Hipster's Harlot

Kiss Me, Stupid. The careers of Producer-Director Billy Wilder and his favorite collaborator, Writer I.A.L. Diamond, can be traced in a curve that peaked in such frantic, funny, wickedly knowing comedies as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, plunged downward in Irma La Douce, and now lands in the murk of Kiss Me, Stupid, a jape that seems to have scraped its blue-black humor off the floor of a honky-tonk nightclub.

Stupid plays cupid for a whisky-throated crooner named Dean Martin, played by Martin himself in an orgy of self-parody. En route to Hollywood from Las Vegas, the swinger has to detour through the town of Climax, Nev. "The only way to go," he leers. In Climax his Dual-Ghia is sabotaged by a garage mechanic (Cliff Osmond) and a piano teacher (Ray Walston) who want to peddle their songs. Martin's only interest is broads ("If I skip one night, I wake up with such a headache"). Unwilling to peddle his own wife (Felicia Farr) along with his tunes, Walston drives her away and brings home a substitute, Kim Novak, who heads the navel armada at a local juke joint known as the Belly Button. Through a series of vinsavory miscalculations, punctuated by a parrot that squawks "Bang! Bang!" all too frequently, Martin gets the wife, the song plugger gets Kim, and Kim gets $500.

Thanks to Director Wilder, Stupid is professionally shrewd and zippy, and flaunts a kind of vulgar integrity. Not only does everyone talk sex; everyone does something about it. That alone might prove refreshing in a Hollywood farce, except that Wilder isn't celebrating sex as a gloriously human temptation; he is exploiting it as a commodity -and he wears a lascivious grin where his satirical smile ought to be. The result, spelled out in dialogue that sounds like a series of gamy punch lines, is one of the longest traveling-salesman stories ever committed to film. Like all dirty jokes, it will probably evoke a shock wave of self-conscious laughter and pass swiftly into oblivion.

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