S. and Canadian prints.
“Wilder has never shown less of his brassy film-engineering ability, and he and Diamond have never written so soggy a script,” was Stanley Kauffmann’s assessment. Kael thought the theme of prostitution was tired: “as a source of comedy I find it about as hilarious as muscular dystrophy.” She seized particularly on the Schwartz joke as proof of Wilder’s tin ear. “At that level of wit, the wonder is that Miss MacLaine and Mr. Lemmon consented to remain on the set.” She didn’t comment on the way the rest of the scene played, nor did she seem to care.
After Irma’s release, Geoffrey Shurlock of the PCA received a blistering letter from producer Hal Wallis, who was enraged and repulsed by everything Irma la Douce represented. The producer of various Lewis and Martin farces as well as the recent Elvis Presley hits Blue Hawaii (1961), Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), and Fun in Acapulco (1963), Wallis was disgusted. He simply couldn’t imagine “what this salacious, pornographic, distasteful, obscene, offensive, degrading piece of celluloid can mean to an audience.” Possibly, Wallis went on, audiences respond to Irma la Douce “in the same way that [they do to] exhibitions in brothels and looking at stag films…. This is without a doubt the filthiest thing I have ever seen on the screen.” But by this point, even Hollywood’s chief censor found Wallis’s objections to be wildly excessive. “It is mostly men who complain about it,” Shurlock wrote back to Wallis. “Women generally seem to find it hilarious.” Shurlock also noted that the Code Administration did convince Wilder to have the film reviewed by PCA, a practice that was no longer required, and that United Artists had assured them that it would be sold strictly as an adult movie. Only then did the PCA issue its certificate of approval.
Wallis was repulsed by the film’s vulgarity, but worldwide audiences were delighted by it. Irma la Douce was a smash hit. In January 1964, Variety reported that the film had grossed $9,500,000 and was second only to Around the World in 80 Days as a comedy blockbuster. This was no New York/Chicago/Los Angeles urban hit with otherwise limited appeal. In the American heartland Irma was raking it in. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, the film set a long-run record—twenty-four weeks. As Variety noted, “This was accomplished by a picture with a prostitute as its principal feminine character in a predominantly Catholic community where foreign, sex, Legion-of-Decency-condemned and skin pix are boycotted by all exhibs in recognition of the fact that a considerable element of local citizenry frowns on them.” (And what was the previous record holder in Saint Paul? The Robe.)
The 1960s were in full swing. Irma la Douce was Billy Wilder’s greatest commercial success, far surpassing anything else he ever made. It grossed about $20 million and made him richer than ever. Lemmon and MacLaine were happy, too. “The truth is, I personally earned more out of that picture than any other picture I ever made,” Wilder said. “That doesn’t mean it was the best. It just means I made the most money. And I enjoyed making it, too.” As for the film’s quality, Billy wasn’t especially happy with it: “If I had my way I’d reshoot ninety-five percent of that thing,” he said. Phalanx and Pyramid, Billy’s production companies, took in at least $1,200,000. (United Artists and the Mirisches, on the other hand, received $440,000 combined.)
Sex was selling—and selling big. Billy, an inveterate gambler flush with success, was compelled to up the ante.
26. KISS ME, STUPID
ZELDA (Felicia Farr): What have you done lately?
DINO (Dean Martin): How lately?
ZELDA: I bet the Singing Nun sells more records than you.
DINO: The Singin’ who?
ZELDA: Let’s face it—you haven’t got it anymore. You’re old-fashioned.
DINO: You sure know how to hurt a fella.
—Kiss Me, Stupid
When he began planning Kiss Me, Stupid, the first of his two back-to-back feel-bad comedies, Billy was in the catbird seat and could do most anything he wanted. He liked reaping profits. Asked which of his many films was his favorite, Wilder answered quickly: Some Like It Hot. His interlocutor objected, citing The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard, but Billy dismissed them: “Nice
little pictures,” he admitted, “but in those days I wasn’t getting a percentage of the gross.” Thanks to Irma la Douce, should he decide to replace his Rolls-Royce, financing would not be a problem. Acting as his own agent, he signed an even sweeter directing deal. Under the new contract, the Mirisches agreed to pay him $400,000 for each film against 10 percent of the gross until the break-even point. After his films made their money back, Billy would receive a flabbergasting 75 percent of their profits.
