Wilder sent Sellers a wire, stating, “Your heart is mended; but mine is still broken.”12 Wilder was already a month into the shooting schedule. In six months’ time, the contracts of the other major players in the film would have expired, and they would move on to other projects. Wilder was saddened by the prospect of having to replace Sellers, but he had no choice.
Once he was back in London, Sellers granted Alexander Walker an interview for the Evening Standard, in which he declared, “I have had Hollywood, luv. At the studios they give you every creature comfort, except the satisfaction of being able to get the best work out of yourself. I used to go down to the set of Kiss Me, Stupid with Billy Wilder and find a bloody Cook’s Tour of hangers-on and sightseers standing just off the set, right in my line of vision.” These were friends of the director and the cast “who came to kibitz on Peter Sellers, actor. I should have ridden to the set on horseback and bawled out, ‘Who are all these damn civilians? Get them out of the range of my cannons!’ ”13
Shortly thereafter, Sellers received a cable signed by Wilder, Martin, and Novak: “Talk about unprofessional rat finks!” “Rat fink” was Polly’s description in the script of any boyfriend who had dumped her. Wilder released the telegram to the press with the comment “Heart attack? You have to have a heart before you can have a heart attack!”14
Sellers replied with an open letter, published in Variety, in which he proclaimed that he was not “an ungrateful limey,” much less a “rat fink.” He continued, “I went to Hollywood to work and found regrettably that the creative side of me couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which the work had to be carried out.” He concluded by saying that anyone was free to say that he was the one at fault, “and no doubt will.”15
Wilder decided against replying to Sellers’s latest salvo to put a stop to the interchange. He hastily recast the part of Orville with Ray Walston, who had played one of the randy executives in The Apartment. Wilder began reshooting all of Sellers’s scenes with Walston on April 13. A full twenty-four shooting days out of a total of eighty-five were devoted to retakes with Walston. That inevitably meant that the film would considerably exceed the film’s original schedule and budget.
Wilder later observed that he admired Sellers as an actor, whatever their disagreements. He added ruefully, “We got Ray Walston, who is a fine actor, but no Peter Sellers.”16 Walston was ultimately charmless and unlikable in the role, Axel Madsen comments. Walston often assumes a grim look, “which is meant to express bewilderment, but registers as truculence.”17 One cannot help but wonder how the film would have turned out with Sellers as a more sympathetic Orville.
During postproduction Previn’s background music was recorded. He adroitly integrated into his score themes from the songs that Ira Gershwin had provided. It was time then to send the picture to the industry censor.
Wilder had stopped submitting screenplays to Shurlock in the late 1950s, when Shurlock had advised him that he could not make a solid judgment about a movie on the basis of the script; he could do so only after viewing the finished film. Shurlock thus had no chance to make even a tentative judgment about Kiss Me, Stupid before it was screened for him and his staff. After the film unreeled, writes Jack Vizzard, Shurlock’s chief assistant, Shurlock flabbergasted his advisers, who deemed the movie somewhat crude and tasteless, by announcing, “I’m going to pass it.” He explained, “If this is the kind of movie they want to make; if the companies are going to put up the money for this kind of stuff and then expect me to try and stop them, they’re crazy!”18
The provisions of the censorship code presumed that “motion pictures, unlike stage plays, appeal to mass audiences, the mature and the immature.”19 As Joseph Breen had pointed out to Wilder more than once, “Because motion pictures command a mass audience, material which may be perfectly valid for dramatization and treatment on the stage may be completely unacceptable when presented in a motion picture.”20 What the code was saying was that movies were fundamentally a family medium. Kiss Me, Stupid was definitely not family entertainment, nor could it be retooled into a family film. Shurlock decided to let Wilder’s picture take its chances in the marketplace, and he would observe whether or not the mass audience was prepared to accept a picture with a risqué plot and ribald humor. He proposed to simply wait and see how audiences reacted to Kiss Me, Stupid.
