Wilder follows the credit sequence with a prologue that recalls the prologue at the beginning of Love in the Afternoon. This time the narrator is Louis Jourdan, another French actor who appeared in Hollywood films. Jourdan’s voice-over commentary accompanies a quick tour of Les Halles wholesale meat market. “This is the story of Irma la Douce,” he intones, “a story of passion, bloodshed, desire, and death—everything that makes life worth living.” This is one of the very few speeches in the screenplay that is taken verbatim from the stage play. The camera tracks along row after row of slabs of beef, pork, lamb, and veal. Then it moves on to a long line of harlots on the pavement. “If you are looking for some action, forget the high-rent district,” the narrator goes on; “come to our neighborhood. Just step around the corner to the Rue Casanova. That is where you will find the girls, better known as poules.” One of the girls, he points out, is named Lolita; she wears sunglasses with heart-shaped rims—the trademark of the title character in Kubrick’s film. The girls take their coffee break in the louche Chez Moustache bistro; so do the mecs. The proprietor is known as Moustache, but “according to police records,” the narrator points out, “Moustache is a Romanian thief named Constatinescu.”
The narrator acknowledges that the mecs regularly pay off the local gendarmes, or flics, to cast a blind eye on the girls plying their trade on the sidewalk. “It is what the politicians call ‘peaceful coexistence,’ trade on the sidewalk. Then one day disaster struck: an honest cop on the beat!” With that, the narrator bows out and Nestor bows in.
Nestor Patou, a rookie policeman patrolling the Rue Casanova, is shocked to find prostitution rife on his beat. He orders a raid on the Hotel Casanova, only to learn that Chief Inspector Lefevre himself has been caught in the raid. Lefevre, Nestor’s superior, personally sees to it that Nestor is kicked off the force. Nestor, out of a job, hangs around Moustache’s bistro. One night Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell), Irma’s mec, roughs her up for holding back some of her earnings from him. Nestor intervenes and knocks Hippolyte’s block off. He thereby inherits Irma as his poule and becomes the number one mec on the block.
Irma in due course seduces Nestor. The Los Angeles Times reviewer employed this scene to compare Wilder to Ernest Lubitsch. “Lubitsch, who delighted in sex farces, stopped at the bedroom door. Wilder walks right inside.”77 Indeed, the camera follows Irma and Nestor right into the bedroom; then Irma shuts the door.
Nestor, who has fallen in love with Irma, soon becomes obsessed with the notion that she is still seeing other men. Nestor concocts a scheme whereby he masquerades as a wealthy Englishman, Lord X, who will provide her with sufficient funds so that he can have her exclusive services. He disguises himself with a goatee, a set of buck teeth, and a patch over one eye. Because Nestor initially wants to sleep with Irma only as himself, Lord X tells Irma that he is impotent and seeks only her companionship. He explains that, while he was a prisoner of the Japanese, the bridge on the River Kwai fell on him when it was hit by an explosion, leaving him “half a man.” Irma is incredulous: “You think you have run out of gas, but maybe you are just stalled”—a typical Wilder double entendre. In any case, to earn the francs that Lord X pays Irma for their weekly evening together playing double solitaire, Nestor must toil all night at the nearby Les Halles market. Suffice it to say that Irma eventually “cures” Lord X of his impotence.
When Nestor suspects that Irma prefers Lord X’s company to his, he becomes wildly jealous and “kills off” Lord X by dumping the wardrobe he wore as Lord X in the Seine. Wilder described the film as the story of a man who becomes jealous of himself. Nestor is soon imprisoned for drowning Lord X, the imaginary British peer, in the river. While in jail, Nestor gets word that Irma is pregnant, and he escapes to be with her. Nestor disguises himself as Lord X one last time to convince the police that he did not drown Lord X. The police hear that Lord X has been inexplicably hanging around under the bridge on the Seine. Indeed, they witness Lord X emerging from the Seine, claiming to be unable to remember what happened to him.