And what was the first film he planned to make under this lucrative deal? As though deliberately tying to scuttle his own success, Billy chose a new project that was as foul as anything he ever conceived—at least on the surface. Giddy with the public’s embrace of a comedy about prostitution, and itching to rub the public’s noses in something that smelled worse than the backstreets and used mattresses of Les Halles, Wilder turned to smut. He saw it as redemptive. The script Billy and Iz produced is full of entendres so overtly coarse they can’t be said to be double anymore. The comedy of Kiss Me, Stupid is purposefully low. Penises, breasts, pubic hair, religion, marriage, American small-town life—Billy holds everything in equal contempt. He was confident about his carnal goals. “Unlike David Lean, who needs the desert for Lawrence of Arabia, my pictures are set in the bed, or under the bed, or in the bathroom,” he told a British journalist in July 1964. “They need a minimum amount of Cinerama,” though he did film Kiss Me, Stupid in Panavision, perhaps only to capture the dull emptiness of his characters’ lives with even more expansive, vacuous space. At the dawn of the sexual revolution, Wilder set out to make sex seem filthy again.
He succeeded. Kiss Me, Stupid is about a husband and wife redeemed by adultery—the husband with a two-bit hooker, the wife with a sodden Las Vegas crooner who gets headaches if he doesn’t get laid once a day (and it doesn’t matter by whom). Movie reviewers have long taken Kiss Me, Stupid to be an artistic failure, as if the film’s extraordinary sadness and muck were somehow inadvertent. Kiss Me, Stupid may not be Wilder’s most finely wrought film, but its tone is so consistently depressing, its vision so assiduously dispirited, and its jokes so relentlessly bad, that the malaise it engenders in its audience becomes a kind of triumph. What the film’s detractors miss is that the peculiar tenderness of the ending results from, not despite, the vulgarity of everything that precedes it. Kiss Me, Stupid is without doubt one of the most complicated comedies Billy ever made.
Kiss Me, Stupid marked the second time in Wilder’s career that he used Ketti Frings as his source: The Dazzling Hour, Frings’s and Jose Ferrer’s adaptation of L’Ora della Fantasia (a farce by Anna Bonacci) enjoyed a short run at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1953. Frings and Ferrer transported Bonacci’s characters to a quaint English village in 1838; as Variety observed, this was “an unlikely spot for the second act bordello scene.” The comedy concerned the village composer, his prim wife, a worldly London nobleman who can further the composer’s career, and the well-handled town prostitute. Wife and whore change places for the night, and everything works out in the end, though Variety was quick to note that the genteel housewife’s surprising enthusiasm at the bordello was really just an extreme version of an old Hollywood pattern—the meek small-towner metamorphosing into a big-city glamour girl.
In 1953, The Dazzling Hour was ahead of its time. Kiss Me, Stupid, on the other hand, may seem in retrospect like a harbinger of the sexually liberating 1960s, but for all its effort to be sexually topical it was notably out of synch with its era. At a time when younger directors like Richard Lester were taking their increasingly lightweight cameras out of the sound-stage and into the so-called real world (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964), Billy stayed mostly indoors on sets. While his colleague George Cukor was filming the meticulously lavish My Fair Lady (1964), Billy focused his attentions on an all-but-dead town in the Nevada desert. MGM was making The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964); Disney was making Mary Poppins (1964). Meanwhile, at United Artists, Billy was forcing his characters to sit on a piano bench in a drab living room banging out seemingly tin-eared songs they can’t sell.
Wilder’s discreet camerawork worked against him, too. In the 1960s, after the French New Wave had begun to call candid, graphic attention to the plasticity of the image, to the shocks of editing, to irregularities on the soundtrack, and to all the other pleasing artifices of the cinema, Wilder’s all-but-invisible style seemed to be a throwback: “I admire elegant camera work but not fancy stuff. The camera hanging off the chandelier—that’s for children, to astonish middlebrow critics. I would like to have them forget there is a camera, a dolly, a crew of one hundred fifty.” American high-culture mongers were trumpeting Brechtian distancing devices, but Wilder was still trying to pull his audience in to his fictions. The last thing he wanted to do was to force them to stand apart, watch the spectacle intellectually, and notice all the mechanics behind it. “If it was possible,” he said, “I’d like to get them up on the screen working.”
Again, this was not simple. Kiss Me, Stupid did mark a new appreciation of cinematic artifice, though on a decidedly starker plane. On a practical level, Wilder wanted to maintain his high degree of control by constructing his dreary little world on a soundstage, but there was an aesthetic consequence, too. For all its colorlessness, Kiss Me, Stupid is set in a fantasy world—a depressing, vulgar fantasy, but one no less fantastic for its baseness. There was some location filming in the dusty town of Twenty-Nine Palms, California, and the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Hollywood as well as in Las Vegas, but Joseph LaShelle’s severely dark, noticeably filtered cinematography makes even these real locales seem hermetically sealed.