The Legion of Decency took a much dimmer view of Kiss Me, Stupid. Monsignor Little and his staff had been concerned for some time that Hollywood’s output was suffering from a creeping indecency. According to Father Patrick Sullivan, Little was exasperated by the long line of increasingly sleazy movies such as Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964) and Where Love Has Gone (1964). Both movies were based on outré novels by Harold Robbins, whose books could be described as below the belt and beneath discussion. Furthermore, Little believed that in recent years Wilder films like Irma la Douce had been stretching the limits. With Kiss Me, Stupid, Little was convinced, Wilder had finally crashed and burned. In Little’s view, Kiss Me, Stupid was about as sophisticated as a burlesque show. Little was determined to make an example of the film by taking a harsh stance toward it.21
Little accordingly submitted a list of offensive material to Wilder. For example, Polly’s pet parrot, which is fascinated by TV Westerns, often snaps, “Bang, bang!” when Polly brings a customer into her mobile home. Moreover, when Orville shows Polly around his home, he comments, “You’ll like it; it’s not very big, but it’s clean.” Polly inquires suspiciously, “What is?” It was clear, said Little, “that Orville was not talking about his house.” In addition, Dino tells Orville that he would like to go out in the garden with Zelda so “she can show me her parsley.” When Wilder noted that the legion found this line suggestive, he commented with feigned innocence, “What do they want? Broccoli?”22 Little and his staff also objected to some visual gags, such as the huge, phallic cactus plants in Orville’s front yard.
Wilder took an unprecedented step for a film director by having a conference with Little. He informed Little personally that he would make some of the suggested alterations, as a gesture of his goodwill. He warned that, because the sets had already been dismantled, he could not do some of the retakes that Little had asked for. The scene in Polly’s trailer, however, in which Dino has a rendezvous with Zelda, could be redone because it involved a small set, and Dean Martin and Felicia Farr were available to reshoot it.
In the trailer scene as originally filmed, Zelda goes to bed with Dino in return for his promise to plug one of her husband’s songs on TV. The scene fades out with Dino and Zelda lying on the bed and kissing passionately, leaving no doubt that they will have intercourse. Wilder had quipped to one of the crew that a director was not responsible for what the characters did after the scene faded out. But Little thought otherwise.
The revamped scene concludes with Dino falling asleep on the bed while Zelda gives him a back massage. The following morning Dino creeps out of the trailer while Zelda is still asleep—after leaving five hundred dollars on the night table. Zelda’s bare shoulders are visible above the bedcovers, so the money is presumably for services rendered. But the implications of the scene are left to the viewer’s imagination.
Harold Mirisch recalled that Wilder tried his best to placate the legion. “We made a lot of changes, but they insisted on more of them. We couldn’t do them,” because Kim Novak was no longer available for retakes.23 At the end of the day, the legion assigned Kiss Me, Stupid a condemned rating. This was the first condemnation of a mainstream Hollywood feature since Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll in 1956.24 Baby Doll centers on the voluptuous young wife of a seedy cotton gin owner many years her senior.
The legion’s official press release announcing the condemnation of Kiss Me, Stupid began by recalling that “Mr. Wilder’s earlier film The Apartment was an example of effective comic satire, ‘with redeeming social value’ ”—a term the legion had picked up from the Supreme Court’s stat
ements about controversial films. “In the case of Kiss Me, Stupid, however, not only has Mr. Wilder failed to create a genuine satire out of situation comedy, but he has regrettably produced a thoroughly sordid piece of realism, which is aesthetically as well as morally repulsive. Crude and suggestive dialogue, a leering treatment of marital and extra-marital sex, and a prurient preoccupation with lechery compound the film’s bald condonation of immorality.” The legion’s broadside also pointed out that “the release of this film during the holiday season . . . is a commercial decision bereft of respect for the Judaeo-Christian sensibilities of the majority of the American people.”25 Harold Mirisch replied to Little that it was too late to postpone the movie’s release on December 18, 1964.
The legion’s news release wound up with one final blast, this time at Shurlock’s office. It noted “with astonishment” that a film “so patently indecent and immoral” should have received the censorship code’s seal of approval.26 Shurlock responded to Little with the same reason he had given for issuing a code seal for Irma la Douce: he did so on condition that the movie’s trailer and ad layouts would contain the warning “This picture is for adults only.” The legion’s public criticism of Shurlock’s office made it abundantly clear that Shurlock and Little were “singing from different hymnals,” notes Thomas Doherty. That the industry censor was prepared to grant a code seal to pictures like Kiss Me, Stupid “led to an acrimonious divorce between the two senior partners of Hollywood censorship.”27
Once the legion had condemned Kiss Me, Stupid, UA, uneasy about public criticism, “turned the picture over with as little fuss as possible to its subsidiary,” Lopert Pictures, for U.S. distribution.28 Lopert specialized in foreign films released on the art house circuit. That automatically resulted in a more limited distribution for Kiss Me, Stupid than UA normally would have provided for a major release.