Nestor explains to Irma hurriedly that he impersonated Lord X and that she really loved him all along. Realizing this, the visibly pregnant Irma agrees to marry Nestor. They are wed in a solemn ceremony according to the rites of the Catholic Church, which is curious, since neither Nestor nor Irma is Catholic. Irma goes into labor during the ceremony and delivers the baby in the sacristy. Chief Inspector Lefevre is on hand to inform Nestor that, since he has been cleared of the murder charge, he will be reinstated as a police officer. So Irma is no longer a poule and Nestor is no longer a mec.
Meanwhile, a lone figure steps out of a pew in the church and proceeds up the aisle toward the exit. It is none other than Lord X, complete with eye patch and goatee. This Lord X cannot be Nestor in disguise, because Nestor is busy in the sacristy with Irma and the newborn babe. Spying this impossible reappearance of Lord X, Moustache can only exclaim to the audience, “But that’s another story!”
Wilder never explained the gimmicky gag with which the picture ends, but the plot has been far-fetched all along. As MacLaine puts it, the scenario does not bear close analysis, “because it was all artificial anyway.”78 Bernard Dick writes, “When a prostitute’s lover masquerades as a peer, . . . without her knowing his identity,” we are in the world of what the French call boulevard comedy, which flourished in the early twentieth century. The term refers to a small theater near a boulevard in Montmartre that specialized in “bedroom comedies” by the likes of Georges Feydeau. Dick explains, “These old-fashioned French farces subsequently influenced movie directors like Lubitsch and Wilder.”79
Although Irma was big at the box office when it was released on June 5, 1963, several critics dismissed the comedy about the proverbial harlot with a heart of gold as vulgar and lacking in true comic invention. Leo Mishkin in the New York Morning Telegraph quite by chance echoed Wallis’s angry letter to Shurlock, pronouncing Irma “a lewd film that belongs at a stag smoker.”80 Sam Staggs, a film historian who is usually in Wilder’s corner, writes, “If high schools put on plays about French hookers, Irma la Douce is the kind of low farce that might have the sophomore class in stitches.” He deplores “the gauche material, the facile dialogue, the in-your-face crudeness parading as wit.”81
Variety did not much mind the bawdy humor but did take Wilder to task for the movie’s excessive running time. The film is just under two and a half hours, “an awfully long haul for a frivolous farce. . . . A little snipping and splicing, particularly in the later stages, and the film’s occasional sluggishness” could have been reduced considerably.82 Variety was not alone in stating that “half-an-hour cut out would make it a better film.”83
Withal, the movie had its fans. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times endorsed Wilder’s “comic skill and his ability to handle raw material with deceptively silken gloves.”84 What’s more, André Previn received an Academy Award for his score, which seamlessly incorporated Marguerite Monnot’s original themes. That was the only Oscar accorded Irma, but Shirley MacLaine won a Golden Globe award for her performance.
Reflecting on Irma la Douce, Wilder noted, “I personally earned more out of that picture than any other picture I made,” since he received a whopping 17 percent of the gross plus his usual salary. “That doesn’t mean the best; it just means it made the most money.”85 The movie eventually grossed $25 million, which would be the equivalent of $80 million today. Irma was a huge hit, Wilder said, “but I’m not sure why.” It was not a film he was particularly proud of. “It didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” but it was not a movie that he thought much of.86
“There is no guaranteeing audience reaction,” Wilder said at the time of Irma’s release. “I’ve been lucky; I’ve taken a lot of chances in treading new ground, which could have slipped out from under me. Though I’ve gotten away with it about 90 percent of the time, I don’t flatter myself that I can hit all the time. But I have to live in hope—or p
erhaps under the delusion—that if I like it, a great many other people will like it too.”87
The 1960s, which brought an increasingly liberal climate to America (in contrast to the buttoned-down 1950s), were in full swing. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma la Douce all dwelled on sensitive sexual issues, and all three were severely criticized by the minions of morality. Yet they were all popular with the moviegoing public. Up to this point, Wilder had successfully tested the limits of what was acceptable to the mass audience in popular entertainment. There were industry insiders, like Hal Wallis, who believed that Wilder had already pushed the envelope too far. Nonetheless, Wilder, emboldened by the extraordinary success of Irma, was confident that he could make another crowd-pleasing sex romp. With Kiss Me, Stupid, however, he would finally overplay his hand.
