Kiss Me Stupid

Kiss Me Stupidⁱ is... well how shall we put this ? A Jewish boy's family wanted him to be a lawyer only he ran away from that to be a journalist in Vienna, eighty years ago. Then he ran away from the whole WW2 mess, ended up working in the United States, made a bunch of films, this is one of his last.

Oh, not what you were looking for. Okay, let's try another tack :

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo ever seen "kiss me, stupid" ?
mircea_popescu: kinda what all these are derived from, hardblown, method-acted comedy. it's a cinematic adaptation of a roadshow style of entertainment (much like the "high class production" fred astaire / frank sinatra etc were in try to steal broadway for the studios)

Also not really, though the point about production lines rather than "genres" or "styles" as commonly discussed perks your ears and you'd like to see detail. Whatever, I'm lazy. Let's stick to the topic at hand.

Kiss Me Stupid is the story of a man who wants something. This is rare nowadays, the California alt-Bollywood is all about men who don't really want anything anymore. It was not rare thenⁱⁱ, pretty much all English-spoken films of the '60s are about men that want something.

This man, however, understands that in order to get something, you gotta give something -- and the giving's upfront whereas the gettin's a whole song and dance away. More importantly -- most importantly, really -- so does the author. And so, when opportunity strikes, he whores out the wife, under a mask. A mask which the wife turns out for him, and whores herself out, right and proper. For him. And it takes, too!

This mask device, on the first pass appearing both spurious and obnoxious, so very much in the vein of coy misbehaviour & assorted "notreally-ism"s, so recognizably a signature of our failed colonies in the North Atlantic as they are the signature of every corralfull of neglected little girls -- turns out to have been the only way this concept could be played out, because it permits consent, in the only possible meaningful sense of the term. The husband may drive her all the way there, but it's the wife that has to reach out for the proboscis and slide it inside her. Which she does.

And then, the scene at the end, where the cynful whore and the married whore split their loot... so endearingly perfect, round and rotund it utterly carries in itself the seeds of that world's claim to eternity. Like a grape.

Like a grape that's destined to one day be a raisin ; but at that point in time isn't a raisin yet -- moreover, like any grape that's not a raisin yet it very well appears like it never is going to be a raisin at all. At least not likely. Perhaps.

This is a great film that the actors kinda get in the way of, but blessfully not enough to actually ruin it.

1. 1965, by Billy Wilder, with Dean Martin, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr and Kim Novak. [↩]
2. Of course, this is a remake, in English, of an Italian film. Which is kinda funny considering the plot device of the paroxistically bad, amateurish re-write of an Italian song.

   Not to mention the part where they're going to import parts from Milan for what is essentially a glorified Dodge. [↩]