Wilder had one sneak preview for the movie in New York City and another in Los Angeles in November 1964. In both instances, several audience response cards complained about the more raucous jokes in the picture. Wilder gradually was coming to realize, however, that there was a limit to how much cosmetic surgery one could perform on a film. All he could do at this juncture was to wait and see how the reviewers reacted when the movie opened on December 18—at yuletide, no less.
The opening credits of Kiss Me, Stupid begin with a shot of the Vegas Strip, then move on to the marquee of the Sands Hotel, announcing Dino’s appearance there. Then Wilder cuts to the Copa Room, where Dino is performing his nightclub act, surrounded by a bevy of bosomy chorus girls. The crooner points to one of the befeathered chorines and says, “Last night she was banging on my bedroom door for forty-five minutes; I wouldn’t let her out!” That bit of saucy wit sets the tone of the humor in the rest of the movie.
Dino departs from Vegas the next day in his Italian sports car, headed for Los Angeles, where he is to tape a TV special. He develops car trouble on the outskirts of the desert town of Climax, Nevada. His car is hauled into town by a tow truck while he sits behind the steering wheel as if he were driving. The local gas station attendant, Barney Milsap (Cliff Osmond), recognizes Dino and immediately gets in touch with his songwriting partner, Orville Spooner, the local piano teacher. Together they concoct a conspiracy to keep Dino in town overnight so he can hear some of their songs. The duplicitous Barney informs Dino that he cannot repair his auto, a foreign make he is not familiar with, until the following day. Orville, according to plan, invites Dino to spend the night at his house, where Orville can perform some of the tunes he has composed, with Barney’s lyrics.
Orville is pathologically jealous of his young wife Zelda. In fact, he goes ballistic when he suspects fourteen-year-old Johnnie Mulligan, one of his piano pupils, of having a crush on his wife. Orville suddenly turns on Johnnie and accuses him of being a “male Lolita.” While they tussle, Orville tears the boy’s shirt off. As he chases the bare-chested youngster around the room, the scene takes on an unwarranted hint of homoeroticism.
Barney and Orville later practice one of the songs they hope to sell Dino on. Orville accompanies Barney as he warbles “I’m a Poached Egg”:
I’m a poached egg without a piece of toast;
I’m a haunted house that doesn’t have a ghost;
I’m da Vinci without the Mona Lis’;
I’m Vienna without the Viennese,
When I’m without you.
Ira Gershwin deliberately made the second rhyme awkward to indicate that, in the story, the lyric is by an amateur.
Orville is aware that the lecherous crooner will listen to the songs only on the condition that Orville provide him with companionship for the night. He hastily pushes a dressmaker’s dummy of his wife out of sight, indicating with a single gesture that his curvaceous wife Zelda is not going to be the target of Dino’s roving eye. Orville sends his wife packing before Dino arrives at the house. He then hires Polly the Pistol, a full-time cocktail waitress and part-time hooker from the Belly Button roadhouse, to pose as his wife—and serve as Dino’s companion for the night.
When Orville plays “Sophia” for Dino, the singer exclaims, “I need another Italian love song like a giraffe needs strep throat!” Still, “Sophia” is a definite improvement over “I’m a Poached Egg”:
Listen to me, Sophia, have you any idea
How much you mean to me-ah?
Sweet Sophia be mine,
Or from the earth I resign!
In due course Dino makes a pass at Polly, and Orville becomes jealous in spite of himself. He behaves like a protective husband, hollering, “Do you think you can buy my wife for a song?” He slugs Dino and kicks him bodily out of the house. (Hence Wilder’s comment that Kiss Me, Stupid is a chaste film that reflects the sanctity of marriage.) Polly is deeply touched by Orville’s solicitude for her.