15
Grifters
Kiss Me, Stupid and The Fortune Cookie
Everybody lives by cheating everybody else.
—Preston Sturges
“The first thing you learn in Hollywood,” Billy Wilder declared, was that you must not offend pressure groups. “Don’t offend the Catholics, the Jews, the dentists,” or any other group.1 Wilder forgot his own advice when he made Kiss Me, Stupid, which offended the Catholic Legion of Decency mightily. But in 1963, Wilder was riding high. In the light of the phenomenal success of Irma la Douce, Harold Mirisch, the president of the Mirisch Company, issued Wilder a sweetheart contract that guaranteed him a salary of four hundred thousand dollars plus 10 percent of the gross profit for his next movie.
Wilder selected as the source of his next movie a farce by Italian playwright Anna Bonacci titled L’ora della fantasia (The dazzling hour). Wilder knew the play in its French translation, which had been a big hit on the Paris stage as a vehicle for Jeanne Moreau in 1953. Irma la Douce had also been a success in Paris. Both were naughty boulevard comedies, as Pauline Kael observes.2 So Wilder assumed that his film version of Bonacci’s farce would repeat the success of Irma on the screen.
The French adaptation of Bonacci’s Italian play is set in Victorian England. George Sedley, a village church organist, wants to have his new oratorio performed in London. Sir Ronald, the influential sheriff of London, passes through town. George, at the suggestion of his friend Taylor, invites the sheriff to stay overnight in his home so that George can persuade him to arrange for the London premiere of his oratorio. To ingratiate himself with the sheriff, George arranges to have Geraldine, the village harlot, substitute for his wife, Mary, as Sir Ronald’s companion for the night. As a result of some plot twists, Sir Ronald winds up spending the night with Mary instead of Geraldine. He agrees to sponsor the London performance of her husband’s oratorio in exchange for “one dazzling hour” with Mary. George is astonished later to learn that his oratorio is to be performed in London.
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
Although the studio had persuaded Wilder to shoot Irma in color, he held out for shooting the present film in black and white. Admittedly, color was in wide use for features by 1963, but Wilder continued to favor black and white. “Unlike David Lean,” who needed color for his epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), “my pictures are set in the bed or under the bed” and do not require color, he glibly explained.3
In adapting the play for the screen, Wilder changed the names of the characters and transplanted the setting from a rural village in Victorian England to a hick town in the American Southwest named Climax, Nevada. George Sedley and his sidekick Taylor are retooled into the frustrated songwriters Orville Spooner and Barney Milsap. Wilder’s first Hollywood screenplay, Music in the Air, featured a songwriting team who served to some degree as the models for Orville and Barney.4
In Wilder’s scenario, piano teacher Orville attempts to sell a song he and Barney wrote to Dino, a famous crooner who is stranded in Climax overnight. Following the play’s plot fairly closely, the screenplay has Orville send his wife Zelda away for the night so that he can have Polly, a prostitute, pose as Zelda and spend the night with Dino. This is all part of Orville’s plot to manipulate Dino into featuring the song on a TV special. But Orville’s plans go awry, and the real Zelda winds up bedding down with the singer—with the understanding that Dino will introduce the song on the air. Throughout the film, Orville is jealous to the point of paranoia of any man who pays attention to his pretty young wife, a trait Wilder retained from his literary source.
I. A. L. Diamond maintained that, in fashioning the script with a spicy plot punctuated with salty double entendres, he and Wilder were aiming to create a movie like Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). Richardson’s film is a loose adaptation of the earthy Henry Fielding novel Tom Jones (1749), a bawdy social satire about the manners and morals of eighteenth-century England. Like the novel, the film is a very honest portrayal of the period. But “we were not interested in doing a picture about greed and sex in Victorian England,” Diamond stated; “we wanted to translate it into modern times.”5
With the script in reasonably good shape, Wilder cast the picture. He went into production with Dean Martin as the crooner Dino, Kim Novak as Polly, and Peter Sellers as Orville. Martin was the first to be cast, since Wilder needed the singer’s assurance that he would not mind that the crooner in the script was modeled after his popular image. Indeed, Martin’s character in the film bears his own nickname, Dino. Martin would be parodying himself in the picture, just as Otto Preminger had done in Stalag 17. “He’s a delicious and adorable man who does what you ask him,” said Wilder of Martin. “He’s one of the most relaxed and talented men I know.”6
As Polly the Pistol, the prostitute who yearns for domesticity, Novak seems to be doing a takeoff on Marilyn Monroe. “Wilder obviously had Marilyn Monroe in mind when he created the character of Polly,” Bernard Dick writes. “Wilder invested Polly with the same sexy vulnerability that made Marilyn tragic and desirable.”7 Novak is quite touching as a Monroe-like wistful floozy. As it happened, Marilyn was Novak’s own first name; it had been changed to Kim by the studio early on to avoid confusion with Monroe.
