Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
One of Jack Lemmon’s most impressive skills as an actor is his ability to take the role of a slightly schlubby loser, a character prone to selfish and petty acts, and still make him likeable. You can really see this in his films with Billy Wilder, roles such as Jerry in Some Like It Hot, C.C. Baxter in The Apartment, Nestor Patou in Irma La Douce and Wendell Armbruster Jr in Avanti! But I think its perhaps best highlighted in his absence from another Wilder film – Kiss Me, Stupid.
Wilder’s 1964 sex comedy was denounced as vulgar on release. His satirical mockery of small-town American sexual morality cut too close to home so that it sparked a backlash. A lot of the shock at its ‘corrupting’ and ‘degenerate’ nature seems quaint today, over sixty years later, but it’s an interesting context to think that the film was seen as pretty radical when released.
The plot of Kiss Me, Stupid is insanely convoluted, but a brief summary of its most scandalous element concerns Orville Spooner (a small-town music teacher and wannabe famous songwriter) offering a night of passion with his attractive wife Zelda to a famous singer. The reason he does this is that he hopes it will get the famous singer to perform and popularise one of his songs.
However Spooner is also an insanely jealous possessive type when it comes to his wife, so in order to prevent her actually spending the night with another man, he plots to trick the famous singer. He’ll hire local sex worker Polly The Pistol to pretend to be his wife for the night. All sorts of farcical shenanigans ensue, finally resolving itself into a happy(-ish) ending.
Key to the film, then, is the character of Orville Spooner. For the film to work it requires a performance that is going to engage an audience with this character, and at least make them interested in the outcome of his schemes. The audience need to buy into his desperate desire for success, to be entertained by his ridiculous failings and engrossed by the farcical goings-on as his ‘vulgar’ plan unfolds at a constant risk of collapse.
If this already feels like a role that Lemmon was born to play, then you won’t be surprised to learn that Orvile Spooner was specifically written with him in mind. Unfortunately, existing commitments meant that he could not accept the part. At which point, Billy Wilder had a genius idea and cast hot new cinematic talent Peter Sellars in the role.
You can really see the logic behind this casting: Sellars already had a track record of playing manic, flawed characters that engage the audience, most noticeably Inspector Clouseau in then recent hit film The Pink Panther. It’s tantalising to think of his performance, given the nature of the script. There’s an early scene where Spooner descends into an irrationally jealous rage towards any man who talks with or even about his wife. His fury and genuine aggressiveness that someone might find his wife attractive plays out uncomfortably. It’s incredibly unlikable behaviour from a leading character. He’s angry, irrationally violent and unsettlingly possessive. You can imagine that Lemmon would likely have performed it emphasising the scale to which this ghastly behaviour stemmed from his own insecurity, drawing the audience in to care as to why he might be insecure.
Casting Sellars brings in someone with even greater manic energy then Lemmon. Maybe he would have taken a similar approach to Lemmon, or maybe found a new comic angle. After all, he manages to take an arrogant and petty character like Inspector Clouseau and turn him into a movie icon. Peter Sellars spent six weeks on the shoot, filming much of the script. Unfortunately Sellars had also spent much of those six weeks of filming simultaneously partying with his new wife Britt Eckland – which led to a heart attack, and orders from a doctor that he not do anything for six months.
Sadly the footage that Sellars shot for Kiss Me, Stupid is lost, so we’ll never know for sure quite how he approached the role. Indeed, even reading about the project and interviews with those who worked on it, there’s practically no information on Sellars and how he played the role. It’s a tantalising mystery that has lasted the ages – but back at the time, Sellars heart attack created a major problem for the production.
Wilder, never one to happily just sit around doing little, decided he wasn’t going to wait. And a third name became attached to the project: Ray Walston.
Wilder had previously worked with Walston on The Apartment – where he played one of the many philandering senior managers. He’s only got a small role, but I think that maybe you can glean from it why, maybe, Wilder thought he’d work for the part. He’s a morally weak character, but he captures a man who’s completely oblivious to the idea that there’s anything wrong in what he’s doing. He doesn’t seem like a bad man, just – well – a bit pathetic.
