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Kiss Me, Stupid [DVD] [1964]
 
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Kiss Me, Stupid [DVD] [1964]

DVD ~ Dean Martin
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
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Product details

  • Actors: Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr, Cliff Osmond
  • Directors: Billy Wilder
  • Writers: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Anna Bonacci
  • Producers: Billy Wilder, Doane Harrison, I.A.L. Diamond
  • Format: Black & White, PAL
  • Language English
  • Subtitles: Dutch, Finnish, Greek, French, Swedish
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: PG
  • Studio: MGM Entertainment
  • DVD Release Date: 7 Jun 2004
  • Run Time: 121 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B0001Y9YLG
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 26,040 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Special Features
  • Interactive menu screens

DVD Technical Information:

  • Audio: Dolby Digital Mono (French, German, Italian, English, Spanish)
  • Running Time: 121 mins
  • Region Code: 2
  • Aspect Ratio: 2.35 Anamorphic Wide Screen
  • Subtitles: Dutch, English for the hearing impaired, Finnish, French, Greek, Swedish


Synopsis
In Wilder's smutty low comedy, Dean Martin has little trouble easing into the role of Dino, a womanizing pop singer with a yen for the grape. En route to Hollywood after a Las Vegas gig, he stops in a small Nevada town, where his arrival is considered a piece of extraordinary fortune by amateur songwriters, music teacher Orville J. Spooner (Ray Walston) and mechanic Barney Milsap (Cliff Osmond). To guarantee Dino's presence and a hearing for their songs, Barney makes a few alterations in his car, while Orville offers his house for the night. But when he learns of the singer's overwhelming need for sex, Orville gets his attractive wife Zelda (Felicia Farr) out of the house and persuades local hooker and waitress Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) to take her place in case the singer needs special attention. Even so, when Dino makes the predicted moves on Polly, the music teacher is still overwhelmed by jealousy and throws the bewildered singer out of the house. Dino seeks refuge in a nearby bar, only to find Zelda drowning her sorrows.

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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars It was risque then and it still is!, 22 Oct 2002
This review is from: Kiss Me.Stupid [VHS] [1964] (VHS Tape)
Billy Wilder was supremely talented not only as a director but also as screenwriter and producer. He covered the gamut from realism (The Lost Weekend), to melodrama (Sunset Blvd.) to mad-cap comedy (Some Like It Hot). This film falls into the latter category with that touch of Wilder cynicism that made his films so great. The story plays out in Climax, Nevada, a name not lost on the sleazy Vegas entertainer, Dino (played to a tee by sleazy Vegas entertainer, Dean Martin!), who is forced to make a detour to and then a stop-over in this seemingly model small-town USA. Two wannabe song-writers plot to have him hear their tunes and the comedy really begins. As always Wilder's casting is consummate, though surprisingly his first choices weren't available. Ray Walston is hilarious as Orville J. Spooner, the jealous older husband of the town beauty, but this part had originally been meant for Peter Sellers. Polly the Pistol, the ultimate good-time trailer-trash girl was a role intended for Marilyn Monroe, but Kim Novak is sublime in this part and I can't imagine anyone, even Marilyn, filling Novak's shoes (or dress!) here.

The comedy plays out beautifully and the crackling dialogue and soundtrack keep this film moving along, the only thing that stopped it becoming a major hit was the puritanical audience it fell upon when it was released. Way ahead of it's time, America wasn't ready for this in the sixties, and maybe it's still not ready, but this forgotten gem deserves revisitng.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Kiss Me brilliant!, 2 Jan 2007
By Richard Bowden "The Film Flaneur" (UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Based on the Italian stage comedy L'Oro della Fantasia (trans: The Hour
Of Fantasy), Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid appeared after a long run
of successes by the director, which culminated with a hat trick on The
Apartment for which he won Oscars for producer, director and
co-screenwriter, respectively. In the years that followed, however,
Wilder's reputation took a battering; he helmed several films then less
favourably received.

Many of these later films have found critical rehabilitation. Kiss Me,
Stupid has found too an increasing number of defenders, a new
generation of viewers discovering its unique tone with delight during
late night TV revivals. In an age when the double entendre can be king,
Wilder's film, stuffed full of visual and verbal sexual innuendo, and
with its ironic irreverence towards traditional values and mores, has
acquired a relevance that it never had before. Times have moved on a
little since the stuffed shirt brigade were shocked by what was seen
then as the leering immorality of Wilder's film, its supposed
vulgarity, with its jaundiced view of fidelity. These days the cynicism
so characteristic of the director and here drawn out the nth degree
appears entertainingly modern, while Dean Martin's central,
self-parodic portrayal of satyriasis ("It's a habit with me. If I skip
one night a week I get such a headache") can be seen as one of his most
memorable performances - probably because it runs closer to home in
contemporary eyes than some of his other, more safely packaged
appearances do now.

Originally Peter Sellers was cast as Orville Spooner, the eternally
jealous and ever-optimistic singer-songwriter, 62 duds in, from the
feverishly named Climax, Nevada. It was one of the great what-if
casting choices, and went as far as shooting some evidently well played
scenes before, for various reasons, the star pulled out. The decision
left the plum role to Ray Walston, thereby allowing that actor his
finest hour on screen.