Wilder envisaged Peter Sellers as Orville Spooner, the jealous husband, because Sellers had the knack of making the most eccentric characters sympathetic to an audience. Felicia Farr, an accomplished actress as well as the wife of Jack Lemmon, rounded out the cast as Orville’s wife Zelda.
Wilder was able to round up the same group of seasoned production artists who had collaborated with him on Irma la Douce. Production designer Alexander Trauner had to create Climax, Nevada, for the movie—a desolate place on the fringe of the Nevada desert, recalling the sun-baked town in Ace in the Hole. Wilder and Trauner scouted locations for Climax on the outskirts of Twenty-nine Palms, a small town near the California desert. They selected suitable sites for the dusty residential neighborhood where Orville lives and for the sleazy Belly Button roadhouse. The tavern is so named because the sign out front, which Trauner constructed outside a real café, features a cartoonish cocktail waitress with a fake jewel conspicuously glittering in her belly button.
Wilder needed a couple of sample songs that were supposedly composed by the team of Orville and Barney. During preproduction he had consulted an old friend, the lyricist Ira Gershwin, about the matter. Ira said that he had a trunk full of songs that he and his brother, the late George Gershwin, had never published. He volunteered to rework a couple of the numbers so that they would sound as if they were written by amateur songwriters. One was “I’m a Poached Egg,” a whimsical ditty that he and George had written in the 1920s and quite rightly discarded. Ira also dusted off a love song titled “Sophia,” which had been dropped from the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie musical Shall We Dance? (1937).
Principal photography on Kiss Me, Stupid began on March 6, 1964. In addition to the location work in Twenty-nine Palms, Wilder filmed some shots of casinos on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. In addition, he shot Dino’s Vegas nightclub act at the swank Moulin Rouge club on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. But the bulk of the picture wa
s filmed, as usual, at the Goldwyn Studios.
Wilder, according to his custom, attempted to minimize the stress level on the set during shooting with wisecracks. In Dean Martin, Wilder met his match when it came to trading verbal punches. Martin always had a comeback for Wilder’s witticisms. When Wilder issued complicated instructions to Martin on how he was to play a particular scene, Martin retorted, “Well, for Chrissakes, if you wanted an actor, what did you hire me for? Why didn’t you go get Marlon Brando?”8 Peter Sellers was not accustomed to incessant banter on the set. Moreover, Wilder preferred an open set and allowed his own friends, as well as guests of the cast and crew, to visit the soundstage during shooting. “The clubby atmosphere made Sellers feel like an outsider,” since he was from Britain, notes Glenn Hopp.9 To make matters worse, other directors permitted Sellers to improvise while rehearsing a scene, but Wilder did not allow any actor to do so.
Sellers kept all of his gripes against Wilder to himself. Nevertheless, the high-strung, erratic actor privately fretted about his resentment of the working conditions on a Wilder set. At night he often sought to assuage his tensions and anxieties by smoking marijuana and sniffing amyl nitrate, a habit that was pushing him toward a crisis.10
The crisis erupted on Sunday evening, April 5, 1964. The thirty-eight-year-old actor—after indulging in a dose of amyl nitrate—suffered a mild heart attack. He was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The following Tuesday, shortly after midnight, Sellers suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and was at death’s door. Miraculously, he survived and was on the road to recovery very soon. The hospital’s heart specialists advised Wilder that Sellers could resume work on Kiss Me, Stupid after six months of convalescence at home in England.11
Some Like It Wilder Page 38