Meanwhile, Zelda, who is not part of Orville’s conspiracy to sell a song to Dino, whiles away the evening at the Belly Button tavern, getting tipsy. Big Bertha, the madam of the party girls available at the café, puts Zelda to bed in Polly’s trailer, which is next door to the roadhouse. When Dino appears at the café, looking for action, the obliging bartender directs him to Polly’s mobile home. Dino hopes to “shoot it out” with Polly the Pistol. Dino finds Zelda in the trailer and assumes she is Polly; Zelda does not tell him otherwise. This is a typical case of mistaken identity, so common in boulevard comedy. Polly’s parrot greets Dino with a shout, “Bang! Bang!” to which Dino retorts, “No coaching from the audience!” The double entendres come thick and fast in this movie. Zelda proceeds to talk Dino into plugging “Sophia” on TV in exchange for some lovemaking. Meanwhile, back at the Spooner residence, Orville tenderly takes the real Polly, who is wistful for domesticity and enjoys pretending to be Mrs. Spooner, to bed.
One night a few weeks later, Orville and Zelda are watching a color television set in the local TV store’s show window, along with other citizens who do not own a color set. Orville is dumbfounded to hear Dino launch into “Sophia” on national TV. The bewildered Orville turns to his wife and wonders out loud how this could have happened. Zelda gives him an enigmatic smile and says, “Kiss me, stupid!” Previn pours on a lushly orchestrated version of “Sophia,” which carries over into the closing credits.
When the movie opened on December 18, 1964, most reviews were negative. Some critics had virtually nothing good to say about the picture. One reviewer sneered, “For Wilder, love is a four-letter word.”29 Life magazine had often been amiable toward Wilder’s pictures in the past, but Thomas Thompson’s review of Kiss Me, Stupid called the movie “a titanic dirty joke.” He continued, “For years Billy Wilder has walked the shaky tightrope between sophistication and salaciousness; but with Kiss Me, Stupid he has fallen off with a resounding crash.”30 Time deemed the picture “one of the longest traveling salesman stories ever committed to film.”31 Variety noted, “Wilder, usually a director of considerable flair and inventiveness (if not always impeccable taste), has not be
en able this time out to rise above a basically vulgar, as well as creatively delinquent, screenplay.”32
Billy Wilder and William Wyler had maintained a long-standing pact whereby each would accept the praise or blame for a movie the other had made, rather than endeavoring to clear up the confusion about their names. When Kiss Me, Stupid received a barrage of negative reviews, however, Wyler phoned Wilder and said, “All bets are off! I am not going to allow anyone to assume that I made Kiss Me, Stupid!” Wyler said he meant his remark as a joke, but Wilder was not amused.33
The single notice that gave Wilder and his picture unstinting praise came from novelist-screenwriter Joan Didion, film critic for Vogue. “Kiss Me, Stupid is suffused with the despair of an America many of us prefer not to know, . . . as witnessed by the number of people who walk out on it.” There is “the desolate glare of Las Vegas; the aridity of the desert; a small town where gasoline station attendants dream of hitting the gold record, the jackpot they will never make at the slots; and cocktail waitresses who work in sleazy bars.” Didion concluded, “In its feelings for such a world, for such a condition of the heart, Kiss Me, Stupid is quite a compelling and moving picture.”34 Didion was the wife of novelist-screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, who titled his career essay on Wilder “The Old Pornographer.” The title is a reference to the note Wilder sent to Didion in appreciation of her review. “I read your piece in the beauty parlor while sitting under the hair dryer; and it sure did the old pornographer’s heart good. Cheers!”35
The film flopped at the box office, “but its failure was ultimately due to the host of negative reviews,” not the legion’s condemnation, as censorship expert Frank Walsh notes.36 “The movie was a dog,” said Wilder stoically; “with Sellers it would have been 5% better.”37
Nevertheless, Wilder’s gaudy, bawdy film boasts a bravura performance by Dean Martin; he is the polished, slicked-down, self-assured embodiment of male sexuality. The movie is like a grind house picture made for the art house trade. “The pursuit of sex and money is always a major impulse in Wilder’s movies, but here it becomes all-consuming,” writes George Morris. “Wilder is appalled by Orville’s sexual and pecuniary machinations,” Morris continues, “but he can laugh at him because he understands Orville’s petty dreams.”38
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