With hindsight, Wilder's film is an ideal vehicle for postmodernists.
Not only does it start with a clue that it is packed full of signifying
elements (a gigantic, erect crane arm is the first thing the camera
sights after the LAS VEGAS SIGN CO wording), but the films also works
hard to deconstruct celebrities, family life and the value of marriage.
"By way of Warm Springs, Paradise Valley" Climax is a place of
conventional morality, where Spooner just happens to be married to the
prettiest girl in town: Zelda (Felicia Farr, incidentally another
Wilder regular, Jack Lemmon's wife). As designed by Alexander Trauner,
who also worked on such atmospheric films as Jour de Lève, and Othello
(1952) it's a small town where the only real excitement is playing the
piano or watching colour TV in shop windows, unless one heads out to
The Belly Button where apparently, at least as Spooner is assured by a
visiting citizen's committee, "love is for sale." Wilder opposes the
sexual opportunism and the commercial value placed upon relationships,
as epitomised by Dino's predatory libido and Polly's trailer with its
conspicuous 'bang bang!' TV, with the ostensible stability and moral
compacts of home life. But whereas the Spooner household is full of
laughably intense jealousies on the part of the husband, Dino's life is
one of easy come, easy go sex. The rub is, of course, that in Kiss Me,
Stupid the two worlds interact and mix: commercialism enters the home,
while the exploited eventually make a nest for themselves on the
proceeds. One of the ironies is that Spooner and Milsap's song writing
team provide the soundtrack for Martin's debaucheries, just as his song
albums have given Zelda her own romantic fantasies (she was once
president of Dino's fan club) and the married woman melts promptly into
his arms as soon as he serenades her. While there is some sorting out
at the end, with some token disapproval by the wife, it is clear that
the message of the film is not warning about the corruption brought by
show business types, or even the disgraceful willingness of some
ordinary folk to be swayed by the glamour. The greatness and maturity
of Wilder's film is that it shows how both sides can make acceptable
accommodation and get along, and without ever compromising
self-respect. Of course the idea that the ideal thing is to live one's
"live-long day and the long, long night" just as needed, and then to
forgive the inevitable, was something hard to find acceptance in early
1960s' America - let alone the thought that relationships could be put
on hold to improve them.

In the light of this one can see how fortuitous it is that Peter
Sellers did not eventually get to play Orville Spooner. While the
comedian would have had a field day with Spooner's psychopathic
jealousy, as well his various quirks, his real life celebrity would
have obscured the film's focus. Walston is enough of an unknown on
screen to suggest the moral confusion of a non-entity desperate for
success, for an audience, contrasting against the heavyweight allure of
Martin. As 'Dino', a few years out from his other best film (Rio
Bravo), the singer is so much at home in his role that one has to pinch
oneself to be reminded that he was actually playing a part. As Polly
the Pistol, "fastest draw in the west," Kim Novak was an inspired
choice. Showing the depth that Hitchcock saw in the actress when he
cast her in Vertigo a few years before, her performance convincingly
portrays the necessary mixture of wistfulness, self-possession and
deprecation that the tart with a heart role here requires.

Lensed in well composed widescreen black and white, and with an
excellent cheap edition available, albeit without extras worth the name
(the region one edition allegedly contains a couple of deleted scenes),
Kiss Me, Stupid is a film made by artists at the peak of their form,
without a dull scene throughout, and I recommended it unreservedly.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful 60's comedy !, 16 Dec 2006
By websurfer (Portugal) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
Director Billy Wilder had already put his name on classic comedies like "Some Like it Hot" and " The Seven year itch" when he directed the great Dean Martin in one of his best roles. "Kiss me Stupid" is like the aformentioned films a sex farse, a comment on midle america's hipocrisy and a perfect show case for talents. Dean Martin is trully a great comedian and so it is Ray Walston( who substituted Peter Sellers after the brithish actor sufered a stroke)Kim Novack does fine has the rest of the cast...a classic film to be rediscovered! The dvd edition as a clean and sharp B/W picture with mono sound, and no extras.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars "If you don't make the most of what you got, then somebody's going to take what you got!"
This film is far more provocative and outrageous than any "Clockwork Orange" or "Straw Dogs" etc etc ... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr. M. M. Waller

2.0 out of 5 stars A rare misfire for Wilder, but not an uninteresting one
Kiss Me, Stupid is an interesting misfire, but despite a promising and outrageous setup - Ray Walston's would be songwriter tries to keep Dean Martin's promiscuous crooner in the... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Trevor Willsmer

5.0 out of 5 stars A politically incorrect movie, but an excellent screwball comedy
Director Billy Wilder is not a novice in making highly successful comedies. Movies such as: Some Like it Hot (1959), Apartment (1960), and Irma La Douce (1963), made Wilder a very... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Rama Rao

3.0 out of 5 stars an interesting failure
I am American, and I do not think of myself as puritanical. But maybe I am, a bit. "Kiss Me, Stupid" is well worth watching, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Hal B. Grossman

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