At Twenty-Nine Palms, special effects coordinator Milton Rice supervised the construction of an immense sign outside the local Elks Club, which the company transformed into a roadhouse-whorehouse called the Belly Button, where a gargantuan woman with a glamorous, electrified navel stands guard. (To give some idea of this billboard-woman’s proportions, the piece of glass in the navel measured three inches across.) The sign works well to describe a chafing social reality—the Twenty-Nine Palms Elks Club became the Belly Button with such verisimilitude that a dozen women are said to have shown up looking for work. It serves as broad, bitter satire just as well. Kiss Me, Stupid is a most realistic-seeming nightmare.
For the most part, Kiss Me, Stupid was shot in soundstages at the Goldwyn Studios and the Universal backlot. Shooting took place in March through June of 1964. Even Barney’s gas station and portions of the Belly Button exterior were rebuilt to order, though the canned quality was always part of the design. When Alexander Trauner took a research trip to scope out the way people lived in the Nevada desert, he was struck by the way their wooden framework houses reminded him of his own all-surface, nosubstance movie sets.
The peculiar comic tone of Kiss Me, Stupid is like the long-lost Gershwin tunes Billy resuscitates in the film—a little off-key at first, but oddly sweet and increasingly tender after the initial shock wears off. Barney sings “I’m a Poached Egg” to Orville’s piano accompaniment: “I’m a mousetrap—without a piece of cheese; I’m Vienna—without the Viennese! I’m da Vinci—without the Mona Lis’, when I’m …” Orville stops playing, appalled: “‘Mona Lis’?’” “That’s what makes it,” Barney explains. “Irregularity. That unexpected little twist. Keep playing.”
Ironically, Billy’s inspiration to use Gershwin to score his film about adultery occurred at a wedding anniversary party for Mr. and Mrs. William Wyler. Billy asked Ira Gershwin’s wife, Leonore, what would convince her husband to work again, and she responded, “To be asked by someone he admires.” Wilder evidently felt he fit the bill, and Ira concurred. Billy assumed that Ira would write lyrics to music composed by someone else, so he asked for suggestions for a suitable composer. He was surprised and thrilled when Ira suggested his late brother, George; there was a trove of unfinished work he could adapt. Billy initially said that he needed no more than three songs—two novelty songs and an Italian ballad—and Ira set to t
he task of figuring out how to write songs that could plausibly have been written by two amateur songwriters from Nevada but that would still work as refined Gershwin tunes.
Wilder suggested “Blah, Blah, Blah” (a song from the 1931 Fox musical Delicious), but Ira vetoed it on the grounds that it was already a Gershwin standard. (The world’s idea of what constitutes a Gershwin classic is evidently different from Ira’s.) Ira then asked for the screenplay-in-progress, which Billy helpfully provided. It was as yet incomplete. Wilder and Diamond hadn’t even finished laying down the story line. With increasing discomfort, Ira Gershwin realized that Billy was asking him to compose the songs first, with Wilder and Diamond using them as the foundation of the script. He was stumped.
Enter Swifty Lazar, who represented not only Diamond but Ira Gershwin, too. Lazar went through the song list in The Gershwin Years and read each title out loud to Billy, Izzie, and Ira. When Swifty got to “Does a Duck Love Water,” Billy and Izzie declared that it was precisely the kind of song they were looking for. Ira then revised a song he and his brother wrote for RKO’s 1937 Astaire-Rogers musical Shall We Dance (though it didn’t make it into the film); now it was reworked into “Sophia,” an Italianesque ditty for the Las Vegas crooner. For “I’m a Poached Egg,” Ira revived and expanded some lyrics and a tune he and George began in the 1920s but never finished, and it was Ira Gershwin rather than Billy who insisted on the title’s cheap whimsy. Wilder and Diamond wanted him to call the song “When I’m Without You,” but Ira refused. Finally, Ira combined two songs he and his brother wrote over a period of time—“Phoebe” and “Livelong Day” to create “All the Livelong Day (and the Long, Long Night),” a simple, graceful ballad.
As songwriters, the neurotic piano teacher Orville J. Spooner and his grease monkey sidekick, Barney Millsap, are only superficially bad. Scratch the surface, and you find the Gershwins. As “I’m a Poached Egg” is to “’S Wonderful,” so Billy’s own early screenplays are to Some Like It Hot or The Apartment or Kiss Me, Stupid itself. This is a film about a writing team that hasn’t made it yet. Even in the moment of his own greatest worldwide commercial glory, Billy relates to these unsung, small-town writers. He can’t help but put them down, but he does it with love.