When KISS ME, STUPID appeared in 1964, there was a lot of controversy. In particular, the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film for its loose morals. Considering how times change, I was expected the film to be rather tame. Was I surprised that even after all these years, I, too, found much of this film just plain sleazy and unpleasant.

The first 75% of the film was fine. While there was plenty of sexual innuendo in the town of Climax (I am NOT making that up),the humor all seemed pretty tame and funny. After all, super-jealous husband, Ray Walston, loved his wife but wanted to pass off another lady as her. Why? Well, because the ultimate lecher, Dean Martin, was staying with them and he made it very clear that he wanted to sleep with Walston's wife! Why would Walston agree to such a thing? Well, he and his partner had written some songs and wanted Dean to sing them, so they used another lady as bait to entice Dean to "play ball".

Wow, now that I explained the first 75% of the film, it sure does sound sleazy as well. Be that as it may, by the end of the film it appeared that Walston actually slept with the substitute wife, the wife slept with Dean and Dean responded by paying the wife like she was some hooker! Now that's supposed to be romance?!? And, in the end, both partners cheated on each other AND everything worked out for the better! Call me old fashioned, but this plot was just gross. Surprisingly, the DVD also included the European version and it turned out to be less dirty than the American version as it implied that the wife may not have actually slept with Dean.

While such a sex farce isn't hard to believe, I was actually surprised that Dean Martin would appear in it because it makes him look like a horrible person with practically no redeeming values--not the lovable Rat Pack lush he usually pretended to be, but an amoral sex addict.

It's a shame, as with a simple re-write here and there, there is a lot to like about the film. It really could have been worth seeing. Instead, it just came off as smarmy--even 44 years later.

The only thing that Kiss Me Stupid shows that even a director as insightful and talented as Billy Wilder can occasionally come up with a clinker.

Billy Wilder whose cynical insights into the human character have given us some of the best films around just goes flat and dirty with Kiss Me Stupid. It's like watching one long locker room joke.

The original casting oddly enough was for two players to essentially play extensions of themselves. Dean Martin plays a Las Vegas entertainer named Dino who had a hit record Volare back in the day. The beginning of Kiss Me Stupid has Martin performing in Las Vegas and I'm willing to bet that all Wilder did here was set up his cameras and film Dean probably doing his final show one night at the Sands half in the bag. He's allegedly singing the Gershwin classic S'Wonderful, but in the Rat Pack tradition, there's more smutty ad-libs than song. It's how the Vegas crowd preferred it. I like my Dean to beautifully complete a song.

The other player who would have been extending himself would have been Peter Sellers who was replaced by Ray Walston after having a heart attack on the set. Sellers was not the easiest man to work with as many of his colleagues so testified and was also known to be insanely jealous of his beautiful wife Britt Eklund. Walston brings a certain frenetic energy to the part, but he overacts to compensate for a bad script. He certainly wasn't as good in this as he was as Mr. Applegate in Damn Yankees.

The plot has Dino as luck would have it, breaking down in a one horse town on the way from Las Vegas to Hollywood. The mechanic who he entrusts his car to is Cliff Osmond who together with the local music teacher, Ray Walston, are a pair of amateur songwriters. These two geniuses concoct a scheme where Dino has to spend the night in their fair metropolis where they can play some of their material for him.

One thing they don't figure on, Dino as it turns out is a sex addict. He's got to get some kanoodling at least once a day or he goes into withdrawal. And you thought booze was his only vice. The real Dean Martin was known to say that that was the reason the Deity put chorus girls on planet Earth.

Anyway this presents a problem for Walston who is insanely jealous of his wife Felicia Farr and Farr is known to be a fan of Dino. What to do, but hire a chippie from the local bordello, Polly the Pistol as played in Marilyn Monroe style by Kim Novak and have her pretend to be Mrs. Walston.

Wilder's headaches with Monroe are the stuff of legend on the sets of The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. He had no such problems apparently with Novak, but Kiss Me Stupid is hardly in the same league with either of the Monroe films.

Speaking of Gershwin standards for some of the songs that Walston-Osmond team come up with, Billy Wilder got none other than the retired Ira Gershwin to write some new lyrics to some unpublished numbers that the late George Gershwin had done back in the day. In 1948 Ira Gershwin had done the same thing with some unpublished melodies from brother George for The Shocking Miss Pilgrim that starred Betty Grable and Dick Haymes and some nice songs came from that score. Of course Wilder wanted some material that would show the amateur talents of Walston and Osmond and Ira Gershwin obliged with some real mediocre stuff. The only thing that this proves is that there is a reason for even the best of songwriters to reject their own work. There is a reason that none of these songs became any kind of hit for Dean Martin.

Sex has always been a great topic for Billy Wilder films and in such things like the aforementioned Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot and also The Apartment and Irma La Douce, Wilder is brilliant and insightful. Here he's just smutty.

But if you watch Kiss Me Stupid think about how Peter Sellers might have done Ray Walston's role. Personally I don't think it would have been any real improvement on the material.

There is no sense to this story of a jealous husband (Ray Walston) who sets up a stranded singer (Dean Martin as "Dino Martini", an obvious parody of himself) with a barmaid (Kim Novak) posing as his wife after the real wife (Felicia Farr) flees in tears after the paranoid Walston sets her up for a fight in order to prevent an actual seduction by the sex-crazed Lothario. The film, photographed in a truly dreary version of fabulous black and white, has a hysterical opening in Las Vegas with Martin performing his stage act to Gershwin's "S' Wonderful", then getting stuck in the town of "Climax" where the big social scene is at a dive bar called the "Belly Button". Such character performers as Henry Gibson, John Fiedler, Alice Pearce and Doro Merande (as Farr's nasty witch like mother whom Walston refers to as "Godzilla") pop in and out of the supposed plot line for non-comic effect. Walston is a songwriter who is trying to get Martin to buy his songs (actually trunk songs by Gershwin which appear to have been trunk songs for a reason) for his upcoming musical special.

This is a one joke movie (where the punchline really has the screenwriter deserving to be punched) that in spite of its truly raunchy story seemed to have some promise at the beginning but soon lead me into shaking my head much like the critics at the time did. There is no evidence as to why Martin would want to seduce a married woman inside her own house with the husband present or why Walston thought his wife was cheating on him in the first place. After the subtle sexualities of "Some Like It Hot", "The Apartment" and "Irma La Douce", director Billy Wilder would really hit rock bottom with this one.