Unfortunately the character of Orville Spooner needs a lot more to work in this film. And the mildly amoral amiable schtick of Walston just does not cut it – resulting in a film that I find fatally flawed. When his take on Orville succumbs to a petulant violent jealous rage, it just feels like a horrible person displaying huge red flag warnings that they should be avoided at all costs.
Maybe the film could still get by with the audience finding the lead character repellent. But the story relies on this not being the case. We’re expected to want Spooner’s wife to end up back with this guy. And one of the convoluted plot twists is that when Spooner spends an evening with Polly The Pistol entertaining Dean Martin, Polly resists Dino’s charms and falls for Spooner, drawn towards the idea of a respectable life with this ‘good man’.
This doesn’t work if the audience think Spooner is a pretty awful human being – doubly so given that there’s zero chemistry between Orville and Polly. It’s actually quite fascinating to watch the film here – as you can see how the script has been meticulously put together to include all the key moments that might bring this unlikely duo together. That writing counts for nothing because – devoid of chemistry and Walston’s Spooner lacking any likeable qualities – there’s no point where the scene becomes believable.
A reason for this is that Kim Novak’s take on Polly is just the right combination of smart, cynical and sassy. She really feels like she belongs in a Billy Wilder film. Despite a lifestyle that ’60s America would have found profoundly immoral, the script wants us to empathise with her and like her. And Novak delivers on this score. Ironically she was also not the first choice for the part; when Wilder and IAL Diamond were first writing the script, they envisaged Marilyn Monroe as Polly, creating the tantalising what-if scenario of a Lemmon and Monroe fronting Kiss Me, Stupid, which sounds fascinating, or even a Sellars and Monroe take on the film… which would have probably killed Sellars.
However, it is because the script and the performance do a great job of getting us to like her, it then struggles when we’re told she’s falling for this Orville Spooner. Because if Polly the Pistol is going to get drawn towards any man, you’d want that to be a man with flashes of intelligence that can appeal to her wits, who can offer something heartfelt that can dispel her cynicism and be a character who can provide a spark that might ignite something when mixed with her moxie. It’s a huge ask, and Walston just can’t do any of it. In fact it’s such a huge ask that Lemmon might not have been up to it, but I think he would at least have got closer.
It’s all such a shame because there’s a lot to enjoy elsewhere in this film. The famous singer in this story is Dean Martin, played by Dean Martin. He’s doing a rather fabulous send-up of his own stage persona: utterly venal, gliding lazily through life on his own charisma. It’s fascinating that Martin was a huge star at this point – and audiences flocked to his Las Vegas shows to see him onstage glamorising the lifestyle of a louche and amoral womaniser. But that same audience did not seem to want him to play the same persona in a small town environment they recognised, and probably lived in.
Felicia Farr also works fine as Orville Spooner’s beautiful but rather naïve and repressed wife. Reading reviews of this film, she seems to get a lot of criticism for being a bit too bland in the part, but I think she gets the balance right. It’s an underwritten part for a good chunk of the movie – but when she gets something to do – and, crucially, react to – she delivers. After a drunken night in bed with Dean Martin who thinks she’s Polly the Pistol (yes the farce in this really is that convoluted!) she sells the idea that her character now realises there’s more to life than she previously thought. And it’s not her fault that the script decides to return this newly confident character to the possessive charisma-free loser that is Orville Spooner.
One thing that’s definitely noteworthy in this morning-after-the-night-before sequence between Dean Martin’s Dean Martin and Felicia Farr’s Mrs Spooner is that you can see the Hollywood morality code crumbling. There’s very little coy allusion here, it’s all up there onscreen. It’s hard for an audience to see Dean Martin and Mrs Spooner wake up in bed together and not know exactly what’s happened.
Ultimately farce is a tricky thing to get right. It requires getting the audience to root for and laugh at folk who are required to be moronic and self-absorbed for the farce to happen in the first place. And Kiss Me, Stupid is a very good example of how important casting is that process: the smartest farce on paper won’t work in the hands of the wrong people. And simply by his absence from Kiss Me, Stupid, you really do get an insight into the incredible comedic, charismatic skillset that Jack Lemmon possessed.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 