Critics reviews

A cold-eyed humorist with a misanthropic streak, Billy Wilder may be the opposite of a warmhearted humanist like Jean Renoir, but even Wilder's acrid worldliness can encompass a fondness for human foibles."Kiss Me, Stupid," widely reviled on its 1964 release, is a case in point... A sendup of rat-pack ring-a-ding-ding smarminess, "Kiss Me, Stupid" is almost ridiculously smutty.

As it stands, the Legion of Decency's official denunciation of it as toxic smut was an unfortunate assessment. The film's surface provocations, its musty scent of sex, point not to offensive gender politics, but to a clear-eyed condemnation of reckless male bravado and jealousy, topped off with a final stinger that now goes toe-to-toe with Eyes Wide Shut in arguing for extramarital adventures as a perverse, indirect route to marriage therapy.

Kiss Me, Stupid is remarkable for pushing zaniness to the point where it becomes upsetting... If the film is far from conventionally satisfying, there is a certain exhilaration to how insistently it zips along on currents of nastiness.

A fresh look at [the film] clarifies for me two essential facts about it for the first time: (1) It seems likely that this masterpiece mainly received a C or "condemned" rating from the Legion of Decency because of its scathing portrait of the hypocrisy of American small-town life and the corruption of big-time media, not because of its depiction of sex per se. (2) Wilder's return to the American Southwest is in fact a return to these very same topics, seen with a no less jaundiced eye.